Quote of the Day (Roger Ailes, on ‘Wet Noodle’ Patriarch Rupert Murdoch)

“He’s walking into walls. He doesn’t know what time it is. It’s old man time. Rupert is an odd bird. A cold fish, but a f-----g wet noodle — it's pathetic — around those kids. They're always stomping off and giving the poor guy the finger.”—The late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, on Australian-born media baron Rupert Murdoch, quoted by Michael Wolff, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty (2023)

As a youngster listening to the original “Eyewitness News” broadcast in the New York area, I would smile and lean forward whenever I heard short, dour reporter Milton Lewis tell the audience, “Now listen to this,” in a confiding, “you’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you” tone.

I experienced the same sensation when I read Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler’s New York Times report this week that three of Rupert Murdoch’s children have united against their father. They are arguing in court against him changing the family’s “irrevocable trust” to ensure that his anointed successor, eldest son Lachlan, will stay in charge of the conservative multinational media empire.

Lewis’ “this” happens, in 1924, to be a plot twist right out Succession. There’s little that the creators much-honored comedy-drama did not imagine. Maybe they dismissed this idea in the belief that their audience would never accept this kind of switcheroo coming from a nonagenarian.

Murdoch is a nightmare spin on Dylan Thomas’ notion that old age should burn and rave at close of day. Having assisted at the birth of Trumpism, he finds himself unable either to embrace or evade his handiwork. 

However much he may carp about the former President, his attempts to promote an alternative GOP candidate have foundered. He’s even been dissed by Don Jr.: “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

And now, this mess.

The discovery process in the litigation can only reveal more embarrassing secrets, the kind he sought to avoid after reaching a $787 million settlement in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox.

Or maybe Murdoch is beyond mortification at this point in his life. After all, who else would marry for the fifth time at age 93 and dare to risk comparisons with billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, who was a mere 89 when he wed Anna Nicole Smith?

Fox News and Murdoch’s New York print mainstays, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, have been making great sport of President Biden’s age-related difficulties. But Ailes came up with that “old man time” phrase about his former boss eight years ago. What could that line possibly entail now?

Flashback, December 1973: Murdoch Gains American Toehold With San Antonio Paper Acquisition

Completing a $19.7 million purchase of the morning San Antonio Express and afternoon San Antonio News from Harte-Hanks Newspapers Inc., Rupert Murdoch was able to secure his first American properties 50 years ago this month.

The purchase launched the Australian on a course that made him the most formidable media baron of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, with properties around the world, a perch from which he finally stepped down a few months ago at age 92.

At age 21, Murdoch inherited a single afternoon Australian tabloid from his father, the foundation of what became News Corp. In 1969, having bought a string of papers in his own country, he turned to the British market when he bought the weekly News of the World and the daily London Sun.  

With his San Antonio acquisitions, he planned to import the same formula that had made him a success on Fleet Street, what I would call “3C X S”: i.e., crime, controversy, and cheesecake times scandal.

More specifically, it meant in his papers screaming headlines, faux anti-elitism, and manufactured outrage—and, in the newsroom, ousters of key managers and staffers as well as broken promises about editorial independence.

Murdoch entered the American market just as the Watergate scandal was slowly but steadily eroding support for Richard Nixon. Disdain for Tricky Dick’s opponents was as much a part of the publisher’s DNA as scorn for journalistic objectivity or ethical newsgathering methods. (“The American press might get their pleasure in successfully crucifying Nixon,” he said, “but the last laugh could be on them. See how they like it when the Commies take over the West.” He could never imagine a world in which both Nixon and “the Commies” would be gone.)

Given that Murdoch was far more enthusiastic about Nixon than he has been in private about Donald Trump, I think it highly probable that Nixon could have survived his growing scandals if he had Murdoch’s backing when the publisher’s American holdings reached their eventual peak.

Even as he was getting ready to invade San Antonio, he was seeking a wider arena for his outsized ambitions. He would have those in just a couple of years, launching The National Star (later, renamed simply The Star) as a supermarket tabloid competitor of The National Enquirer in February 1974 and transforming the faded liberal daily The New York Post into a rabid right-wing publication after his acquisition in 1976.

Nevertheless, it is one of the ironies of the past half-century, when daily newspapers withered successively under the assault of the evening news, 24-hour cable stations, and the Internet, Murdoch remained one of the most enthusiastic supporters or print against electronic journalism. 

(The newspaper portion of his empire might be considerably slimmed down, if his successor, son Lachlan Murdoch—notably less enthusiastic about the old medium—has his way, according to this September 2023 AP article by Pan Pylas and Jill Lawless.)

Though the Murdoch empire has, with more than a little truth, been credited with creating the conditions for Trumpism, the denial of climate science may be the most lasting and pernicious legacy of the publisher’s.

Had Murdoch’s influence merely extended to America, he would just bear responsibility for the rise of a homegrown demagogue. But because he is invested in six continents, he has been able to undermine climate-science advocates and erode diplomatic and legislative efforts to curb the greatest existential threat of our time.

It took two screenwriters, Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, to depict in fictional terms one of the early “yellow journalists”: William Randolph Hearst, in “Citizen Kane.”

In contrast, Murdoch was translated into fiction by the novelist Edward St Aubyn, in Dunbar, a 2017 retelling of King Lear, and Jesse Armstrong and his team of writers for the recently concluded series Succession.

Compared with other newspapers that he kept alive despite constant losses (notably, The New York Post, which only recorded its first annual profit in modern history this past year), San Antonio’s News and Express fell by the wayside relatively quickly in the Murdoch stable of newspapers.

After bamboozling readers for a decade with headlines like “Ax Attacker Kills Sleeper,” “Armies of Insects Marching on S.A.,” and “Uncle Tortures Tots with Hot Fork,” Murdoch began to hedge his bets with the two papers he’d bought, closing the News in favor of a reconstituted Express-News in 1984, then selling that to his longtime rival in the San Antonio market, the Hearst Corp.

Now, it was America, not just San Antonio, that he was looking to conquer. In the end, it would involve telling people what they most wanted to hear, even if his private views were far different.

To satisfy the legal requirement that only American citizens could own U.S. TV stations, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen in September 1985. Still, there is reason to wonder if he has anything other than contempt for the great mass of his adopted countrymen—or if he feels any sensitivity at all to those less fortunate than him.

In Michael Wolff’s recent book about the Murdochs and their empire, The Fall, Rupert is quoted taking a swipe at both his Fox evening anchor, Sean Hannity, and, implicitly, in the most insulting manner possible, many in the latter’s audience: “He’s retarded, like most Americans.”

In word and action, Murdoch might be the best example of what columnist H.L. Mencken meant nearly a century ago in concluding, “No one in this world, so far as I know...has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on a ‘Rotten Cabal’)

Roman Roy [played by Kieran Culkin]: “There's just something about betraying our father that just doesn't sit well with me.”

Kendall Roy [played by Jeremy Strong]: “He's a central player in a rotten cabal that has basically eaten the heart out of American democracy.”

Roman: “ ‘Rotten Cabal’ is a good name for a band.”— Succession, Season 3, Episode 2, "Mass In Time Of War," original air date Oct. 24, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong and Jamie Carragher, directed by Mark Mylod

So now the fourth and final season of Succession is at hand. Once the series ends, fans like me will not only miss its backstabbings and other assorted plot twists, but also wisecracks like the one above from Roman, as well as the unusual verb forms used by its characters and so many others in the business world (from this same episode, Kendall’s “You aren't Judasing, are you, Greg?”)

The media family that inspired this acclaimed satire, the Murdochs, are finding it harder these days to, as Kendall (again) put it, “clean-slate this.”

This week, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis not only expressed doubt that powerful patriarch Rupert Murdoch would have trouble traveling to testify in the trial arising from Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News, but also found that the evidence in the case “demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” and that Fox’s behavior constituted defamation per se.

The speed with which mendacity can ricochet around the world has grown exponentially, disrupting the media, politics, and even everyday life increasingly damaged by falsehoods about public health and climate change.

The law, despite its agonizingly slow pace and manifest shortcomings, may be the only institution in American life that can still hold accountable “the rotten cable” represented by the Murdochs’ News Corp. and the political grifters so long in league with it.

Open Plan Offices: Weighing Their Effectiveness

“For decades, research has found that open plan offices are bad for companies, bad for workers, bad for health and bad for morale. And yet they just won’t die. Human beings, if they are to thrive, need a bit of privacy — walls and a door. And yet employers, decade after decade, neglect to give workers what they need, refuse to do what’s in their own self-interest.”— Columnist and TV commentator David Brooks, “The Immortal Awfulness of Open Plan Workplaces,” The New York Times, Sept. 9, 2022

New York City was utterly transformed by a number of the projects begun or completed under former three-term mayor Michael Bloomberg (pictured): the High Line, a rebuilt World Trade Center and its surrounding Lower Manhattan neighborhood, Hudson Yards, East River Park in Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens, 400 miles of bike lanes throughout the five boroughs. 

No mayor has left such an imprint on the look of America's largest city since Fiorello LaGuardia (with the help of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal) in the Great Depression.

Bloomberg supporters fervently wished he might have similarly altered the landscape of The Wall Street Journal if he had successfully achieved his rumored interest in purchasing Dow Jones. (The Washington Post had also reportedly caught his eye.) That hope was dashed (at least for now) when a Bloomberg spokesman quickly tweeted that he had no such interest.

If Bloomberg could only get his mitts on Rupert Murdoch’s most influential business print publication, the thinking in some quarters surely went, maybe he could return the Journal to something like the separation of news and opinion that largely held sway before the Australian media baron bought the company from the Bancroft family in 2007.

I won’t comment on the political change that might occur under such a scenario. What I’m concerned with here is a physical environment far different from what he left Gotham: the office space that would become part of his media empire. My apprehension arises because few other American corporate titans have trumpeted open-space offices as tirelessly as Bloomberg.

I don’t know if the Murdoch family follows this office model. Maybe they consider it an outgrowth of Bloomberg’s hated RINO outlook.

Judging by the impact Hiz(former)zoner has had on American office design in general, I’m afraid he’ll exert a baleful influence on the health and creativity of any Dow Jones workers that could come into his fold.

I don’t always agree with David Brooks’ views on politics, but his analysis of the controversial and crazy American corporate embrace of Bloomberg’s “open office” is spot on. I just wish the Times columnist would have mentioned Bloomberg by name in the article, so that the debate on this could get the thorough airing it deserves.

In his otherwise excellent piece, Brooks notes the dangers that open-space offices pose to employee health, but dwells on one aspect (stress) without mentioning the one that’s become ubiquitous since late-winter 2000: airborne illnesses like COVID-19. 

Even urging workers to stay home if they feel something coming on is not likely to be helpful if they have insufficient sick days. (And COVID—not to mention a COVID rebound—can exhaust that supply quickly.)

Brooks rails against cubicles, but I’m afraid those units have long since become staples of the modern workplace. At least they could, at their best, provide a modicum of physical separation from adjacent workers.

But I am aware of at least one employer, just before the COVID outbreak, which implemented a renovation that did away even with that. Instead, workers were herded together in triangles, with no partitions between.

Did I mention that this design model became obsolete within just a few months after the COVID outbreak?

How much do you think that America’s C-suites have invested in up-to-date ventilation systems? Your guess is as good as mine. As Liz Szabo’s article nine months ago from Kaiser Health News noted, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers published updated recommendations in 2020 not only for limiting indoor odors and dust but control viruses like COVID-19.

But, because those guidelines are voluntary, there’s no way of telling how closely the business world is adhering to them—anymore than we know right now they are following up on the White House’s initiative (again, voluntary) encouraging schools and workplaces to improve ventilation.

Companies’ best-laid plans for a return to the office—and, let’s be frank, a return to traditional top-down control—keep getting upended by a disease that evolves and adapts to new environments far faster than corporate heads ever have done.

The move towards a more open environment often rests on the contention that it fosters creativity and managerial transparency. That would send great—if corporate heads were willing to accept ideas other than their own, let alone dissent.

But, before Elon Musk started going seriously off the rails with managing his new toy, Twitter (like firing janitors, thus forcing workers at two locations to bring their own toilet paper to the office!), more than a few other CEOs were not only rooting for his return-to-the-office mandates but implementing their own.

Employers are anxious to herd their workers back to the office. If various Amenities of the Month can’t lure them back, then diktats from Human Resources will have to do.

Unfortunately, the types of layouts in Bloomberg L.P. that have been copied elsewhere don’t inspire workers to rush back to their cubicles—and, if those employees find any kind of alternative arrangement out there in the market, they will seize it.

I suppose that if there’s any good outcome from the turbulence that has roiled American politics over the last several years, it’s that Mike Bloomberg never won a Presidential election so he could implement his 2019 plan to make the East Room of the White House into another showcase for theopen office model he followed in his own company.

(The image accompanying this post of Bloomberg, speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Warehouse 215 at Bentley Projects in Phoenix, Ariz., was taken by Gage Skidmore on Feb. 1, 2020.)

Will the Fox ‘Twin Galahads’ Lay Down Their Trump Lances?

“Mr. [Seamus] Colonnity’s valiant colleague, Mr. Corky Fartmartin, was joining in Fox's defense of the president. So we had on our hands twin Galahads tilting lances. But Mr. Fartmartin's efforts to link Hillary Clinton to all of Mr. Trump's calamities weren’t quite getting traction. Still, one had to applaud the passion with which these two ‘Lions of Fox’ defended their president. If only more members of the media were as patriotic. Mr. Trump returned the favor by inviting them frequently to golf with him, and told me to comp them whenever they stayed at Trump properties. Naturally, the media even managed to make these friendly gestures by Mr. Trump seem criminal.”— American author and political satirist Christopher Buckley, Make Russia Great Again: A Novel (2020)

Among the many joys of Christopher Buckley’s fake memoir by "Herb Nutterman"—President Trump’s seventh chief of staff—are the hilarious names created for their very thinly disguised, real-life counterparts. (Do I really need to tell you that Colonnity is Sean Hannity and Fartmartin is Tucker Carlson?)

The difficult aspect of writing this satire, though, lay in spinning out a plot more absurd than what has been happening in the Age of Trump—very much including at the media outlet that helped propel him to the White House.

The irony in Buckley’s passage above extends well beyond those names for the Fox prime-time stars. As any fan of Lerner and Loewe (or, for that matter, T.H. White and Sir Thomas Malory) would remember, pure-hearted Sir Galahad was loyal to King Arthur, a wise, judicious monarch who ruled Camelot with wisdom.

But “Colonnity” and “Fartmartin” follow—for reasons best known to themselves and their boss, Rupert Murdoch—a President governed not by reason but by rampaging resentment.

Like Facebook, Fox News has fashioned a monster out of Frankenstein: an audience that has turned angrily on its creator. A quarter century after Murdoch gave free rein to Roger Ailes to whip viewers into a lather of bitterness over the liberal elite, the network’s prime-time pundits have not seriously tried to convince them that Donald Trump lost the election fairly and that no amount of challenges based on nonexistent evidence can reverse that outcome--even as many of their colleagues have admitted the obvious.

How dismally they must have felt over a week ago to hear crowds in Washington chant, “Fox sucks!”—all because the network finally attempted to live up to its “Fair and Balanced” moniker by calling Arizona for Joe Biden.

As my friend Joe Ferullo noted in a recent piece for The Hill, Fox is hardly alone as a channel that traded objectivity for editorializing—it is part of a larger trend towards “the tribal journalism of cable news,” mirrored on the left by MSNBC and CNN.

But, in the current needlessly fevered transition, Fox bears unique responsibility for the belief of 70% of Republican voters polled by Politico/Morning Consult that Joe Biden's victory was not "free and fair." Their evening stars—Hannity, Carlson, and Laura Ingraham—have been particularly reckless in giving a forum for the Presidential voter fraud narrative.

All of this might be amusing, in its odd way, if Hannity and Carlson weren’t aware that Trump isn’t missing a few brain cells. But they are, and that knowledge opens them up to a charge of journalistic malpractice.

According to an article in Vanity Fair by CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter, Hannity has grown tired of the 24/7 burden of being on call as an off-camera sounding board and on-air booster of a President desperately needing attention. “Hannity would tell you, off-off-off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy person,” one of his associates told Stelter.

But Hannity dares not say anything remotely like this publicly. Doing so would not merely end the friendship of the President with his “shadow chief of staff,” as Stelter suggests; it would also mean that progressives would remorselessly chide him for shameless cheerleading for the President, that the network would lose access to and patronage from a still-powerful figure in American politics, and that Hannity would open himself up to the same kind of retaliation experienced by two other media personalities formerly friendly with Trump, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

And so, Hannity tries to leave minimal daylight between himself and the President. "Americans will never be able to believe in the integrity and legitimacy of these [election] results," he told viewers as Joe Biden built an electoral and popular vote advantage that Trump did not enjoy in 2016 over Hillary Clinton. He has taken to retailing the President’s baseless charge that an electronic voting system used by election authorities across the United States has cost him millions of votes.

Carlson has had to perfect a similar balancing act of publicly embracing the President while privately stressing out over the President’s fecklessness. 

In early March, after backing Trump to the hilt during the impeachment fight, he felt compelled to fly down to the Trumps’ Mar-a-Lago resort to tell the President that COVID-19 really WAS a big deal. That warning, the commentator said, was based on a tip from a non-partisan figure in the U.S. government with access to intelligence, who claimed that the Chinese authorities were concealing the severity about the outbreak (advice, it should be noted, that the President could have availed himself of if he paid attention to his daily intelligence briefing).

The President’s shift in tone after their talk was short-lived, as Trump went back to downplaying the seriousness of a pandemic that, as of this writing, has claimed more than 250,000 American lives.

Nevertheless, Carlson feels obliged to give oxygen to the conspiracy theories of this lazy, lying excuse for a manager. The broadcaster has claimed that the "outcome of our presidential election was seized from the hands of voters" and put in the hands of "clearly corrupted city bureaucrats."

The problem is that Trump keeps devising wilder and wilder tests of the loyalty of his Galahads. One would have thought that Carlson, for instance, would have gotten a lifetime pass from the President by inappropriately comparing critics who think Trump contracted COVID-19 through his own reckless behavior with those who say women in provocative clothing ask to be raped.

(In a blog post right after that statement, Wonkette properly gave Carlson's insanely offensive analogy the back of her hand: “There is, in fact, no known outfit in the world that is scientifically proven to prevent sexual assault. Masks, on the other hand, are known to reduce the transmission of COVID-10. We all know this. It's been proven.”)

But Trump’s multi-state electoral challenges—knocked down, one by one, across the country—may be too much for even Carlson to stomach.

First, Carlson was embarrassed into offering an on-air apology about ballots illegally “cast” by dead people when one cited case, James Blalock of Georgia, turned out to be correctly—and legally—cast by his widow, Mrs. James Blalock.

Second, after offering Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as much time as she wanted to exhibit her “evidence” of voter fraud, she angrily declined, leading to Carlson’s on-air explanation of the brush-off.

It’s one thing when Fox personalities elsewhere on the schedule are finding it increasingly difficult to hide their impatience over the endless and pointless electoral lawsuits. It’s another entirely when even the “twin Galahads” are showing signs of cracking under the strain.

Yet Murdoch, Hannity and Carlson may have no choice but to follow through, as long as they can, with their daily nighttime charade, even as the most brazen challenge to Presidential election results in American history continues unabated.

Like any major company, Fox fears a competitor that can slice into its market share. Trump has already called on his supporters to watch Newsmax and One America News Network, two rivals that have been out-foxing Fox as purveyors of outlandish conspiracy theories.

The “twin Galahads,” then, may represent Murdoch’s best chance of warding off trouble from a President whose candidacy he endlessly promoted four years ago, despite privately dismissing him as an“[expletive] idiot,” according to an April 2019 article in the Daily Beast.

(The accompanying photo of Sean Hannity was taken May 29, 2014, by Michael Vadon; the photo of Tucker Carlson, speaking at the 2018 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, FL, was taken Dec. 22, 2018, by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Girls,’ Speaking Prematurely About Wendi Murdoch)

''Maybe I wanna be Wendi Murdoch, maybe that's my new thing.'' — Elijah (Andrew Rannells), on his future as a trophy wife, on Girls, Season 2, Episode 1, “It's About Time,” teleplay by Lena Dunham and Jennifer Konner, directed by Lena Dunham, air date January 14, 2013

Funny how some lines take on entirely new meaning within the passage of only, say, half a year after they’re released to the world. Two years ago, I noted this phenomenon in a post about the film Crazy Stupid Love and its homage to the then-epitome of love between older woman and younger man, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher.

Back when the year began, Wendi Murdoch must have seemed the very kind of trophy wife an aging media mogul would love to have. Who needed security when assaulted in public when you had such a tigress for a spouse?

Last summer, the storyline suddenly shifted with news that Rupert Murdoch had filed for divorce from his latest (#3) wife. Just before Thanksgiving came word from The Hollywood Reporter of their “amicable” divorce settlement—helped along, in no small part, one is sure, by one pre-nup and two post-nuptial agreements.

All of this begs the question: If this situation were being covered by a rival corporate entity, how would its New York-based screaming tabloid and its right-wing cable news outfit cover the breakup?

(This April 2010 photograph of Wendi Murdoch at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival was taken by David Shankbone.)

This Day in Crime History (“Son of Sam” Spree Ends With Arrest)

August 10, 1977—After round-the-clock tips and endless footwork, after 13 months, six people dead and seven wounded, after countless screaming tabloid headlines, the “Son of Sam”—a serial killer who had held millions in fear—was arrested as a result of the simplest of reasons: a parking ticket.

Two days after the murder of the latest victim, Stacy Moskowitz—whose shooting, because it broke the pattern of young blonde women shot in the borough of Queens, had brought the entire city of New York practically to a fever pitch of terror—an eyewitness told police she had witnessed a suspicious-looking man not long before in the vicinity of the crime, ripping a parking ticket off his car.

That sent police on a frantic search of every parking ticket issued in the area. When detective Ed Zigo followed up the lead on one-- issued to a yellow Ford Galaxie—he had one question he couldn’t shake: “What is a Jewish guy from Yonkers doing parked in an Italian neighborhood at two in the morning?''

It turned out the car was registered to a 24-year-old postal worker, David Berkowitz, who claimed his neighbor’s Labrador retriever had ordered him to kill—pursuing his victims in lovers’ lanes or on quiet streets, appearing seemingly out of nowhere to aim through car windows or at close range with his .44 caliber pistol. On the 10th, Berkowitz was outside his house when the police appeared, with guns drawn. The scent of mortality he had inflicted on others for over a year now clung to him.

“I am the 'Monster' -- 'Beelzebub' -- the chubby behemouth,” one of his notes had taunted police. “I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game -- tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are prettyist of all. It must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt -- my life. Blood for papa.”

It’s impossible to convey to people who were not born yet or even not then in their teens during the “summer of Sam” the dread engendered by Berkowitz. The sale of guns and locks soared. Because all his victims, till Moskowitz, had been long-haired brunettes, young women took to cutting their hair or dyeing it blonde.  Her murder, because it broke with his usual M.O., led The New York Post to announce: “No One Is Safe from Son of Sam.”

The murder, apprehension and incarceration of Berkowitz brought to the surface questions of tabloid irresponsibility. The New York Daily News had become part of the story when Berkowitz sent one of his letters to the paper’s star columnist, Jimmy Breslin. The paper showed it to the police first, then published only part of the message. 

But involvement in the story made Breslin’s editor, Mike O’Neill, uncomfortable. “I would not argue that everything we did was exactly the way I would have liked,” he later told The New York Times.

No such qualms existed for Rupert Murdoch, who had recently acquired the New York Post. Only a few weeks before the Moskowitz murder, the paper's coverage of New York's blackout left the overwhelming impression that a race war was about to break out in the city. 

Now, for the second time that summer, he displayed to American readers the sensationalistic coverage that had, unfortunately, made him a force in British journalism. At one point, the paper printed excerpts from a novel that, they claimed, “might have” set the Son of Sam off on his rampage.

As time went on, the chosen instrument for Murdoch to get into the circulation sweepstakes was fellow Australian émigré Steve Dunleavy. Several years ago, when the hard-drinking, wenching Aussie retired, friends and rivals recalled him as displaying a kind of raffish charm. That is really far too kind to someone who scoffed at other members of his trade as overly beholden to the “Columbia School of Journalism.”

For all the profession’s many, many sins, all too much on display in recent years, it’s useful to be reminded that it was Dunleavy and Murdoch, not they, who breached one particular wall: common decency. 

After one of the later Berkowitz shootings, Dunleavy entered the hospital where the victim had been brought, donned scrubs so he could pass as a surgeon, then found and interviewed the victim’s family.

Concerns that normal, decent people might have had—about assuming a fake identity, breaching hospital security, intruding on victims’ relatives in a time of stress and grief—were brushed aside in an effort to get a story.

When Berkowitz was captured, the paper managed to smuggle out of prison a photo that ended up on the front page. The headline: SAM SLEEPS. Never sufficiently explained was how the Post managed to penetrate security at the correctional facility.

Those who have followed the scandal in Britain over the News Corp.’s use of intercepted cellphone calls--and of how News of the World bribed Scotland Yard officials-- will find the paper’s role in the Berkowitz case all of a piece with later events. 

"Half truth, half speculation" is how one biographer, Thomas Kiernan, described "Murdoch journalism" for the PBS Frontline documentary, "Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch"? 

The publisher brought malleble Fleet Street ethics to this country, and America has not been the better for it.

(The image accompanying this post shows the second page of the first “Son of Sam” letter.)

Quote of the Day (James Fallow, on Rupert Murdoch’s “Embattled” Career)

“Another constant in his [Rupert Murdoch’s] career is its embattled, roller-coaster quality. Murdoch is said to be popular and admired within his own organization, rather than resented, mocked, or gossiped about behind his back. But with business rivals he is always in feuds and showdowns, and not only high-profile ones like that with [Ted] Turner. He has taken big risks (one associate describes Murdoch's making, in a matter of minutes, the billion-dollar decision to back Fox News ‘the way you or I might order lunch’), and his business has suffered serious reverses. In 1990, in an episode vividly described by [William] Shawcross, Murdoch was nearly forced to liquidate News Corp after a bank in Pittsburgh refused to roll over a small but crucial portion of his corporate debt. Although admirers compare him to Bill Gates or John D. Rockefeller because of his appreciation of technology and his instinct for strategic advantage, Murdoch is perhaps best compared to Bill Clinton: his nature keeps getting him into predicaments from which his talent lets him escape. “—James Fallows, “The Age of Murdoch,” The Atlantic, September 2003

His appearance before Parliament, Rupert Murdoch said mournfully, was “the most humble day of my life.” Many might think he had misspoken, meaning to say it was “the first humble day of my life.”

But James Fallows’ profile in The Atlantic runs directly in the face of those ready to begin writing Murdoch’s business obituary. I had long recalled this piece because of an odd little anecdote about the publisher's relationship with Bill Clinton: “Each has lunched at the other's office in New York, and Murdoch came away impressed by Clinton's ability to discuss impromptu almost any issue arising almost anywhere on earth. Associates of both say that despite the political differences between the men, they clicked because of complementary personalities: Murdoch loves to listen, and Clinton loves to talk.”

But in re-reading the piece, I realize that Fallows had overlooked another possible reason why these two men, in a weird way, bonded: their Houdini-like ability to escape damn near everything. That same ability should increase skepticism, even among the many who loathe him, of any notion that Murdoch’s number is, at long last, finally up. Remember, above all, the line from the late novelist Josephine Hart: “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”

(Full disclosure: two of my college friends were among the high-profile casualties after Murdoch began installing his own primarily British-based upper echelon after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. The carnage there was as immense as it was predictable.)

Take this latest scandal, for instance, about the Murdoch empire's all-too-cozy relationship with Scotland Yard, and in particular the phone hacking. It's not like he hasn't tried something sleazy like this before. For instance, not long after Murdoch’s buccaneering entrance on the American media scene, he had done something similarly loathsome: the infamous “SAM SLEEPS” photo, of “Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz behind bars, was spread all over the front page of his recently acquired New York Post. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever adequately explained how the Post photographer got back the prison guard for that shot, nor why a grand jury never returned an indictment in the case.

Even if Murdoch slinks away, mortally wounded, from the media wars, he has already left his imprint on the way Americans receive and process news. Fallows guessed correctly, nearly eight years ago, the reaction against the Post, Fox News, and the other elements of Citizen Murdoch’s empire: “papers, radio shows, TV programs, and Web sites for liberals, and conservative ones for conservatives.”

In a way, Fallows noted, Murdoch was engineering a reversion in time: “Our journalistic culture may soon enough resemble that of early nineteenth-century America, in which party-owned newspapers presented selective versions of the truth. News addressed to a particular niche—not simply in its content but also in its politics—may be the natural match to an era with hundreds of satellite and cable channels and limitless numbers of Internet sites.”

In other words: no more dream of journalistic objectivity. One side has Fox, the other MSNBC; one side has the Wall Street Journal, the other The New York Times. Neither is remotely interested in what the other has to say--or, indeed, any other non-ideological view. I have my news and you have yours, buddy, and never the twain shall meet.

This Day in Media History (“Bouncing Czech” Robert Maxwell Buys Mirror)

July 13, 1984—The improbable—no, preposterous—career of press baron Robert Maxwell took another unexpected turn, as he took control of the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN)—and positioned himself for another down-and-dirty rumble with fellow yellow journalist Rupert Murdoch.

I’m not surprised by the allegations of phone hacking of private citizens by Murdoch’s minions in the U.K. After all, the publisher of the New York Post has never adequately explained how his paper was able to get a photo of serial killer David Berkowitz asleep in prison (an image that got plastered on the front pager with the headline, “SAM SLEEPS”).

I am surprised, however, by all that I hear about Maxwell. The amount and variety of his shenanigans continue to astound, 18 years after his mysterious death aboard his yacht.

Some years ago, on a field trip for librarians, someone on the tour recounted how Maxwell had offered her a job as an executive assistant. Initially, she was torn about taking it, because the money was so good. Eventually, she decided not to make the job switch because she did not want to lose precious time with her family by constantly being at Maxwell’s beck and call.

After Maxwell’s death, time wouldn’t have been the only commodity lost by the librarian. The scandal of Maxwell’s death was how much he had endangered the pensions of his employees.

Over the years—and especially with the premiere of the BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now—Maxwell was often compared with Augustus Melmotte, the con artist extraordinaire at the heart of the Victorian masterpiece of high finance and meager ethics, especially on these counts:

* Both vaulted to the top of their professions using nefarious financial schemes.

* Both were émigrés from the Continent (Maxwell, from Czechoslovokia, inevitably became known as the “Bouncing Czech”) who sought and gained political office in their adopted country (in the ‘60s, Maxwell served in the House of Commons as a Labour Party member).

* Both men died as their financial house of cards was about to collapse.

But Maxwell’s resemblance to Melmotte on a particular point brought out especially invidious comparisons, as well as the worst aspects of their accusers. Both men, it was noticed, were Jewish.

In Trollope’s time, anti-Semitism was a product of the right; in Maxwell’s, it had switched over to the left, many of whom over the last two decades have dismissed guesses that Maxwell accidentally drowned or (more likely) committed suicide. No, these new anti-Semites believe, Maxwell was killed on order of the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Or by the Russian Mafia. Or who knows who? Pick your favorite conspiracy theory. One’s as good as another.

The purchase of MGN was particularly heartening for Maxwell—it meant he not only had fulfilled his dream of owning a national paper but that he could finally take on Murdoch, who had defeated his 1969 attempt to purchase The News of the World.

Maxwell’s ambitions far outstripped his ability to keep his empire going, however. By the end of the ‘80s, he was in a merry-go-round of acquiring and disposing of one item after another: media groups, paper producers, printers, banks, insurance and leasing companies. Within a year of his death, his company filed for bankruptcy.