by Bruce Page
But the waters did subside. The tabloid rivals of the News – the Graphic above all – were financially catastrophic, and after their collapse the paper’s own news values slowly calmed. Sensational populism didn’t vanish. But during the decades straddling the Second World War it ceased to dominate the US media system.
The New York wars had more lasting impact in Fleet Street. As we saw in Chapter 5, their furious example was Guy Bartholomew’s inspiration – if the word suits him – when he rounded up the British working class and propelled the Daily Mirror towards the world’s largest circulation. (Post-Northcliffe, it had ailed.) This may seem culturally bizarre, but Atlantic cross-currents often are: what could be less plausible than a bunch of middle-class Brits naming themselves the Rolling Stones and recycling the blues to America? By the 1970s, Rupert Murdoch was eager to do some re-recycling, and saw good reason for his enthusiasm.
While building his New York base around the National Star, Murdoch turned his defence of its supermarket concoctions into a claim that mainstream American journalism was anaesthetising itself – he, by implication, being the fellow to wake it up. There were good observers who conceded his first point (if never the second). Max Frankel, later editor of the New York Times, records that its best reporters were in this period often driven ‘close to resignation’ by editing so oppressive as to resemble censorship. New social and political patterns were replacing a long post-war consensus, and reporting them often required more than a simple tour of the certified positions. This courted accusations of nonconformity, and while there was nothing especially American about media top brass dreading such a prospect, there was about the solution they attempted – a mechanical ‘objectivity’, almost stenographic in character, with sheets of editorial boilerplate obscuring any gleam of judgment. Frankel and some of his colleagues envied the British Economist’s ‘concise and dispassionate’ analysis of their own country enough to consider starting their own version of it – and found from its US editor that ‘her best articles were merely rewritten from our dispatches’.
The Times is today more heterodox, to its stylistic benefit. But the Economist incident cross-references the comparison Murdoch was dwelling on – the presentational superiority of British journalism over American. It is valid only as a very broad comparison, with multiple exceptions. And it relates to a complexity he bypasses – the greater relative strength of American reporting. But in the 1970s Murdoch wanted simply to argue that (a) US papers were systematically dull, and (b) they were dull because, unlike himself, they cared little for social and political legitimacy. This he dressed up in class analysis of a kind, telling American newspaper publishers in 1977, ‘A press that fails to interest the whole community is one that will eventually become a house organ of the elite.’
‘Elite’ is a key concept in Murdoch discourse. An elite newspaper generally is one which is not a populist tabloid, or one not operated by his own company. (Under the second term, a Murdoch broadsheet may be less elitist than a tabloid in other hands.) Over the years he has stated his case against elite newspapers in variorum, and extended it to television, but a core version can be distilled. Elite newspapers are dull because they despise the tastes and ignore the needs of ‘bluecollar workers’ or ‘ordinary people’. Elite journalists are ‘snobs’. Snobbery makes them incapable of attracting a popular audience, so they resent the egalitarian success of tabloids. Resentment motivates their condemnation of his methods. Like all snobs, elitists are unrealistic; they should be brought down to earth, not least because of their affected concern for social reform, liberty and the people’s rights. Their talk about making the world better is a sham.
Just as he and his newspapers respect and serve popular tastes, they are the people’s true defence against the power and corruption of elites. ‘Serious’ journalists are too comfortable inside the status quo to do anything for the masses who enjoy the tabloid newspapers which attract so much hostility for their sensationalism. But, for Murdoch and his followers, the hostility of the elite is welcome. The tradition of the Muckrakers, he says, is an old and honourable one, and Murdoch types are happy to be its populist successors, exposing the selfishness and hypocrisy of power wherever it exists.
Like the Gallipoli Letter – decked out similarly in class-war rhetoric the diatribe has a rough plausibility but rests on a spurious history. Murdoch put it this way in one of his more extended essays: ‘It was not the serious press in America but the muck-rakers, led by Lincoln Steffens and his New York World … who challenged the American trinity of power – Big Business, Big Labour and Big Government.’
Some modern research challenges the scholarship of Muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker: only Murdoch could suggest they were not part of – most of – the serious press of their time (1904-12). The Muckrakers exposed city bosses and oil companies in magazines like McClure’s and Collier’s , which didn’t at all resemble the Sun or News of the World – and were tough critics of contemporary papers which did. They sometimes worked with yellow-press paladins – when they got them to be serious – but Steffens didn’t own, edit or work for the World. If the Sun can be justified via the Muckrakers, Charles Dickens’s insanitary Sairey Gamp is the disciple of Florence Nightingale.
The Fleet Street style Murdoch desired for America came of another pedigree. Britain was only lightly touched by the notions of training and professional education which shaped American and Australian news-gathering in the twentieth century. It did not stop the country producing its full share of brilliant reporters and editors: Henry Nevinson, C. P. Scott, Elisabeth Wiskemann, Clare Hollingworth, René MacColl, Harry Evans, Kate Adey – some celebrated, some known best to discriminating insiders (and more turning up still). But it certainly caused Britain to out-produce heavily in cynical hacks – predominantly inept, but sometimes darkly skilled.
Some of the story we have traced already: presentational ingenuity suppressing reality, in a culture dominated by subs where only a minority of journalists believe they carry any professional obligation – broadly, the US situation reversed. Baldwin’s ‘harlot’ speech had its crunching effect because the image of the press lord and his ductile entourage was already embedded in public consciousness: Humbert Wolfe, writing The Uncelestial City at the same time, represented journalistic mendacity as orthodoxy, not as corruption. His work is mostly forgotten, but not the lines quoted at the head of this chapter. Hearst of course had his lordly ambitions. It is just that in the US context there were more countervailing forces.
Generally Britain’s mass newspapers in their period of hectic mid-century growth recruited from survivors of the provincial sink-or-swim ordeal that Arthur Christiansen describes (augmented sporadically from Oxbridge and the Antipodes). Entry standards were modest, to allow for lavish wastage. Talent has always seemed abundant in Britain, permitting a substantial cynicism about training and supportive instruction. There have been organisational exceptions (such as the armed forces), but until recently newspapers have been much better at exhorting other industries to improve than doing better themselves.
Of course there were those who survived with a crystalline sense of truth – James Cameron, for instance, after whom Britain’s premier award for journalistic courage is named. Cameron, among other things, quit a glamorous job at the Daily Express just because it began telling deliberate lies, and he was thought most eccentric, as his autobiography makes clear. There were far too few Camerons to change either the public’s estimate of the British journalist or the view within popular newspapers that truth was a matter for the boss to define.
The social and political environment which once nurtured this huge press was changing fast when Murdoch joined the Fleet Street scene. Consequently, much of it was disintegrating by the 1970s. Often the rise of television is cited to explain the collapse – and now is a good moment to zap that shopworn alibi, as Error! Reference source not found. does very effectively. Newspapers were at saturation point in the
1950s; the progress of television towards a similar status never produced destructive competitive pressures. Some there were, of course – but a fair hypothesis is that there were too few people in the newspaper business with enough intellectual address to organise any better response than a downmarket plunge, made at the least opportune moment in terms of the overall trend of British society.
Murdoch was able to pursue it without complicating inhibition. He had double immunity against the idea of dealings between news media and consumers being anything more than the most basic contract. He had not undergone the processes of selection and training developed in his own country (having qualified by the laying on of parental hands) and had triumphed in Fleet Street among and through people contemptuous or resentful of all such philosophies.
Figure 3
America presented a chance to repeat that triumph – the supermarket Star was reconnaissance-in-depth – and Old Fleet Street’s mortal convulsions threw off recruits abundantly. Roger Wood, for instance, editor of the Star after James Brady, was one of the technicians behind the first, abortive Sun, and then one of many editors given a brief try at curing the desperately ailing Express. (These were scarcely triumphs, but surely Murdoch could transmute men too.) And to augment Fleet Street there was his own Antipodean supply out of the old Norton tradition in Sydney – Dunleavy pre-eminently. Brady found Dunleavy ‘wonderful’. ‘If you wanted a miracle cancer cure, a flying saucer, a Hollywood scandal, or a rip-off of a forthcoming book in the guise of a “review”, what we called an “el thievo”, Dunleavy was your man.’ Dunleavy did have a philosophy, and could define it: ‘If it’s accurate, anything goes. If the reader buys it, it’s moral.’ Accurate. Now there’s a word.
As it happened, American journalism did reshape itself during the final third of the last century. It hasn’t become ideal (or stopped the Economist taking good money from the American ruling class). But newspapers, in Frankel’s words, ceased to be mainly ‘expositors of government policy … We saw ourselves as more accountable to our readers than to our sources.’ That distinction the London Times originated in the nineteenth century – and, as the next chapter will show, forgot in the twentieth. ‘In the generation before ours,’ Frankel went on, ‘it was enough for Arthur Krock to interview President Truman to qualify for a Pulitzer Prize. In our time, the prize went to Woodward and Bernstein for planting dynamite under Richard Nixon’s throne.’
From Pulitzer’s accessory bequest, the Prizes, we gain a narrative portrait of the Republic’s journalism. Since 1970, they have been won most often for exposing corruption: which was a sin of elites (who else gets the chance?) when Ida Tarbell dealt with Standard Oil, and still was when Bethany McLean punctured Enron in 2001. But no award has gone to a paper under Murdoch’s control, though the Post persistently claims to be a terror to abusers of the people’s trust.
Across the border dividing paranoia from conservatism, some say the Pulitzer awards – even the whole media – are an elite metropolitan fix. Fixing a selection process so elaborately generalised would be tough, but it is true that, as in the Olympics, most medals go to the big teams. Since 1970 the ten papers with double-figure scores have 218 out of 416 mentions: the New York Times with forty-seven is followed by the Washington Post (twenty-nine), the Associated Press (twenty-one), the Los Angeles Times (twenty), the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Wall Street Journal (nineteen), the Chicago Tribune (eighteen), the Boston Globe, Miami Herald and Newsday (fifteen).
It’s scarcely political – few liberal papers outscore the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal. But it’s disseminated – the group taking more than one prize is twenty-three strong, and while some are grand tides (Atlanta Constitution, St Louis Post-Dispatch), not all are (Akron Beacon-Journal, Orlando Sentinel, Pottstown Mercury). And seventy-one papers, mostly small, have scored at least once: the Berkshire Eagle, Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, Gainesville Sun, Odessa American and Xenia Daily Gazette hardly belong to a metropolitan elite. Most of these prizes were for tackling local, sometimes vicious power-abuse. Anyone who understands journalism – or community life – knows that such action demands civil courage of a daunting order.
Though Murdoch likes his papers to generate a hyperactive look, they aren’t usually allowed generous budgets for the purpose. Even so, the Post must be better resourced than the Xenia Daily Gazette. How can all that activity, over thirty furious years, have struck no enemy of the people anyone else can recognise? How did it all begin?
Dorothy Schiff, who took control of the Post in the 1940s and turned it into a tabloid – in size, not style – enjoyed fair success until the later 1960s. The paper empathised with liberal Manhattan, and enjoyed an evening monopoly, but it was one that did not develop with its times. Its news-gathering was honest, but stuck in the mechanical style, and its editorial package relied heavily on columnists – often distinguished, but too many, and too often syndicated. (Evening papers which stay profitable do so by covering their patch.) And Mrs Schiff’s years weighed on her. Clay Felker, the urbane founder-editor of New York magazine, who had begun steering Murdoch around upper-class Manhattan in the mid-1970s seeing the Oxford-alumnus aspect, and taking it for the full Murdoch confided that she might consider a sale.
She was ready to consider, reluctant to decide. Mrs Schiff was fond of her paper, and thought Murdoch’s use of it might be unlike hers. But his attention seemed to veer towards the London Sunday-paper market – as the distinguished Observer came up for sale – and it compelled her to think that his offer could not be kept on ice. And it was not just tempting, it was staggering. Murdoch was ready to give $32.5 million (about $100 million now) for a newspaper shedding both money and readers. He had acted likewise (if on a lesser scale) with his San Antonio purchases. The value of a newspaper is classically a multiple of its earnings. Not in New York or Texas were there earnings visible. So the Post justified only the kind of bargain-basement price which had been paid in London for the Sun. In accountant’s terms, therefore, Murdoch was paying lavishly for the Post’s ‘goodwill’ – more plainly, for what he thought he could do with a real newspaper franchise in the world’s most fabulous city.
It was a deal an American company could not have financed, because in the US accounting ‘goodwill’ is not a bankable asset. But News Ltd though renamed News Corporation – was registered in Adelaide, and under Australian accounting it could treat the goodwill of its US acquisitions in much the same way as tangible assets. Nor were the Commonwealth Bank and its associates in Australia likely to quibble about the worth Murdoch attached to them. He was the tabloid alchemist who had converted base Fleet Street elements to gold. If he had promised to raise the Graphic from the dead – and Mrs Snyder with it – they would not have doubted him.
Murdoch was very excited indeed. He described having the Post as like having both the Sun in London and the Mirror in Sydney. He saw enormous changes to be made – columns to be scrapped, layouts to be reconstructed, reporting to be ‘improved’. It was a stupendous opportunity. As it would seem, he owed it to Clay Felker’s introduction, but the favour attracted no return. Laying the Post aside for a moment, he bought out New York’s shareholders and ejected Felker – who said the experience modified his conception of friendship.
The Post deal closed in November 1976. On the 26th of the month a stranger tracked two New York girls walking home from the movies. Catching up with them, he muttered something, and fired several shots, wounding both. Donna DeMasi recovered well. Joanne Lomino was rendered paraplegic.
Though he was still a mystery to the police, this was the third New York shooting escapade of David Berkowitz, who became known as ‘Son of Sam’. Five weeks earlier he had killed Rosemary Keenan and wounded her friend Carl Denaro. And before that, on 29 July 1976, as Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti sat in a car outside Donna’s apartment, a man peered into it, then took a .44 Charter Arms Bulldog revolver from a paper bag and fired all five chambers at them. That, too, was Berkowitz. Donna died. Jody sur
vived and was able to give some account of her attacker, though not of the unusual weapon.
Thus the ‘Son of Sam’ story, taken to define the Post’s new, hard-boiled and ruthless character – the story Spike Lee turned many years later into a movie about urban hysteria – was already far advanced, if still clothed in mist, by the time Murdoch took over his new paper.
On 30 January 1977, as Christine Freund sat with John Diel in his car, two shots pierced the windscreen. She died, but he survived to describe loosely a young male attacker. Ballistics this time did identify a .44 Bulldog – suspected in the earlier cases, and a gun unlikely to appear often. The NYPD feared this might be a serial madman, and the evening of 18 March made them sure. Virginia Voskerichian was killed while walking home from Barnard College, and a complete Bulldog bullet matched the earlier ballistic material. A witness got a good look at the killer – white, dark-haired, twenty-five to thirty, medium build.
The police held a press conference, described their unidentified quarry, and began organising Operation Omega – bigger than anything they had done before, involving more than 300 detectives and costing in today’s prices $2.75 million a week. This had become a serious metropolitan crime story. And nobody who depended on the New York Post would have been aware of the fact, or of the degree of menace New York faced.
The first of two or three striking headlines which Murdoch’s team produced for the case was