Frank DiGiacomo
The week I started reading Paper of Wreckage, Eric Adams became the first New York City mayor to be indicted while in office, under a whopping and frequently comical list of alleged bribes and favors from the government of Turkey, along with accusations of bilking the campaign-finance system out of millions of dollars. The front page of the next day’s New York Post read, “I AM A TARGET,” quoting Adams’s complaint that the charges were, as the subhead put it, “payback for complaining about Biden’s migrant crisis.”
Why was the Post filling page one with a tepid defense of the mayor, featuring a talking point from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign? Early in Paper of Wreckage, Eric Fettmann, a former columnist and editorials editor for the Post, tells the authors, Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, that after the citywide blackout of July 1977, Mayor Abe Beame blamed the Post’s 24 HOURS OF TERROR front page for ending his political career. Further on, Wayne Darwen, a managing editor from the 80s, describes the paper’s editorial ethos as he understood it:
It didn’t matter if it was Ted Kennedy or Richard Nixon. If there was a scandal, it’s going out there, and you’re going to show no mercy. Don’t let anything get in the way of a good story. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
This knowing little flutter from fearlessness to shamelessness, or from principled to unprincipled, is the heartbeat of the Post throughout the near half-century covered in Paper of Wreckage—sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, but always frantically racing. Mulcahy and DiGiacomo, both former editors of the paper’s showpiece Page Six gossip column, talked to “more than 240 former and current staffers, story subjects, competitors, and astute observers of the media” to tell the story of how the paper grew from a shabby, earnest liberal tabloid into the scalding, scabrous soul of a right-wing media empire, and what it gained and lost along the way.
That chorus of voices echoes in the immense space defined by one man, Rupert Murdoch, the cynical, relentless Australian by way of Fleet Street who saw the Post of the 70s as his way into the center of American media and politics. Picking up the money-losing paper from its fur-flaunting, idiosyncratically feminist owner, Dorothy Schiff—who, feature writer Joyce Wadler recalls, “required that we always include a married woman’s maiden name, and whether the interview subject’s apartment was rent controlled or rent stabilized”—Murdoch quickly brought into an already seedy South Street newsroom a disreputable, sensationalist gang of Australians, bent on remaking the paper in their image.
Chief among their tools were the screaming front-page headlines—“the wood,” the authors explain in an introductory glossary, so named because under the limitations of old-time cast-lead typesetting, the oversize letters had to be wooden—that would define and construct the tabloid’s worldview: MOB WAR SHAPES UP OVER DRUGS … BOY GULPS GAS, EXPLODES … SHE WAS NICE TO ME, THEN I KICKED HER OFF THE ROOF. “If the story didn’t fit the headline,” Darwen says, “we made sure it did.”
The wood of yore was an unforgiving format, inside the newsroom—a night editor recalls being ordered to change the death toll of an accident from “20 DEAD” to “19 DEAD,” because the “2” was too wide to fit—and out. When the Reagan administration was about to announce in 1985 that it had forced down the plane carrying the hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, Fettmann recalls the Post assigning its Washington-bureau chief, Niles Latham, to convince Attorney General Edwin Meese to add the phrase they’d planned for the wood, YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE, to the president’s speech: “Meese agreed and, sure enough, Reagan used it. We had our wood. Niles had a $5,000 bonus.”
That scheme was one of the many, many schemes of reporter turned metropolitan editor Steve Dunleavy, the comprehensively debauched Launcelot of Murdoch’s knights. (His share of the book’s index takes up most of a column, second in length only to Murdoch’s: in incident outside of Elaine’s, 95–96 … nicknames of, 285 … police and, 145, 146, 148.) Former night managing editor Dave Banks explains that Dunleavy was what Australians call a “larrikin”: “A bit of a semi-criminal, but almost a lovable semi-criminal. I think Rupert loved that side of Australia that he never experienced because he came from a rather upper-class family.”
Photographer Joe DeMaria recalls that, in the summer of 1977, while the “Son of Sam” killer was at large—and feeding material to Jimmy Breslin at the rival New York Daily News—Dunleavy suggested the Post should send out a car and “put a blonde wig on somebody, and have another reporter next to him, like they’re making love, with me hiding in the back seat,” in the hope of provoking an attempted attack. Another reporter tells of seeing Dunleavy interviewing the mother of one of the victims in the hospital: “It turned out that Dunleavy had passed himself off as a grief counselor.”
Here was newspapering unimpeded by ethics or, often enough, by laws. One Post staffer stole the name from the apartment buzzer of David Berkowitz after his arrest in the killings, to throw other reporters off the trail; another led a band of journalists in breaking into the apartment, behind the backs of the police, to take notes and pictures. When Bernhard Goetz shot four teenagers on the subway in 1984, reporter Richard Esposito says he went to the vigilante’s apartment, “flipped the lock with a credit card,” and secured the first news photo of Goetz by pilfering his passport for a photographer to snap a picture of. “Technically,” Esposito says, “it could be considered stealing a passport.”
By profession, the Post veterans or survivors who talked to the authors are snappy storytellers, with lurid stories to tell. The results can’t help but make for a rollicking book; the figures in it were obviously self-consciously trying to rollick at the time, to the point of harming themselves and others. The book reads, in places, like some horrible sort of fairy tale, one where, if a bold young man can endure five nights sitting at the booze-soaked Dunleavy’s elbow, paying his bar tab for him, a job offer will materialize at the end, or where the multi-millionaire Murdoch, seeing a vendor overloaded with newspapers at Grand Central, seizes a bundle of Posts from him and hawks them all to passing commuters himself, a king among commoners, at 30 cents a copy.
But the authors scrupulously decline to let the sleazy romance carry them away. In the middle of the giddy account of the creation of the Post’s immortal HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR cover—reporters banging the phones to find facts to justify “topless”; editors waiting to publish it till Murdoch, the closest thing the paper had to a super-ego, was on a plane to London—they turn to a detective and a prosecutor who handled the case, who spell out the sadistic, not-at-all amusing particulars of the underlying crime, in which the murdered man’s own niece, held hostage, was forced to cut the head off the corpse, so the killer could try to get rid of the ballistic evidence of the bullet in the skull. Myron Rushetzky, the Post’s former city-desk assistant, notes that by the time the triumphant headline had been put onto later editions, the underlying story “was a mess. Might’ve been bad copy editing, bad editing, maybe moving graphs around, but it didn’t read as well.”
Likewise, what starts off as raffish tales of placing sports bets in the composing room ends up some 400 pages later with the news that a “ninety-nine count racketeering indictment charged that a group of Bonanno crime family members … ran criminal operations out of the Post that included loan-sharking, extortion, gun sales, bribery, and stealing and selling papers.” The newspaper’s colorful superintendent of deliveries, Bobby Perrino, disappears before the feds arrive, and his murdered remains turn up a decade later.
Behind all the war stories (some of them literal), Mulcahy and DiGiacomo have a serious and audacious argument to make—namely, that while Murdoch and his crowd of scoundrels and larrikins were slinging their disposable ink around, they left indelible fingerprints all over 21st-century America. “Did Rupert Murdoch accelerate the cheapening of the collective consciousness?” reporter Amy Pagnozzi asks the authors. “Obviously. Is he a negative force in the world? Totally.”
The Post was, and is, hopelessly bigoted and obtuse, the sort of place where a photo editor, hearing about an accident story being assigned, would ask reporter Gregg Morris, one of the few Black newsroom employees, “Is the victim white?” Staffers recall the paper having the chance to publish the first pictures of break dancing and the first news of the AIDS epidemic, only to have them rejected by the editors; the Post’s most lasting legacy of that era is that its relentless homophobia inspired the formation of GLAAD.
The story of Murdoch the shirtsleeved, pure-blooded newspaperman “eager to know the stuff that couldn’t be published” and “always trying to help you make up a front page or scale a picture” is entangled throughout with the story of Murdoch the ideologue and operator, discovering just how much power the paper gives him to advance his political or business interests (if those could even be separated).
Some of the influence was blatant and direct: in 1977, Murdoch decided he wanted to make Ed Koch the next mayor and set about stuffing the news pages with rabidly pro-Koch coverage. The reporters wrote a petition of complaint, and he ignored it; Joyce Purnick, one of the few political writers Murdoch didn’t meddle with, tells the authors her position “was like being on a little island surrounded by polluted waters.”
Those waters would get ever more polluted. Three years later—despite telling Banks, after meeting Reagan, “I’m not sure that he’s all there”—Murdoch endorsed Reagan for president. The reporter and columnist Charlie Carillo recalls turning in a political story about a local candidate Murdoch despised, only to have Dunleavy tell him, “Tut, tut, mate, you’re trying to be fair.”
But beyond those crude political manipulations, the paper’s tone and sensibility turned out to be capable of bending reality. As early as 1978, sportswriter Harvey Araton observes, the brawling Bronx Zoo New York Yankees, pitting superstar Reggie Jackson against short-tempered alcoholic manager Billy Martin, were not only “a dream come true for someone like Rupert Murdoch wanting to sell papers” but that owner George Steinbrenner “clearly operated in those days with the back page of the Post in mind.”
Even while the Murdoch Post kept its nose in the gutter, making folk heroes of the likes of Goetz and Mob boss John Gotti, its eye was fixed on the city’s penthouses and executive suites, where readers hung on its business-and-media coverage and its gossip alike. The supposedly local paper, its onetime film critic Frank Rich says, was read by the people who shape mass media, “the bookers at NBC, ABC, and CBS and editors at national magazines”; on the other side of things, feeding the paper rumors and trading favors with it, were the likes of the right-wing arch-fiend Roy Cohn and Nixon trickster Roger Stone. Brokering among the conflicts of interest, creating new ones, and occasionally negotiating to keep the paper afloat was the gossip columnist Cindy Adams. “She never stopped working,” the former executive editor Jane Amsterdam says. “Her stuff checked out, and every dictator and dictator’s wife adored her.”
Murdoch let the paper go in 1988, when federal regulators briefly forced him to choose between it and his growing Fox Television empire, then took it back in 1992. It was during that break that the paper published what the authors call its “second-most-famous headline”: BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD, accompanied by a photo of a grinning Donald Trump.
The quote, attributed secondhand to his soon-to-be second wife, Marla Maples, was essentially fabricated by reporter Bill Hoffman, but it worked, throwing a publicity lifeline to a failing businessman with a failing marriage. “I feel like that elevated him in the public mind in a way that made everything else plausible,” the Post reporter turned New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen says.
Things were only getting meaner. When Murdoch returned, he resolved a dispute with the newspaper union by firing most of the staff. In 1995, he moved the paper out of its den on South Street and relocated it to Midtown, under the same roof as Fox. In 2001, to shake up the paper, he brought in as editor his son Lachlan’s friend Col Allan, as unscrupulous as Dunleavy but devoid of charm—a presence so toxic that books editor Mackenzie Dawson tells the authors she skipped editorial meetings when pregnant to protect her unborn child from “hearing an angry Australian ranting.” (Disclosure: when I covered media for the New York Observer, the Post’s publicist set me up with Allan for a drink or meal at Elaine’s; all I remember about it is a lack of rapport so absolute that afterward word got back to me that Allan was telling people I’d been strung out on drugs.)
My first impression, seeing the dates 1976–2024 on the cover of Paper of Wreckage, was that I was looking at a tombstone. As the book closes in on the present day, with Murdoch aging and receding, and with the paper one money-losing cog in a propaganda machine, the sizzle can’t help but subside. What use is the New York Post in covering an era invented by the New York Post? Whose noses are left for it to tweak? Col Allan gets photographed in the newsroom wearing a MAGA hat. By 2022, the paper tries to turn on Trump—Florida Man Makes Announcement—and it makes no difference. The mayor gets indicted for taking free upgrades on Turkish Air, and the front page has nothing to say.
And then, the next day, it came out with GRAND THEFT OTTOMAN. Some things are impossible to kill.
Tom Scocca is the former politics editor at Slate and the editor at Popula
