The Man Who Owns the News (29 page)

Prepublication, these revelations caused vast panic on the eighth floor at News Corp. Genie Gavenchak, the company’s compliance lawyer, found that Allan did in fact, despite denials, use his credit card at the strip club in question—so they knew the jig was up, and the story would surely come out. It was Gary Ginsberg’s idea that “Page Six” ought to gossip about itself, and, in fact, Ginsberg negotiated the “confession” with Allan.

Allan believes he’s about to be fired and, certainly, Murdoch is furious with him and deeply worried about how the Bancrofts will react. Murdoch, nevertheless, used to suffering the bad behavior of hacks, lets it ride.

HIS NEWSROOMS

The newsroom at the
Wall Street Journal,
in the World Financial Center—put up on the landfill from the excavation when the World Trade Center was built in the 1970s—has seemed to Murdoch, on the few times he’s visited, rather more like the backroom of an insurance company than a news operation. It’s quiet, orderly, businesslike—or, you might say, strangled, repressed, dead. Murdoch didn’t think the place, so “depressing and without energy,” could be the newsroom. They obviously need, he will tell me later, “a change of culture, a change of scenery.”

Newsrooms in Murdoch’s world are id places, where reporters express instinctive impulses that, ideally, mirror the unexpressed impulses of their readers. Murdoch’s favorite reporter, his totemic reporter, over the fifty years of his newspaper career is Steve Dunleavy, who worked at News Corp.’s Sydney paper, the
Daily Mirror
. In the 1960s, he preceded Murdoch in heading to New York. Now, at sixty-nine, he can be found on many afternoons—and mornings—drunk at Langan’s, among the least appealing bars in Manhattan (think tourists in funny T-shirts), but where anybody who is anybody at the
New York Post
stubbornly congregates. Similarly, in Sydney, on any given evening you’ll find the cream of News Ltd.’s reporting staff at the Aurora, a twenty-four-hour last-stop bar filled with slot machines, fluorescent lighting, and the occasional white Aussie male salsa dancer. It’s the only remaining nongentrified spot in revivified Surry Hills, where Lachlan Murdoch has his chic offices.

Newspapers, to Murdoch, are an ungentrified idea. They are an immediate, often crude act. The energy you feel in a good newsroom comes from speed, good reflexes, and that highest Murdoch standard, a lack of pretense.

The
Journal
newsroom in New York and its annex in South Brunswick, New Jersey, are foreign and desultory places to Murdoch—unlike the truly horrifying places where his reporters have in years past worked (and found secretly exhilarating).

From Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie’s classic account of Murdoch’s
Sun, Stick It Up Your Punter!
:

The horrible conditions in the rackety old Bouverie Street building only added to the air of adventure about the enterprise…. Inside, the building was cramped, dingy and smelly. The corridors and stairway were cluttered with leaky vats of acid and various other chemicals used in the process department to make plates for the presses. The ceilings were a tangle of ducting carrying electrical and drainage systems which had haphazardly evolved over the decades, defying any logical system of safety or planning. On one occasion an acid drain split overnight and the
News of the World
hacks arrived in the morning to find the typewriters on their desks reduced to smoldering and partly dissolved lumps of metal. Facilities were rudimentary. The toilets were foul and swarmed with bluebottles in the summer. The canteen was filthy and infested with rats, giving the hacks another excuse to get out of the office into the Fleet Street pubs, where they could tap into the grapevine of what was happening at the other papers….

But the squalor did make Bouverie Street an exciting and unpretentious place to work, with the day always dominated by the subconscious anticipation of press time, when there would be a deep rumble from the basement as the presses began to roll.

Such traditions and theatricality are not so much the point for Murdoch (he’s hardly a sentimentalist—he ultimately moved the
Sun
and
News of the World
to antiseptic conditions in Wapping, and the
New York Post
from rat-infested digs above the trucking bays on South Street to News Corp.’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue) as the basics. Murdoch has a fixed notion of journalism—tinkering with it or dressing it up doesn’t, to him, make it significantly more than it is. He has, in fact, a visceral revulsion, or contempt, for the dresser-uppers. It’s artifice. It’s fake. It’s disreputable. And it always results in copy so much longer than it needs to be.

“There’s levels and levels of editing,” he will tell me incredulously after an early tour of the
Wall Street Journal
’s newsroom. “Every story gets edited about five times. Then it goes down to Princeton, where they put the paper to bed, there’s 150 people there and they say, ‘We do everything in a final edit to make sure everything is absolutely right and we check the sources and stuff.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s a wonder anything ever gets in the paper or on time.’” (He will often tell this story with the number of edits varying from 5 to 8 to 8.7.)

This has been a consistent disconnect—what American journalists think of when they think of news and what Murdoch thinks about news. To Murdoch, even the word
tabloid
is misunderstood. “Tabloid” in the Murdoch context is an idea of immediacy, sharpness, efficiency, and emotion—it’s news at its most visceral and powerful and entertaining. The craft, and it is a high craft, is compression. Necessary and vital compression: The tabloid tradition in Britain and Australia derives in part from newsprint rationing after the First and Second World Wars. When Murdoch took over at the
Adelaide News,
newsprint was still controlled. Hence, during the Falklands War in 1982, when the Royal Navy sank Argentina’s warship ARA
General Belgrano,
Murdoch’s
Sun
famously reached the pinnacle of the form by delivering the news in a word: GOTCHA.

“Tabloid,” in the modern U.S. context—to most people at the
Journal,
certainly—is about celebrities and gossip. It’s faux news. Tabloidism is a modern journalistic illness, a virus—spread most of all by Murdoch himself.

But Murdoch is, more accurately, not a modern journalist but the last representative from an era when a newspaper was its own advertisement, when it had to sell itself.

Newspapers as sellers of news—as loud, unsubtle, rude instruments, as midway-type entertainment (games of chance, horo-scopes, funny pages)—were, of course, the American form too. The Hearst and Pulitzer empires were built on such papers. Any city with two or more papers fighting it out was certain to have a version of carnival news: cheaper (cheaper to produce, cheaper to buy), blunter, louder.

Then American papers—American news—turned orderly and genteel. This happened as newspapers, feeling television’s competition, figured out a new business model: monopoly (largely by absorbing secondary papers). And then the big chains—Gannett, Knight Ridder, Tribune Company, Advance—replaced local owners. What’s more, the American city as a working-class redoubt was transmuted into ghettos and suburban flight. The newsstand, and with it the battling urban evening newspaper, died. But a newspaper controlling its geographic position—not so much the city as its piece of the great expanding suburbs—had a monopoly on local ads. In a single-newspaper market, local advertisers often had no alternative but to advertise in the single paper. So a newspaper’s best strategy was to be sedate, mannerly, uncontroversial—to offend no one, and not to call attention to the fact that it has monopolized the market, which it would certainly do if it screamed and bullied.

The dominant news voice in the United States has become a network television voice. News was now a serious, weighty, basso profundo affair, delivered by men of unimpeachable integrity and, relatively speaking, zero personality. News, bland news, self-important news, suddenly defined a kind of respectability and upward mobility. For the middle class, Walter Cronkite rather than William Randolph Hearst or a chain-smoking city editor came to represent the news.

The business itself was transformed from a workingman’s profession—reporting had been a semi-white-collar job that didn’t require a college education—to an Ivy League one. This is sometimes called the Watergate effect—the press’s own good press during the investigation and pursuit of Richard Nixon, together with its evident power, made it a profession of choice. Also, during this time, the newsgathering function was being overtaken by the information-processing one—more specialized skill sets were required. Then too, there were fewer and fewer newspaper jobs; employers got to be choosier.

Arriving in New York in the early seventies, Murdoch—whose papers are in markets where television news is hardly a factor, and are still staffed by working-class reporters—is struck by one overpowering sense of the market: American news is lazy, stultifying, pickle-up-its-ass, boring. This suggests, to a man who has spent twenty years selling news in some of the most competitive news markets in the world, great opportunity.

In this regard, he is both right and wrong. In retrospect, it will be possible to see his years in America as a process of wrestling with what he does not understand about the American news market—a losing fight that, oddly, will make him a winner. It’s partly out of frustration with American newspapers that he will come to build an entertainment empire. It’s partly because he doesn’t doubt himself that he will continue to try to succeed at news, and build Fox News, and bid $60 a share for Dow Jones. The $60 offer will indicate to many observers, however, that he still does not understand the American news market.

By the time Murdoch arrives in the United States he’s mastered one business model: single-copy sales. Advertising is a modest adjunct to this greater business strategy. Indeed, at the beginning of his career, Murdoch is kept out of the “quality” media and the “rivers of gold” classified advertising revenue by the dominant Fairfax family. His son Lachlan, in a discussion about his father, will later point out that if Dame Elisabeth had not sold the Queensland newspapers, which were the upmarket part of the Keith Murdoch legacy, as opposed to the downmarket
Adelaide News,
then her son would have begun his career with a quality broadsheet (in Brisbane), rich in classified advertising—and Lachlan’s father might not have ever become a tabloid king.

Murdoch’s only real deviation in Australia from the single-copy tabloid strategy is the
Australian,
the first national newspaper in Australia, a quality broadsheet that he launched in 1964—the only newspaper he’ll ever create, as well as the proof positive of his journalistic bona fides that he’ll cite over and over again in the battle for the
Journal
. The
Australian,
whose respectability keeps his mother happy, will lose money for nearly thirty years.

It’s the
News of the World
and the
Sun
that are his principal models. They are downmarket as an identity, with a precise and calculated form—constantly refined (even if refinement means vulgarization) and sharpened. And they sell like crazy.

It’s media magic, his reconstruction of what he thinks of as the perfect tabloid form. Murdoch himself may be sour about and disaffected with Britain, but Britain embraces his
Sun
. Its tone is pitch-perfect. It is so spot-on that it effectively revolutionizes the form itself—in modern Britain, the tabloids become the most powerful media, breaking stories, setting the agenda, electing politicians, changing the culture. To question the form means you’re standing on the sidelines. Questioning it, turning up your nose at its cultivated noxiousness, its calculated downmarketness, would make you something like an intellectual arguing against television, or a sixties parent decrying rock and roll. Successful media is its own justification (a key Murdoch precept). It is not possible to overestimate how much the
Sun
’s success has transformed even Murdoch’s idea of the tabloid. He feels he has found the secret. What’s more, the
Sun,
with profit margins as high as 60 or 70 percent, has become the most significant part of his business and will remain so for nearly twenty years. It not only becomes the primary revenue source, supplying the cash flow for his other efforts, but it also gives him his extraordinary power base in the United Kingdom. The
Sun
becomes one of the key levers to push the transformation of Britain itself. It changes Murdoch too, giving him a sense of just how large his ambitions could be.

The
Sun
and the
News of the World
are what he somehow hopes to bring to the United States. The size of this dream is disconcertingly huge—to be able to create a national tabloid with the success and impact of the
Sun
on a U.S. scale would be massive.

And yet, judging by the incredibly boring newspapers in the United States, it seems almost like a no-brainer.

Such sales as the
Sun
and the
News of the World
are having in the United Kingdom are dependent, however, on working-class men (ideally with the same interests, i.e., soccer) who buy papers, and newsstands where they can buy them.

The absence of those key factors in the U.S. market is an indication of how little Murdoch knows—and how hard it is to dissuade him from going forward when he wants something. Part of the reason he sends his early U.K. coterie in America packing back to London is that each of them perceives, in the face of his stubborn enthusiasm, that the U.S. market is inhospitable to the British tabloid model.