The Man Who Owns the News (30 page)

In a car culture, in the great rolling suburbs, the only place the middle class gets to truly eyeball the cover of a periodical is in the supermarket. And all the middle-class people doing this eyeballing are women.

The Murdoch formula—his tabloid magic, his working-class insouciance, his badgering and bullying—is for men. The aggressiveness, the girls, the sports, the jokiness, the news—all for men.

Supermarkets in America do not really sell newspapers. Supermarkets sell magazines. And tabloids, aka “the tabs.” In the seventies, an American tab is a magazine/newspaper hybrid—it fits into a supermarket checkout rack—that merges two publishing genres: the fanzine (with slavish attention to celebrities) and the fantastical (accounts of aliens and grotesques and deviants with only the barest pretense of being factual). The
National Enquirer
—MOM BOILED HER BABY AND ATE HER!—which sells four million copies a week and is published by the Pope family, with its supposed organized-crime connections (Mafia boss Frank Costello is rumored to have put up the money for it), is the height of the form.

Murdoch’s idea of a tabloid as a media property that could become a powerful working-class institution comes face-to-face with the American reality that a tabloid is a product that defines not only its readers’ lack of standing but that of its owners. This is confounding and frustrating to him—and, significantly, an entirely different business and cultural climate from any he’s ever been in. He has no background in soft celebrity gossip targeted at women.

It’s important to keep in mind how premodern Murdoch is. He’s a fifties guy. A guy’s guy. From an era when guys talked about guy stuff.

But now comes the stubbornness and the relentlessness and the conviction that he can do whatever it takes. That, going forward, is the important thing. You set something in motion and then you try to control it. Doing it is what defines you.

In 1974, he launches the
National Star
. This is his American tabloid—not at all what he had in mind, but, nevertheless, he is playing it as it lays. Because although this is not the kind of paper he wants to be publishing, it does have another virtue that moves him: single-copy sales.

In this instance, the money overrides his ego. It doesn’t really bother him that the
Star
is further poisoning his already problematic reputation. He’s not only a British tabloid publisher, which is one thing, but he’s now the proprietor of the lowest form of media in America. You can’t go further down than this. The publisher of a supermarket tabloid doesn’t get to eat out in Manhattan with the other parents at Brearley and Dalton.

Still, say what you want, one fine morning in August 1977 Elvis Presley dies. Steve Dunleavy had just published a book about Elvis—it’s the King as a drug-taking debaucher well on his way to death. Murdoch scoops up the U.S. rights, and after the first installment of the serialization of the book, the
Star
’s circulation jumps from two to three million. The
Star
will serialize the rest of Dunleavy’s Elvis book twenty more times, and at four million copies reach an equal footing with the
Enquirer
. (Murdoch will sell the
Star
for $400 million in 1990 to the
Enquirer
’s parent company.)

But never mind the
Star
. It will be the
New York Post
—acquired almost three years after he launches the
Star
—that will truly demonstrate his belief in the potential of the tabloid in America.

The oldest paper in the city is, virtually overnight, transformed into a British tabloid—a species of newspaper that New York has not seen in two generations and which, over the next thirty years, will only ever lose money.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate how determined and how wrongheaded Murdoch is with the
New York Post
. It is another one of those things that shadow his reputation: No matter how wrong he is, he won’t give up. That’s scary. In this regard, he’s beyond all reason. It is a grand and stubborn obsession.

In fact, after he is forced to sell the paper in 1988 to comply with rules that prohibit a proprietor from owning a newspaper and television station in the same market, he will move political mountains to get the
Post
back when its new owners bring it to the brink of insolvency in 1993. He can’t entirely breathe without it.

The
Post
exists, in some sense, like a perfect fantasy world. A tabloid newsroom in a world where there are no such things anymore. They pretend, at the
Post,
that this is real work, legitimate work, sustaining work—when, in some sense, it is more? like a theme park. (For that reason, I will tell my own daughter, casting about for her first journalism job, that there is no newspaper as wonderful to work at as the
New York Post
.)

Nor can you argue that it hasn’t, on its own terms, been wildly successful. It is just, oddly, that this most commercial of papers is not, well, commercial. Upscale-centric New York advertisers treat the
Post
and its three-ring-circus sensibility with contempt.

Still, Murdoch’s New York British tabloid arguably becomes the second most influential paper in America—the paper that everybody in the media business reads first. The
Post
—the only real daily tabloid in America—embodies and influences the circus of pop and media culture that has migrated to so many other media outlets and which has left so many newspapers behind.

Meanwhile, the reason cited by Murdoch’s detractors for his keeping the
Post
alive—that it wields disproportionate political influence—seems a strained one, considering that by 1996 he will have Fox News. And by 2007, he’ll be losing $50 million a year on the
Post
—which could buy a lot of lobbyists and political leverage (which, at any rate, he already has bought).

The
Post
’s early losses don’t in the least dissuade him from his plan to build an American tabloid newspaper empire. Wherever there’s a second paper—an imperiled second paper—he’s buying or trying to buy it. He considers launching a morning competitor against the
New York Daily News
which he’d call the
Daily Sun
. He tries, in 1982, for the
Courier Express
in Buffalo, but the unions rebuff him (and the paper closes—“We voted to die with dignity,” says one reporter). At the end of 1982, he buys the
Boston Herald American,
the also-ran against the dominant, establishment
Boston Globe
. In 1983, in Chicago, historically one of the greatest newspaper cities in the world—the setting of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s classic newspaper farce
The Front Page
—he buys the
Sun-Times
.

His is a classic and anachronistic newspaper business plan: With boldness, sassiness, sexiness, and wild promotions, he’ll make big gains against the dominant paper. Because the tabloid style of journalism requires a much smaller investment than the starchy, information-heavy papers, it ought to be a no-lose formula.

Except he loses. Each of his American tabloids, save the
Post,
is a kind of listless version of a true Murdoch paper. Stories are short; there are more pictures, there is more crime coverage (murder and rape), but there isn’t the tabloid joie de vivre. He is betwixt and between—and disengaged. American newspapers aren’t any fun. Also, they don’t make money.

At least he understands the basic issue: Advertisers want to reach an aspirational middle class, and such a middle class reads a paper above its station. “Everybody in this country wants to get ahead, get a piece of the action,” he will tell biographer William Shawcross. “That’s the fundamental difference between the Old World and the New World. There’s not the self-improvement ethic in England that there is in this country.”

And yet, even with this unprepossessing American experience, he remains committed to the tabloid model, unable really to see beyond it, believing that the visceral impact of tabloidism has to prevail—and, indeed, it finally will, on the Fox network and on Fox News.

Murdoch’s tabloid stars are, in some striking co-dependency, extraordinarily loyal to him—and he to them. This may be because there is really nowhere else to do what they do than to do it for Rupert—no other well-paid corporate outlet for their kind of behavior—and because he relies on them to do what he personally, and temperamentally, can’t do. They’re his weapon, his amusement, his idea of romance. His personal
fuck you
.

In the media business, which more and more strives for respectability, many of his favorites border on the unemployable. They exist only because he lets them exist. They get to be employed by a public company only because his control of the public company is so sui generis. These are Rupert’s reprobates.

As Murdoch first starts to think about pursuing the
Wall Street Journal
in late 2005, Rebekah Wade, the thirty-seven-year-old editor of the
Sun
—still Murdoch’s largest and most profitable publication—is sitting in a jail cell in South London. She was out the night before with Murdoch at a birthday party for his son-in-law, Matthew Freud, who is one of Wade’s close friends. After leaving Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch’s home in Notting Hill, Wade—who’s been running a campaign in the
Sun
against domestic violence—got into a drunken brawl with her husband, Ross Kemp, an actor who plays a tough guy on Britain’s most popular soap,
EastEnders
. At 4:00
A.M
., the terrified husband—more than twice the size of his wife—calls the cops, who arrive at their Battersea home to find him with a busted lip. Wade is arrested and fingerprinted and gives a DNA sample before being thrown in a cell for eight hours to sleep it off, even as Murdoch sits waiting for her at News International’s Wapping headquarters for their 8:00
A.M
. breakfast meeting. It’s the biggest story in the other British tabloids for more than a week. Wade continues to be one of Murdoch’s favorite editors and he frequently discusses moving her into the executive ranks of the company.

And Richard Johnson. Not only does he not lose his job because of the “Page Six” bribery scandal, but in some sense the bribery business actually seems to confirm Johnson’s status for Murdoch as an old-time, walk-on-the-wild-side, dangerous, rule-bucking, proudly cynical newspaperman.

At Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, flouting News Corp.’s own rules on sexual harassment, is caught up in a lawsuit that—complete with phone transcripts—accuses him of brutal sexual stalking and bullying. It’s handled as an internal matter.

And then there is, in some long-running act of newspaper sentimentality, Steve Dunleavy at the
Post
. There is almost no contemporary explanation for him. He exists so much outside of the norm that no one tries explaining him. He’s just part of the News Corp. background—that’s in some sense his real function: to demonstrate that News Corp. is unique, proudly unreconstructed, can’t be brought to heel. Besides his pompadour, which even after weeklong binges still manages to be upstanding, Dunleavy is most famous for drinking like…well, Dunleavy.

Dunleavy stories, whether true or not, are part of News Corp.’s identity. Such as: He was once having sex with an (insert Norwegian heiress, “
Post
cub reporter,” “redheaded temptress,” “political source” here) in a back alley on a cold winter’s night when a snowplow ran over his foot and Dunleavy didn’t notice. (When Pete Hamill, an old-school New York journalist, was told about the supposed accident, he responded: “Was it his writing foot?”) And another: A fresh-faced copy kid shows up for work early at the
Post
’s offices on Sixth Avenue and finds Dunleavy in his usual position, passed out under his desk. The problem is, nobody’s told the copy kid that this is just the way it is. So the copy kid rings 911 for an ambulance. The paramedics say, “Don’t worry about it. It’s just Dunleavy.”

Dunleavy may be the oldest journalist on any payroll in the city who still turns out for the big crime—and no matter how many drinks he’s consumed that day, whether a sip of orange juice or twenty vodka tonics, his stories never really make any sense.

Alcohol and tabloids go together. (Murdoch once banned alcohol from the premises in London, but he nevertheless can sometimes seem in awe of great drunks.) In a city where overdrinking has become a grievous gaucherie, it’s possible to find
New York Post
editor Col Allan swishing tomato juice at Langan’s in the afternoon before he commences an evening of drinking. When Allan first came to New York in 2001—brought to the
Post
by Lachlan—he was preceded by stories of pissing in the sink at the
Daily Telegraph
. (These stories seemed partly designed to horrify New Yorkers.) The alcohol is accompanied by temper tantrums and strip joints.

Lack of restraint and decorum is also Allan’s newsroom management style. Not only is he a legendary screamer—the morning news meeting is a daily and by now ritualistic drama of reporters and editors having the shit screamed out of them—he’s a deeply disorganized one. This disorganization, however, facilitates a tabloid effect because there is no reasonable and procedural process for gathering the news. Hence, Allan is the one who is left to dictate what the news is going to be that day. Which sometimes backfires. For instance, blotto during the 2004 Super Bowl, Allan failed to appreciate the importance (even the tabloid importance) of Janet Jackson’s notorious public breast baring—and the next day’s headline was about Super Bowl advertisements.