Rupert Murdoch is back in the news. But then when is he not in the news? He is the news -- this time by virtue of having granted a rare interview to the enemy side, arriving here in the person of David D. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times. The interview demonstrates once again the devious and slippery brilliance (unfortunately, there is no other word) of the man and the "news" organizations built so fulsomely in his image, and reminds us that, rather than having reached the pinnacle of his power, he's just getting ramped up. It all made me think back over how he built his empire and how it might have been dealt a crushing blow once, but for the help, at an extremely crucial point, of mostly Democratic politicians.
Murdoch came to the States in 1976 from Australia. In quick succession he purchased The Village Voice, New York magazine and, of course, the New York Post. It appears quaint to us today, but such was the temperate sensibility of 1976 that Time magazine put Murdoch on its cover, exorcised that this mystery man's purchase of three prestige publications (combined circulation at the time was around 1 million) constituted a dangerous concentration of ownership.
He bought New York mostly for the cash and thought better of meddling with the Voice's tempestuous ideology. But the Post: Now there was the jewel -- a daily newspaper, after all, far more influential than either of the weeklies. It had been owned by Dolly Schiff, an ardent New Dealer. At that time -- back when George W. Bush foreign-policy adviser Richard Perle was working for Democrats -- the paper represented a readership shaped by immigration (especially Jews), Depression, war and Cold War: fiercely pro-Israel, and strongly liberal. In the 1950s, the Post broke the stories about the Nixon slush fund that led to Tricky Dick's famous "Checkers" speech.
Murdoch took control of the Post in the week between Christmas and New Year's 1976. By March it was a completely different paper -- saucy and truculent in ways American tabloids had never been, and ferociously ideological from the front page to the editorial pages to, on days when he could plausibly work it in, the sports pages. In due course, liberal titans such as Murray Kempton -- whose matchless copy was edited by the man who would one day run the Globe, Murdoch's supermarket entry -- were getting the message that this Post might not be the place for them.
Fade in, fade out. Murdoch was forced to sell the paper in the late 1980s, when he started going into television. At the time, Federal Communications Commission cross-ownership rules -- speaking of "quaint" -- forbade one person from owning a paper and TV station in the same market. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), a frequent recipient of Murdochian jibes in the Boston Herald, which Murdoch then owned, helped engineer this. The Post found new ownership but by 1993 was on the ropes, in danger of closing and scouring the landscape for white knights.
Murdoch's success has been described in many ways, but for my shilling, it comes down to this: He has always had a keen insight into liberalism's greatest psychological vulnerability--that liberals, above almost any other virtue, want to be seen as fair-minded and reasonable. He exploits that condition daily, but he's never exploited it quite like he did in the summer of 1993.
The FCC cross-ownership rules still existed, and Murdoch still owned New York's WNYW (a FOX affiliate), so he needed a waiver to buy the Post. And to get the waiver, he needed backing from Democrats and liberal institutions. He needed Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.), who chaired the relevant committee at the time. He needed Mario Cuomo, then New York's Democratic governor, to help behind the scenes and to speak publicly about the importance of diverse viewpoints. And he needed major concessions from the paper's unions. This was March. Phone lines were worked furiously; one thing led to another, and by July, Murdoch had the players right where he wanted them. Hollings -- arm twisted to the breaking point by Sen. Al D'Amato (R-N.Y.), Murdoch's all-time favorite pol -- agreed to a waiver, and Kennedy agreed not to try to block it. Cuomo made repeated intercessions with the unions to get them to meet Murdoch's price, $6.2 million in givebacks. This last hurdle was jumped in part because Murdoch made the ballsy move of actually shutting down the paper for three days, giving New Yorkers a glimpse (however fleeting!) of what life without the Post might be like.
Why did these people do Murdoch's bidding? Because they wanted to appear open-minded; or, put another way, they didn't want to appear to be acting out of political motivation in shutting down a conservative paper. (In Cuomo's case, there was the saving-New-York-jobs angle as well.) And surely Murdoch knew from the start they would behave this way.
And what did the politicians get out of it? Hollings got nothing that I know of, maybe a few shekels for his next campaign. Cuomo got the Post to endorse his candidate for state comptroller, who in the long run turned out to be more bane than boon for him. (That candidate, Carl McCall, used the comptroller position as the base from which he wiped out Mario's son Andrew to gain the Democratic nomination for governor last year.) The unions? Naturally, they got spanked: The Newspaper Guild presence at the paper was swiftly eliminated, although some craft and delivery unions still hold contracts.
What might have happened if all these actors hadn't capitulated? It's too much to say that the Murdoch empire would have collapsed. But it's also true that on some deep level, the Post is the emotional core of at least the News Corp.'s stateside operations. The Post, and then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, certainly helped FOX News Channel get its foothold in the New York cable market. The Post has also done yeoman's work in bringing discredit to Murdoch's competitors. (Troubles at AOL-Time Warner, for example, tend to be big news in the Post's pages.) The Post may not be the meat of the Murdoch empire, but it is certainly its zesty, indigestion-inducing sauce. The whole shebang would look different without it.
Since then, of course, it's been off to the races. After many congressional Democrats endorsed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Bill Clinton signed it into law; the bill benefited Murdoch to astounding proportions, and cross-ownership rules are for sissies now. FOX is beyond my present powers of description, at least when I'm running out of space. And the Post is still the Post. Somehow, they all get away with it, having successfully sold the average media consumer -- and most of the mainstream media -- on the idea that the Post is no more conservative than, say, The New York Times is liberal.
Horsefeathers. Back when Hillary Clinton was running for Senate, a research assistant and I undertook a study. We looked at the unsigned editorials and the pieces by staff columnists (not those by guest op-ed columnists) of all three New York City dailies and asked, How have these papers and their writers assessed her candidacy? We read every piece they wrote for the 17 months of her campaign, counted up the ones that were chiefly about her (as opposed to being about a policy debate or what have you) and, based on their content, called them either positive, neutral or negative. Results? The Times ran 24 favorable pieces, 25 neutral and 26 negative. The Daily News ran 19 positive, nine neutral and 23 negative. And the Post?
Seven positive, 17 neutral. . .and 212 negative. And believe me, we were being generous with that seven.
There's a lesson in this, and in the whole tale, for our side. Tolerance for other views has been part of the very essence of liberalism since John Stuart Mill. Read Lionel Trilling's brief introduction to The Liberal Imagination: He fretted not that conservatism might one day overtake liberalism (the notion was laughable in 1949) but that conservatism was so weak that liberalism would grow flaccid from its ideas not facing rigorous-enough scrutiny from the other side (which happened, in certain respects).
Well, this isn't 1949, modern conservatism is not founded on toleration for other points of view, and Mr. Murdoch has an empire that's just getting up a head of steam (FOX News Europe? FOX News India?) and that's out to smash everything we believe. We need to quit being so damn reasonable about it.
Michael Tomasky's columns appear every Wednesday at TAP Online.
