Murdoch's World by David Folkenflik Read Free Book Online Page B

Wade’s casual cruelty at a party thrown by News International at the Labour Party conference a few years later.
    â€œShe came up to me and said, ‘Oh, Mr. Bryant, it’s after dark.Shouldn’t you be on Clapham Common?’” Bryant recalled. The park in south London served as a pickup spot for gay men. According to Bryant, the news editor’s then-husband, the actor Ross Kemp, snapped back, “Shut up, you homophobic cow.”
    Brooks had been ambitious, a more public presence than her successor, Andrew Coulson, mixing with the powerful and glamorous asshe pinged from one top News International job to the next until she became head of the whole British wing of News Corp.
    Her own reporters feared her and her peers.Some of the older reporters hired private investigators because they no longer wanted to stay in a van from dusk to dawn, urinating into plastic jars, on the off-chance they might catch a married soccer star or reality show contestant sneaking out of someone’s apartment. Other reporters skipped out to a bar for a drink or home for a nap. But editors kept tabs on bylines and scoops. Pressure on reporters became more pronounced as newspaper circulations declined and websites emerged as rivals. The need to slake the public thirst for scandal would lead the tabloids to take even more daring measures.

4
    â€œTHE WORLD THROUGH RUPERT’S EYES”

    ON A SUBFREEZING MORNING IN March 2013, the New York Post decided to take its headlines to the streets, introducing a two-and-a-half hour bus tour of Manhattan to point out the sites of incidents that inspired some of its frothiest front pages. The double-decker bus, wrapped with reproductions of its nameplate and some of its more lurid headlines, became a rolling advertisement for the paper.
    Seated at the front of the open-air top deck with a small clutch of hardy visitors, the guide for the tour company, Dennis Lynch, took cues from a script written by Post staffers, his voice slipping into and out of a throwback Brooklyn accent that would have suited a minor mug in Guys and Dolls .
    Less than a minute in, Lynch announced an enduring classic of the form: “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” Few newspapers carry such laconic punch, such an efficient mix of knowing humor and casual cruelty. Of course, the paper’s artistry in that particular form oftencloaked the grittiness and brutality of the news it covered and, in fact, of the way in which the news was covered. As a paper of crime, sex, and corruption, the New York Post played on racial fears but proved far more likely to cover stories of triumph and tears in Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx than the New York Times .
    The “headless body” murder had taken place three decades earlier in Queens, an outer borough that the tourist-friendly bus did not visit. The hilarious headline trivialized a gruesome story: a twenty-three-year-old man hopped up on cocaine got into an argument with the owner of a bar in Jamaica, Queens, shot him, cut off his head, took four women hostage, and raped one of them. Upon learning one of the hostages was a mortician, the killer demanded she fish the bullet that had killed the bar owner out of his skull. The shooter thought its absence might confuse the cops. It was perfect copy for the Post .
    On the south edge of Central Park, instead of marveling over the brilliance of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Lynch pointed across the street to the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel. When hotelier Leona Helmsley died, the will of the woman the tabloid dubbed “The Queen of Mean” left $12 million to her dog. The tabloid commemorated the bequest to the Maltese with a front-page headline: “Rich Bitch.” A bar in the Meatpacking District where golfer Tiger Woods met one of his mistresses triggered another page-one tribute: “Tiger Admits: I’m a Cheetah.”
    Lynch omitted some headlines from the tour, however. Rock and