Murdoch's World (7 page)

The payback arrived in person as well. Bryant felt the sting of Wade's casual cruelty at a party thrown by News International at the Labour Party conference a few years later.

“She came up to me and said, ‘Oh, Mr. Bryant, it's after dark.
Shouldn't you be on Clapham Common?'” Bryant recalled. The park in south London served as a pickup spot for gay men. According to Bryant, the news editor's then-husband, the actor Ross Kemp, snapped back, “Shut up, you homophobic cow.”

Brooks had been ambitious, a more public presence than her successor, Andrew Coulson, mixing with the powerful and glamorous as
she pinged from one top News International job to the next until she became head of the whole British wing of News Corp.

Her own reporters feared her and her peers.
Some of the older reporters hired private investigators because they no longer wanted to stay in a van from dusk to dawn, urinating into plastic jars, on the off-chance they might catch a married soccer star or reality show contestant sneaking out of someone's apartment. Other reporters skipped out to a bar for a drink or home for a nap. But editors kept tabs on bylines and scoops. Pressure on reporters became more pronounced as newspaper circulations declined and websites emerged as rivals. The need to slake the public thirst for scandal would lead the tabloids to take even more daring measures.

4

“THE WORLD THROUGH RUPERT'S EYES”

ON A SUBFREEZING MORNING IN March 2013, the
New York Post
decided to take its headlines to the streets, introducing a two-and-a-half hour bus tour of Manhattan to point out the sites of incidents that inspired some of its frothiest front pages. The double-decker bus, wrapped with reproductions of its nameplate and some of its more lurid headlines, became a rolling advertisement for the paper.

Seated at the front of the open-air top deck with a small clutch of hardy visitors, the guide for the tour company, Dennis Lynch, took cues from a script written by
Post
staffers, his voice slipping into and out of a throwback Brooklyn accent that would have suited a minor mug in
Guys and Dolls
.

Less than a minute in, Lynch announced an enduring classic of the form: “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” Few newspapers carry such laconic punch, such an efficient mix of knowing humor and casual cruelty. Of course, the paper's artistry in that particular form often
cloaked the grittiness and brutality of the news it covered and, in fact, of the way in which the news was covered. As a paper of crime, sex, and corruption, the
New York Post
played on racial fears but proved far more likely to cover stories of triumph and tears in Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx than the
New York Times
.

The “headless body” murder had taken place three decades earlier in Queens, an outer borough that the tourist-friendly bus did not visit. The hilarious headline trivialized a gruesome story: a twenty-three-year-old man hopped up on cocaine got into an argument with the owner of a bar in Jamaica, Queens, shot him, cut off his head, took four women hostage, and raped one of them. Upon learning one of the hostages was a mortician, the killer demanded she fish the bullet that had killed the bar owner out of his skull. The shooter thought its absence might confuse the cops. It was perfect copy for the
Post
.

On the south edge of Central Park, instead of marveling over the brilliance of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Lynch pointed across the street to the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel. When hotelier Leona Helmsley died, the will of the woman the tabloid dubbed “The Queen of Mean” left $12 million to her dog. The tabloid commemorated the bequest to the Maltese with a front-page headline: “Rich Bitch.” A bar in the Meatpacking District where golfer Tiger Woods met one of his mistresses triggered another page-one tribute: “Tiger Admits: I'm a Cheetah.”

Lynch omitted some headlines from the tour, however. Rock and roll legend Ike Turner predeceased his wife, whom he had abused physically. The
Post
's headline was “Ike ‘Beats' Tina to Death.” Assuredly few outside the paper found that funny. Another, showing a photograph of a man who fell onto the subway tracks taken moments before his death, simply said: “Doomed.”

Murdoch had broken into the American market in 1973 by purchasing the
San Antonio Express-News
, the only daily he could
acquire; the next year he created the
National Star
to compete against the more established supermarket tabloid, the
National Enquirer
.

Murdoch had circled the
Post
(started by Alexander Hamilton in 1801) in the mid-1970s at a time when New York City had skirted bankruptcy, drug dealing occurred openly in public parks, and Times Square earned renown for pornographic movie houses.
This world welcomed Ken Chandler when he arrived in the US for the first time in 1974 after a brief stint working at Murdoch's
Sun
in the UK. In London, Chandler had been assigned to the copy desk, where he wrote the captions for the pictures of topless models, the Page Three girls, following this daily edict: “Forty-five words. If possible, at least two puns.” He volunteered to come to America in response to a posting on a bulletin board for British staffers to join Murdoch's new
Star
tabloid.

When Murdoch offered to buy the
Post
from longtime owner Dorothy Schiff, he
promised in writing that he would keep faith with its liberal and midmarket past, not pull it down-market by replicating his British scandal sheets. Schiff was charmed by Murdoch and heard what she wanted or needed to hear, selling it for $31 million—a bit more than $120 million today.

Once the deal went through, Murdoch inevitably, and swiftly, recast the
New York Post
in his image. The
Post
became punchy, with front-page headlines that were crass, if provocative and amusing. The
Post
did not offer topless models—but did feature bathing beauties on excuses as flimsy as their garb. And it sold papers through the introduction of Wingo, a numbers-based game, a bit like bingo and a lottery, promising riches to lucky readers, as Murdoch had in Australia and the UK. Chandler joined the paper as an editor. “He'd worry about
Star
magazine in the morning, and in the afternoon he'd be on the phone to Australia—the sun never set,” Chandler recalled. The paper cultivated two generations of conservative writers on its opinion pages to allow them to refine their voices and shout down liberal pieties.

Throughout the years, the media executive remained hands-on—in Britain, Australia, and New York. Murdoch loathed public holidays—when a federal or bank holiday approached in the US, he would fly to London the night before so he would not squander a day's work. For good measure, Murdoch added the influential
New York
magazine, which catalogued the fights, finances, and fears of the moneyed class of Manhattan, and bought the left-of-center, establishment-loathing
Village Voice
. He later would pick up and, under regulatory duress, discard two more big-city tabloids: the
Chicago Sun-Times
and the
Boston Herald
.

Murdoch deployed his tabloids' pages—in both the news and editorial sections—to help those candidates he favored. The
New York Post
plucked Congressman Ed Koch from relative obscurity in the Democratic primary for the New York City mayor's race. The endorsement (and favorable coverage in the news pages) helped propel Koch to victory over future governor Mario Cuomo, among others.

In 1984
New York Post
columnist Steve Dunleavy, a Murdoch favorite from Australia, wrote an internal memo about
how to take down Geraldine Ferraro. The Democratic congresswoman from Queens was the first woman to run on a national ticket, as Walter Mondale's vice presidential running mate. The unwillingness of Ferraro, a Catholic, to oppose abortion firmly angered Murdoch. The Scottish Presbyterian faith in which his grandfather held such prominence took a stance similar to the Vatican on the issue. The paper reflected his negative views toward the candidate despite her local ties.

Murdoch
didn't think much of a woman as possible VP, a belief reinforced, surprisingly, by Margaret Thatcher's performance as British prime minister. Though he squarely supported Thatcher, Murdoch held a “conviction that women were emotionally ill-equipped to hold high office,” according to Thomas Kiernan, an early Murdoch biographer.

Over time, Chandler held various senior roles at the
Post
and at the
Boston Herald
for Murdoch. He remains a political conservative
and currently serves as the editor in chief of the news site and magazine Newsmax, created by former
New York Post
reporter Christopher Ruddy. Chandler said the
Post
, when he first joined, proved a product of its times but also its leadership, covering the news but not itself in glory.

“When I look back at some of the stuff we did, I cringe,” Chandler said. “There was no question it was homophobic.” The paper singled out AIDS victims for particular scorn, he said, and treated people of color poorly. “The only time you had a picture of a black person was when they'd been arrested or done something horrible,” he said. “The pictures of the celebrities were almost all white. The only blacks were in the sports section. There was that attitude—that people don't want to see pictures of black people.”

Forced to sell the
Post
in 1988 by regulators, Murdoch swooped back in as a savior five years later when the paper's subsequent proprietors collapsed financially. Political figures in both parties agreed to set aside, for a while, the restrictions under laws limiting ownership of newspapers and television stations in the same markets to ensure the paper would continue to publish.

Chandler became editor and later publisher of the
Post
once again in the 1990s. “I was the editor, so I was in charge of the day-to-day operation, but he treated the
Post
like a favorite child. The
New York Post
and the London
Sun
—no question they were his favorite children,” Chandler told me. At that time, Chandler said, the
Post
focused anew on the obsessions of Manhattan: media, fashion, crime, Broadway, TV, politics, sport, and gossip.

Murdoch would call Chandler at least three to four times a week—often three to four times a day. In days before email and cell phones, most News Corp editors maintained separate phone lines, whose numbers were known only to Murdoch.
Murdoch here
, he'd say.
What's happening?

Murdoch tended not to issue orders. “You'd tell him what you were planning,” Chandler said. “He wouldn't interfere.” After the fact,
Murdoch might well criticize a front-page headline, or a photograph, or the angle on a story. Ahead of time, however, he rarely interfered with coverage in the works. But Murdoch loved to gossip. “He might well say, well I was at a party last night, talking to Ed Koch, and Ed told me, and he'd tell me a delicious story, that you could use on Page Six,” which delivered scandal, gossip, and celebrity items every day. “You'd have to check. Sometimes he exaggerated, and sometimes they turned out not to be true.”

The chairman's voice and sensibility would materialize unsummoned even when he did not call. “In my head was, this guy is losing a million dollars a week on the
New York Post
. He's providing work for two hundred journalists who, in any kind of rational economic situation, wouldn't be having a job here. There's probably eight hundred people at the company in total, including the pressmen and the ad people who are working there. So, yeah, I want to produce the sort of paper that he would like,” Chandler said.

“That doesn't mean printing stories that you think aren't true. But it does mean printing stories that you think he'd be interested in. Avoiding stories that he might not want to see in the paper,” Chandler said. “Definitely, there's self-censorship.” Former London
Sun
editor David Yelland said much the same took place elsewhere. “Most Murdoch editors wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear that something has happened and think:
‘What would Rupert think about this?'” Yelland said. “It's like a mantra inside your head, it's like a prism. You look at the world through Rupert's eyes.”

Murdoch believed it was important to take out Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 2003. Pundits
making the conservative case for war in Murdoch's
Weekly Standard
and
New York Post
were often reproduced in the
Times of London
, the
Sun
, the
Australian
, or his Aussie tabloids. A headline in the
Post
characterized the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” for voting against the US position at the United Nations (the reference came from
The Simpsons)
. Another headline
called France part of the “Axis of Weasels.”
Murdoch called British prime minister Tony Blair three times in the week leading up to a House of Commons vote to deploy UK troops to Iraq, promising the support of News International's newspapers. And the fervor was shared throughout Murdoch's other titles as well, including Fox News. Murdoch told
Fortune
magazine the time was ripe: “The whole world will benefit from cheaper oil.”