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Murdoch, who had nothing but contempt for Elliot’s “elitist journalism,” made his position clear in a speech to the American Newspaper Publisher’s Association during the height of the Son of Sam story. “A press that fails to interest the whole community is one that will ultimately become a house organ of the elite engaged in an increasingly private conversation with a dwindling club…. I cannot avoid the temptation of wondering whether there is any other industry in this country which seeks to presume so completely to give the customer what he does not want.”
Dunleavy himself expressed identical sentiments in more colloquial terms. “Rupe doesn’t dictate public tastes, you know,” Dunleavy said. “He has a lot of bosses out there. Millions of them. The public tells him what they want to read and Rupe gives it to them.”
In 1985, Murdoch, having already acquired, in addition to the Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Herald-American, New York magazine, and the Village Voice, set out to purchase half interest in Twentieth-Century Fox for $250 million from Denver oil man Marvin Davis. The following year, Murdoch bought out Davis’s interest for another $350 million, and at the same time negotiated a deal to purchase Metromedia—a collection of seven television stations in crucial markets such as WNYW in New York, WTTG in Washington, WFID in Chicago, and KTTV in Los Angeles—from businessman John Kluge for $2 billion that allowed him to create the Fox Network.
Many media analysts felt Murdoch had vastly overpaid for the stations, but he believed he could increase their value far beyond what he had paid for them by merging them with Fox to create a fourth network. Fox would supply the product, entertainment, and the television stations would distribute it. “Entertainment you can take to be anything from a movie to a sporting event,” Murdoch told his biographer Jerome Tuccilli. “The rest is a question of a distribution system. How do you distribute news, how do you distribute words? It’s got to be a television screen, it’s got to be a newspaper, it’s got to be a magazine or a book. Is it cinema, a video cassette, is it the cable business or whatever?”
Murdoch announced in 1985 the founding of Fox, Inc., a division of his overall corporate body, News Corp., that would produce television shows as well as movies. This would enable Murdoch to cut his costs because, unlike the other networks, his would not have to bid for the television programs Hollywood produced—competition that, together with the loss of audience share caused by the expansion of cable television networks, was seriously eroding network profits. But since Murdoch’s acquisitions had put him so deeply in debt, and since his fledgling network did not yet have the audience size that would enable him to air the sort of expensive prime-time comedies and dramas in which the other networks specialized, he needed shows that could both build a mass audience quickly and be produced on the cheap. The solution, he decided, was electronic versions of the print tabloids he had published so successfully.
In June 1986, Maury Povich was working as the host of Panorama, a daytime talk show blending celebrity interviews, cooking and travel spots, and breezy political discussion on WTTG in Washington, D.C. He also anchored the evening news. The station was one of those Murdoch had acquired the previous year in the Metromedia deal, and one night that June, after the ten o’clock news, the station’s news director, Betty Endicott, told Povich she’d just received a call summoning him to a meeting first thing the following morning with Murdoch.
Povich had never met his boss. What he had heard about him was at best mixed. When Harold Evans, the former editor of the Times of London, whom Murdoch had fired after taking over the paper, had been a guest on Panorama, he’d told Povich, off-camera, that Murdoch was a “killer.” Wondering whether or not he was going to be fired, Povich caught an early shuttle flight up to New York. At the Fox offices, he was ushered into a conference room where Murdoch and a few aides awaited him.
“We intend to start a new show,” Murdoch said after the preliminaries. “Here, in New York. If it works, we’ll put it on the other Fox stations, and then across America. It is going to be unique. You will be the host.”
Povich was astonished. After some discussion about the nature of the show, he told Murdoch he didn’t understand what would distinguish it from other television news shows.
“You’ll work it out,” Murdoch said.
Murdoch introduced Povich to Peter Brennan, who had worked in Australian television, to Ian Rae, who’d been editor and publisher of the Star, and to J. B. Blunck, a graphic artist who worked at the Village Voice. The four of them, he said, would create the show. It would air in one month. “I was bowled over by the sheer audacity of it,” Povich recalled. “Nobody mentioned focus groups or consultants or marketing research. These guys were so casual, as if nothing could be easier.”
Ian Rae explained that the name of the show, A Current Affair, had been taken from the name of a similar show in Australia, “A kind of Nightline Down Under,” in Povich’s words. He was also told that he was not their first choice. They had hoped to hire Geraldo Rivera or Tom Snyder, but the two had demanded huge contracts. Povich, who was already on Murdoch’s payroll, would be cheap. “They threw me in with all these crazy Australians,” said Povich, though as host he would provide a comforting American tone. “I was the front man,” he said. “I had certain advantages, because the people who knew me associated me with legitimate, respectable news.”
Their first hire was Steve Dunleavy, whom Murdoch had moved to Fox News when he was forced, after the Metromedia deal, to sell the New York Post because of FCC regulations designed to prevent media monopolies. Dunleavy suggested that for the first episode, they profile Jimmy Chin, who allegedly controlled organized crime in New York’s Chinatown. Chin, a mysterious, elusive man, had never been interviewed on television but days before the show was to air, David Lee Miller, one of the show’s new reporters, ambushed him on the streets of Chinatown. While Chin insisted he was just an ordinary citizen, the show’s staff felt they had nonetheless scored an important exclusive. After it aired, however, the word was that Murdoch hated the segment so much that he wanted to fire Miller. “He wanted the guy in handcuffs and arrested by the end of the show,” said Povich. “He wanted a brand-new kind of journalism. Activist … He expected our reporter to go out and arrest Jimmy Chin. A reporter he had in mind—his kind of reporter—would have clapped kindly old Uncle Jimmy in irons, in full view of his henchmen—which would have made an interesting part of the show if the henchmen didn’t gun down Miller and the cameraman and the soundman first—then march him down to the Elizabeth Street police precinct, where he would present this known felon, this unrepentant villain, to the desk officer.”
The program’s trademark style became apparent shortly after its debut when Povich conducted a tearful, completely one-sided interview with Mary Joe Whitehead, the surrogate mother who’d decided to keep the child she was carrying for an infertile couple. Initially, the reaction of the establishment was surprisingly positive. “‘A Current Affair’ is tabloid journalism,” wrote John Corry in the New York Times. “Forget now the pejorative notions that cling to the phrase. ‘A Current Affair’ is tabloid journalism at its best. It is zippy and knowledgeable, and when it falls on its face at least it is in there trying.”
In the early eighties, most television stations had to content themselves with reruns and game shows and local news when they were not showing network programs. But satellites and cable television had fueled the syndication business, enabling independent producers to sell regular shows or specials to stations whenever they wanted. Geraldo Rivera, abandoning his quest for establishment acceptance since leaving ABC, had produced and starred in “The Mystery of A1 Capone’s Vault,” a critical flop—nothing was in the vault—that nonetheless became the highest rated syndicated show in television history. An astonishing 33.4 percent of the country’s 87.4 million television sets tuned in. Geraldo had gone on to do a special on devil worship with ratings so high that, for the first time, Roseanne was knocked from the number one spot.
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bsp; A Current Affair thrived in this tumultuous atmosphere. In addition to its run-of-the-mill stories on nude beaches and UFOs, on freeing dogs from Connecticut pounds and putting them in witness protection programs in Massachusetts, it consistently succeeded in making news. It aired a videotape of Robert Chambers, accused of murdering his date Jennifer Levin in Central Park, partying with four young woman on the eve of his trial, and at one point holding up a doll, twisting its head, and saying, “Oops, I think I killed it.” When critics accused the show of bias because it paid $10,000 for the tape, Levin’s family held a press conference defending the program. During the 1988 Democratic Convention, it bought and aired the videotape of Rob Lowe having sex with an underage woman, which resulted in a conviction of statutory rape for the actor.
Because it consistently made news, by 1988 the show, in addition to being shown on the six Fox stations, was being syndicated to more than 100 stations around the country to a total of 9 million homes. The Atlanta Constitution called it “the juggernaut of tabloid TV” and the networks, faced with declining audiences, found themselves imitating the tabloids in order to compete. ABC, for example, used what it called “dramatization”—nothing more than A Current Affair’s “reenactments”—to tell the story of the diplomat Felix Bloch, who was accused of spying for the Soviet Union. But the network, still bound by its traditional ethics, felt uncomfortable with the segment and Peter Jennings delivered an on-air apology for it.
A Current Affair’s critics were of course legion. “The tabloid television shows have absolutely blurred the distinction … between news and titillation,” Conrad Fink, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia, told the Constitution. “This creates a real problem. It confuses the public on who is a journalist and what is the role of journalism.” The program’s staff found such complaints tedious. “We wanted to do emotional stories and people stories,” Peter Brennan, producer of Fox Television, said in 1989, “and not screw around with language or try to save the world or be Dan Rather.”
But the critics were not limited to journalism professors. The moguls behind some of the programs were increasingly facing the wrath of friends and business partners who were being skewered by the shows. Barry Diller, who as head of Fox, Inc., was in charge of all programming and movies, was reportedly irritated by the show, if only because of its irreverent pieces on the private lives of the celebrities with whom he was trying to do movie deals. Diller was upset after A Current Affair ran a story on the rocky marriage of his good friend Sid Bass, who was in the process of dumping his wife Ann for Mercedes Kellogg. And, sources say director Steven Spielberg was incensed when A Current Affair ran a story, complete with background music from “Jaws,” on his divorce from actress Amy Irving and his subsequent romance with actress Kate Capshaw. Spielberg reportedly called Diller and threatened never to work with him again.
And in 1990, a man named Stuart Goldman was arrested and led away in handcuffs for infiltrating A Current Affair. Posing as a producer, he had tracked down the tabloid’s methodology; the word was that he was hired by a group of movie stars. He was celebrated by them; Oliver Stone reportedly optioned the movie rights to his story and Tom Cruise was interested in playing the lead.
But Murdoch, with decades of experience in dealing with powerful people his journalists had infuriated, refused to interfere. A Current Affair’s real problems were brought about by its success. Just as the huge circulation of the National Enquirer in the early seventies produced a host of imitators, so too did the mass audience of A Current Affair spawn electronic competition. In 1988, Roger King, whose syndication company King World produced Oprah and Wheel of Fortune, lured away two producers from A Current Affair—Murdoch, wanting to keep costs down, had put hardly any of the staff under contract—to start Inside Edition. The next year, Paramount started Hard Copy. “This is wild,” Bill O’Reilly, host of Inside Edition, told the Wall Street Journal in 1989. “It’s a shoot-out. It’s the O.K. Corral.”
The three programs were competing not just for staff but for stories. And the producers and reporters knew that, as in any tabloid war, victory goes to the most sensational. The first great battle in that war would take place in Palm Beach in 1991, when Patricia Bowman accused Willie Smith of raping her on a moonlit night on the lawn of the Kennedy family’s oceanfront mansion—a news event in which for the first time the tabloid press not only competed with one another but drove the coverage for the entire media establishment. “We were the most watched newscast in the country,” said Povich. “We relied on the great Shakespearean themes of revenge and violence and lust and betrayal. So the heads of the network news divisions realized that it’s not just news about Washington and international news. And they began to chase the stories that dealt with these themes of lust and violence and revenge.”
“One, two, William Kennedy Smith. William Kennedy Smith. William Kennedy Smith.” Steve Dunleavy, standing on a ladder just outside the courthouse in West Palm Beach, in a surging crowd of reporters, photographers, camera crews, and spectators, was giving a sound check. “William Kennedy Smith,” he repeated. “William Kennedy Smith.”
The maroon Mercury station wagon owned by Jean Kennedy Smith, the sister of Ted Kennedy and the mother of William Kennedy Smith, turned down the street and came to a stop at the curb. The police restrained the crowd behind barricades. William Kennedy Smith, the pale, slightly pudgy medical student and accused rapist, climbed out of the car. Wearing slacks and a brown tweed sport coat, his face blankly amiable, he nodded at the crowd, then turned toward the contemporary brick building.
“Eight forty-six!” shouted Cynthia Fagen, Dunleavy’s co-producer and one of ten Current Affair staffers assigned to cover the trial.
“Eight what?” asked Dunleavy.
“Eight forty-six.”
“Okay.”
“Go for it!” a crew member shouted.
Dunleavy looked into the camera and then, in his gravelly Australian drawl, a voice that managed to be at once snide and sanctimonious, he intoned, “William Kennedy Smith arrived at court today at eight-forty A.M., on the first day of his sensational rape trial. Outwardly he looks calm and confident, but now he faces some rough going as prosecution witnesses take the stand. I have spoken, exclusively, to one of those witnesses, who told me of the state of mind of the alleged victim and just how tough it’s going to be for Mr. Smith!”
“Every famous trial has its chronicler,” David Margolick, a reporter for the New York Times, would write a few days later, once the verdict was in. “The Scopes trial had H. L. Mencken, the Eichmann trial Hannah Arendt, and the just concluded rape trial of William Kennedy Smith had Steve Dunleavy.” Indeed, Dunleavy, and A Current Affair, not only provided the definitive coverage of the trial, they influenced its outcome in a way that may have been unprecedented in legal history, and in doing so permanently redrew—and in the view of some, obliterated—the lines between the tabloid and the establishment press. “We wanted to own that story,” said John Terenzio, the program’s executive producer. They did.
What came to be known as “The William Kennedy Smith Rape Case”—even though Smith never used his middle name—was initially broken by freelance journalist Malcolm Balfour, a native South African and former National Enquirer reporter who worked out of a duplex apartment down the street from his old employer in the heart of Tabloid Valley. Although his office was cluttered with stacks of newspapers spilling from filing cabinets and the closet, and he could often be found in shorts and no socks at a battered metal desk, Balfour hardly fit the image of a struggling freelancer. He had ties to half a dozen British tabloids, as well as papers in Germany and Australia and the New York Post, and he could resell a single small item to any number of these publications, multiplying his earnings and turning him into, in effect, a one-man gossip syndicate. The living he made enabled him to drive a Mercedes, pilot his own airplane, put his two children through college, invest in real estate, and return to South Africa once a year.
The media began pouring into Palm Beach the next day. Among the 500 print and television reporters who descended on the scene was Steve Dunleavy, his two producers, and a camera crew from A Current Affair. They booked rooms in the Brazilian Court Hotel, which was favored by the tabloid press, and Dunleavy, an old nemesis of the Kennedys who had once written a book called The Wild, Wild Kennedy Boys, put Balfour on retainer, and the two began scouring Palm Beach, offering “finder’s fees” for tips.
It was just as important to the mainstream press, and, as the case unwound, the distinction between the tabloid and the establishment did begin to collapse. In the most controversial incident, a British tabloid, the London Mirror, published Patricia Bowman’s name and photograph, leading an American tabloid, the Globe, to do the same. This led NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw to use her name, on the grounds that it had already been made public, and that, in turn, decided the editors of the New York Times to do the same. Just as significant as an indicator of the collapsing distinction between tabloid and mainstream was that the article in which Bowman’s name appeared, an extremely critical profile taking her to task for her “wild streak,” was written by Fox Butterfield, a Times reporter in Boston who had no logical territorial connection to a Florida rape story but who did have strong connections to the Kennedy camp. Furthermore, the article contained, in true tabloid fashion, anonymous quotes, a description of the books on the shelf of Bowman’s two-year-old daughter obtained by peering through her window, and material that some believe was supplied to Butterfield by Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator who was hired by celebrities and reportedly worked for the Kennedys.