The News Corp. scandal already exposed just how thoroughly the company had corrupted Britain. Now it’s time to look on this side of the pond.
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Illustration by Eddie Guy |
When I was offered a job as a film critic for the New York Post in 1975, it had just been labeled �a terrible newspaper� by Nora Ephron in her media column for Esquire. Having been a Post reporter, she knew whereof she spoke. Dolly Schiff, the paper’s legendary dowager-in-chief, was notorious for being cheap, petty, whimsical, and, somewhat more fetchingly, a rumored onetime paramour of FDR. Her paper was a rapidly declining asset�a staunchly liberal tabloid chasing after a hypothetical middlebrow afternoon readership too highfalutin for the Daily News and yet insufficiently titillated by the sober New York Times. I knew Nora and asked her if I should really take the plunge into a newsroom she had so convincingly portrayed as a hellhole. She advised, wisely: Well, why not? I was 25 that spring and had nothing to lose except my innocence.
Which I would lose soon enough. I liked and looked up to my colleagues at the Post, many of them talented, hardworking, and ingenious at circumventing the obstacles imposed by the owner. They soon inducted me into the gallows humor of the joint. Everyone knew the ax would fall one day. We just didn’t know which day, or who would be wielding it. When the moment finally arrived, shortly before Thanksgiving in 1976, with the announcement that Schiff would sell her paper to a foreign mogul almost no one had ever heard of, it was greeted as good news. �Nobody was crying,� one reporter told the Times. �It was a rebirth. The Post is an orphan that has been adopted.� Our Daddy Warbucks would not only pour money into the paper’s impoverished coffers but also, as he told the Times, preserve its �essential characteristics,� �style of reporting,� and ��political policies.� The Post would continue to be a �serious newspaper.� ...read more
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/frank-rich/murdoch-scandal-2011-8/
