Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires

by David Folkenflik

  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 fr
om cheaper oil.”

  Whenever Murdoch came to New York, he’d duck into the newsroom, and always make a beeline for the business department. What have you heard? Murdoch would ask. Every now and then he’d invite a reporter up, as he did when he beckoned a young Tim Arango, a media reporter for the Post in the early 2000s, to eavesdrop as he talked shop with another corporate titan on speaker phone.

  He saw the Post as one of the chief proving grounds for his older son, Lachlan Murdoch, then enjoying uneven luck in Sydney. Lachlan became deputy chief operating officer of News Corp in 2000, under president and COO Peter Chernin. His father put him in charge of the Fox Television Group, the HarperCollins publishing house, and the Post as well as the company’s Australian division. Suddenly Chandler witnessed the ejection of top officials at the Post around him. Col Allan of the Sydney Daily Telegraph became editor in chief. He had been infamous for periodically urinating in a sink in a corner of his office during editorial meetings as a way of underscoring his authority. Allan protested to a reporter that the sink was actually behind a door. But the mind games worked. The general manager left too, in favor of an Aussie. Chandler’s turn followed.

  Under Col Allan, the Page Six gossip section developed into the tail that wagged the dog, brought to heel only by FBI intervention. One of the section’s lead reporters, Jared Paul Stern, sought to extort a billionaire buddy of former president Bill Clinton, promising to keep negative items out of the paper if he paid $100,000 upfront and $10,000 a month subsequently. Another former reporter for the gossip section wrote in a sworn affidavit that many writers accepted freebies from those they wrote about, or didn’t write about, to influence coverage, and that Allan was among the worst offenders. The Post had to get out ahead of the story; Page Six acknowledged that Richard Johnson, the gossip section’s editor, had accepted $1,000 from a restaurateur he was writing about. Johnson’s four-day, $30,000 bachelor party in Mexico had been underwritten by Joe Francis, the founder of the soft-core pornography site Girls Gone Wild and a frequent subject of gossip reports.

  But Johnson was not the only figure at the paper accused of such coziness with those he covered. In 2007 it emerged in the Aussie press that Allan had taken future Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd to Scores, a popular New York strip club during a visit to New York a few years earlier; the incident briefly clouded Rudd’s career. Allan seemed amused by the disclosure, until some of his former colleagues accused him of accepting free drinks, lap dances, and sexual services at the club. He denied those accusations.

  Under Allan, the Australian culture of mateship allowed a frat house aura to flourish at the New York Post. Sandra Guzman, a Latina journalist who had been fired as editor of a Post magazine section, accused Allan of sidling up to her and several other female employees to show them pictures of a man displaying his penis on his cell phone; she also alleged he rubbed himself lewdly against a female colleague, and that she herself was serenaded with “I Want to Be in America”—an allusion to the Puerto Rican character who sang the musical number of that name in the musical West Side Story.

  The paper contested her charges. Yet under oath, Post editors admitted that Dunleavy had called conservative black columnist Robert George “a token nigger,” saying he would never have his job at the paper if not for his race. The city editor, James Murdoch’s closest childhood friend Jesse Angelo, chastised Dunleavy. No other punishment was meted out.

  THE POST was rigidly ideological, reflecting a conservative populism, except when it chose to diverge from that path. The tabloid had endorsed GOP congressman Rick Lazio in the 2000 race to represent New York in the US Senate, but it did not complicate life unduly for Democrat Hillary Clinton, who ultimately won. Murdoch personally hosted fund-raising events for her fellow Democrat, Senator Charles Schumer, in 2003. The press baron helped her raise money at a dinner three years later as she ran for reelection and the Post endorsed her for Senate that time around, well aware she would win handily and was laying the groundwork for a White House bid of her own.

  The Clintons had found ways to make peace with those who had been adversaries. Former president Bill Clinton broke bread with Chris Ruddy despite the former Post reporter’s seminal role in questioning the official version of the suicide of White House aide (and Clinton friend) Vince Foster. Ruddy’s long articles suggested Foster had been murdered and inspired congressional hearings from Clinton’s Republican foes. By 2007, Ruddy was speaking warmly of both Clintons. The Clintons and their surrogates had publicly praised Fox News for what they characterized as its fair-minded coverage of Hillary’s historic bid; MSNBC hosts, with a lineup almost entirely male and increasingly dominated by liberals, had favored Barack Obama.

  And yet the New York Post endorsed Barack Obama in the Democratic primary. Senator Clinton’s election would presage, the paper held, “a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency.” Obama, the paper wrote, was an intelligent man with a record as a conciliator with whom it rarely agreed on substance, but he still appeared the better choice.

  Fox News chairman Roger Ailes interceded with Murdoch, fearful that his boss’s more liberal children would convince the News Corp patriarch to endorse Obama in November. Elisabeth Murdoch and her husband, the British public relations executive Matthew Freud, had raised money for Obama from expatriate Americans living in London. James Murdoch had given money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and his wife was a committed environmentalist.

  In early September, for the general election, the Post reverted to form. It tepidly endorsed John McCain, an antitax campaigner, national security hawk, and relative social moderate (on many issues such as gay rights) whose positions meshed decently with the outlook of the paper’s readership, if not its own record. The paper cited Obama’s intelligence but invoked his “tissue paper thin resume.”

  In her lawsuit, Sandra Guzman asserted the paper intentionally sought to undermine Obama after he won. She claimed the agenda was permeated with racial overtones. In February 2009, after Congress had passed a $787 billion stimulus legislation championed by the new president, Post cartoonist Sean Delonas drew a chimpanzee shot dead by a policeman. The caption showed another officer saying, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

  In an editorial headlined “That Cartoon,” the paper insisted it was not racist. “To those who were offended by the image, we apologize,” the paper wrote. “It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period.”

  Allan also released a statement: “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy.” He dug in his heels, dismissing the flap as a stunt driven by activists such as Al Sharpton.

  The controversy came at an inopportune time. News Corp had been operating WWOR, a New York City station based on New Jersey soil, without a renewed license. Federal regulators appeared skeptical, if only because Murdoch already owned a station and two newspapers in the New York market. The company had won the support of many black groups for license renewals at other stations, but some challenged it.

  Black journalists protested. Days later, as the NAACP and others called for Delonas’s firing, Murdoch issued his own apology “to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.” He added: “I promise you that we will seek to be more attuned to the sensitivities of our community.”

  Allan then said he would personally be offended by a caricature of Obama as a monkey even though he claimed ignorance of the demeaning depiction of blacks in the US or Australia as monkeys and apes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “I don’t understand the history of the affiliation of black people and primates,” Allan said. “I am not aware of that.”

  He could not be racist, Allan insisted. His wife was half Australian Aboriginal.

  AMONG ALLAN’S critics in early 2009 was Michael Wolff, aut
hor of The Man Who Owns the News, a book about Murdoch. Wolff was a writer for Vanity Fair magazine, a digital news entrepreneur and media savant who had conducted dozens of hours of taped interviews with the man himself and many more with his family and friends. An advance copy obtained by the Murdochs had caused friction as it betrayed the unease with which the younger generation viewed Roger Ailes of Fox News. Other elements irked various Murdochs as well. According to Wolff, Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch’s top adviser on publicity and other strategic matters, told him that they would allow such concerns to pass if he were to do one favor: change the date when Murdoch met his third wife, Wendi Deng.

  Deng’s story was one of astonishing ambition and opportunism, first chronicled by the Wall Street Journal in 2000 (seven years before the paper joined the News Corp fold). Deng had moved to the US with the help of an American couple, then had an affair with the husband. She married the husband, Jake Cherry, roughly three decades her elder. They stayed married for two years and seven months—as the Journal noted, seven months longer than needed to obtain the green card necessary for her to stay and work in the US as a legal resident. Cherry told the paper that they lived together “four to five months, at the most.” While working for an Asian satellite television venture of News Corp, she caught Murdoch’s eye by confronting him with sharp-edged questions during a staff meeting on one of his trips to China. (A leading Australian newsmagazine termed Deng a Chinese Becky Sharp, after the conniving antihero of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.) A relationship ensued and Rupert and Wendi were married just weeks after his divorce from his second wife, Anna Torv Murdoch, was finalized. The divorce settlement was reported to have cost $1.7 billion, but in reality she settled for a nine-figure payout, valued between $100 million and $200 million, to lock in the fortunes of the adult children. (She had raised Murdoch’s daughter Prudence, by his first wife, since the girl was nine.)