McMullan snorted at the idea that the public only recently learned reporters relied on questionably obtained tapes of private exchanges. People paid money for the right to call a special line set up to listen to the peculiar flirtations of the next in line to the British throne. At the time it occurred, recording conversations from portable phones did not break the law. But even if it had, British courts have often set aside prosecution against illegal intrusions if news proprietors can convincingly argue a story they had published served the public interest.
McMullan argued judges and lawyers construe that protection too narrowly. “I think anything that the public is interested in is in the public interest,” McMullan said, echoing Murdoch’s views. “And who is anyone to say that you are not allowed to read that? Who is putting themselves in the position to restrict what the British public can read? It’s people in power who don’t want to get caught and thrown out of office.”
“Privacy,” he said, “is for paedos”—pedophiles. No one else needs to keep secrets.
He does not apologize for his former way of life. McMullan’s words evoke American principles of freedom of the press, demanding, not requesting, freedom from government censorship or prudish meddling. And yet his ethical construct fails to account for the question of how the story is acquired. The News of the World, the Sun, and other papers routinely failed to inform their readers which sources they had paid for information and how they obtained other damaging material.
One of McMullan’s infamous scoops involved the late British actor Denholm Elliott’s daughter, who had become addicted to drugs. A policeman found her begging in a London Underground stop. Instead of helping the troubled young woman, he called the newspaper and pocketed a fee for the tip. “And then I went and chatted to her and did the story,” McMullan said. “The tragedy is, a few years later she actually killed herself. So that’s something I feel guilty about.” The story never mentioned the payment.
McMullan showed undue modesty. In reality, the reporter actively set up Jennifer Elliott, playing on her desperation to convince her to come to an apartment to have sex with him for £50. He made sure the hidden cameras captured her face for the pictures that would be published in News of the World.
McMullan displayed something of a nihilist streak that blinded him to limits on his ability to intrude upon the private lives of others. If a receptionist at a medical clinic called in with a tip that an internationally known model had shown up pregnant at a doctor’s office, McMullan said, he would have eagerly paid ten grand, even though the receptionist would have broken the law in violating her privacy. “Do you just stick your fingers in your ears and go, ‘No, no, don’t tell me?’ No, you’re a journalist.” Celebrities relied on publicity from the tabloid to hawk their movies, albums, sports teams, and the like. This brutal treatment marked the unspoken other half of the bargain.
McMullan was one of the few who surfaced to acknowledge what life looked like on the news manufacturing production floor. Yet he did not operate that way in isolation. Former reporters for the News of the World said editors screamed at them, or worse, sacked them, if they failed to deliver three promising leads at each Tuesday’s story meetings. One young reporter fainted under the pressure, according to the former News of the World reporter Graham Johnson. Johnson’s account of his own time at the paper involved fabricating stories and sources, staging photographs, and manufacturing stings, not to mention major bouts of drug abuse and faked expenses.
Much of the time, reporters manipulated the subjects—targets—of their stories into talking. Johnson later claimed that he had “blackmailed” a soccer star, Steve McManaman, into admitting his mother’s incurable cancer. Editors at News of the World frequently horse-traded with the PR handlers for the celebrities they intended to expose. If your soccer star admits he was sleeping with a stripper, we’ll omit the part about cocaine that would kill his endorsement deals.
“When a story breaks, the editors start shouting,” McMullan recalled. One editor at News of the World “used to ring up my phone and say, ‘You fucking fuck, what the fuck are you doing?’”
“The tone was buccaneering, get the story, be rewarded for getting a headline that sounds good,” whether or not it’s true, said David Gordon, the chief executive of the Economist and the television news service ITN during the 1980s and 1990s.
One man set that tone. Murdoch’s cadre of Australians imported what’s called “mate culture”—or “mateship”—into his newsrooms in London and New York. The culture flourished at the tabloids but also made its presence felt at the prestige titles. The Australian novelist and historian Thomas Keneally traces the origins of mateship back to nineteenth-century bush life, particularly the life and legend of the bush ranger Ned Kelly, an Australian born of Irish parents in the mid-1850s. His petty crimes yielded to cattle rustling, bank robberies, and increasingly elaborate plots involving family and friends (the “Kelly Gang”) against corrupt and brutal territorial police. His gang was loyal and fearless, if lawless, bound together against an outside authority considered unjust.
Mateship, Keneally said, continued in the carnage of Gallipoli during World War I, where Australian soldiers felt they had been subject to particularly hazardous duties by their British commanding officers. The ill-fated invasion was later depicted in the 1981 Peter Weir film, Gallipoli, starring Mel Gibson. It was financed by Associated R & R Films Pty Ltd, Murdoch’s newly formed production company.
The defining element of the mate culture was a kinship infused with a sense of grievance that led Australian men to risk their careers, security, or lives for their brothers, as soldiers did defying officers’ orders or helping one another survive prison camps during World War II. Mateship. “When most Australian men say, ‘He’s my mate,’ they’re speaking of a genuine fraternal solidarity,” Keneally said. But mateship also serves as a double-edged sword: “It is an inclusive, fraternal virtue, and an excluding device.”
Under Murdoch, those excluded from the circle of mates usually encompassed women, liberals, people of color, academics, environmentalists, union members, and government employees. Andrew Jaspan provided a translation of how mateship played out in Murdoch’s newsrooms.
MATESHIP CAN TAKE THE FORM OF A FAVOR: “Mate, would you like a job?”
AN ADMONITION: “Mate, we don’t do that.”
A REQUEST: “Mate, give us a hand.”
AN ORDER: “Mate, get the story—I don’t fucking care how.”
That culture, Jaspan said, allowed Murdoch and a small circle of trusted aides to “control the various entities because people know what’s expected—and know their cushy livelihoods are dependent on it.” Jaspan said mateship builds in its adherents a kind of self-constructed identity that proves tough to dispel: they believe themselves to be outsiders, rough-hewn, self-sufficient, distrustful or even contemptuous of authority. The establishment rules are not for them.
This outsider image was—and is—a preposterous confection. Murdoch and his crew became consummate and powerful insiders, creating their own establishment from which to operate. In 2000, Freya Petersen was a twenty-eight-year-old Australian journalist working at Murdoch’s Courier-Mail tabloid in Brisbane. She had done a brief stint in New York City and was invited to spend a boozy night on the town with New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, an Australian, and some others from the paper. They started at Langan’s, a favorite bar just a block from the Post newsroom, and ended at Elaine’s, a restaurant patronized by the city’s political, cultural, and media elites. The owner, Elaine Kaufman, stopped by the booth to greet Dunleavy warmly by name. Petersen, sitting next to the columnist after a few drinks, started haranguing him about working for Murdoch, who, she said, had done so much to tarnish the industry.
After a bit, Dunleavy stopped her cold and said, So what you’re telling me is that you never want to work for Rupert Murdoch again?
“It was a little shocking,” Petersen later said. “He’d distilled everything I�
��d said into a conclusion so simple, and one that demonstrated that he either didn’t understand—or care about—my concerns.”
She recalled trying to engage him again on the substance of her complaints, but was stopped anew.
What I’m hearing is that you never want to work for Rupert Murdoch again, Dunleavy repeated, pausing, and leaned in closer for effect. You know, I can make that happen. The bond between the two Australians had endured over decades. When Murdoch was enmeshed in a business feud with Warner Bros. chief Steve Ross, he tapped his mate Dunleavy to lead a team of Post reporters to dig up dirt on the man.
Petersen’s eyes grew wide as she envisioned her professional life evaporating. She had placed herself outside the circle of “mates.” She joined Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, after working for a non-Murdoch paper in Brisbane, Queensland.
In London, Rebekah Brooks, initially editor of News of the World, then the Sun, similarly prized devotion in reporters above all. Brooks (back then, Rebekah Wade) always presented something of an enigma for those who followed her meteoric rise in London. In her entry in Who’s Who, she was said to have studied at the prestigious French university, the Sorbonne. (The Daily Mail later reported with no small amount of snark that Brooks had only taken a short course there while working in Paris for an architecture magazine.) She had materialized at the News of the World as a secretary and occasional features writer in 1988 after a brief stint at a fledgling British tabloid called the Post. Little more than eleven years later she was the tabloid’s editor in chief and, at thirty-two, the youngest editor in chief of any British national newspaper.
Her boldness, even impudence, tended to pay off. According to her peer, rival, friend, and predecessor at News of the World, Piers Morgan, Brooks had prepared particularly well for an interview with the presumed lover of Princess Diana at a fancy hotel room: she had arranged in advance for a team to “kit it out with secret tape devices in various flowerpots and cupboards.” On another occasion, she stole a scoop from the News of the World’s upscale sister paper the Sunday Times by posing as a cleaning woman at the presses to grab an early copy of the paper and rewrite it for her own publication’s editions.
Soon after Brooks took over News of the World in 2000, eight-year-old Sarah Payne was abducted and killed, her body left in a field. The tabloid dedicated giant headlines to the crime, but Brooks wanted to do more. It adopted a “name and shame” approach. Over a two-week period, it published the names, addresses, and photographs of eighty-three convicted sex offenders, a figure all the more impressive given that it appeared in print only once a week—on Sundays.
On one day, the front-page headline, “Sign Here for Sarah,” kicked off a campaign for what Brooks called “Sarah’s Law.” Brooks wanted legislation requiring authorities to allow parents access to the registry of criminal sex offenders living nearby. She became a confidante and champion of the girl’s mother, handing over a mobile phone from the paper. You can use it for anything—call me anytime, the editor told her. The two women would stay in touch for years. Sara Payne, the mother, became an occasional columnist for the paper.
The tabloid’s “name and shame” approach won the attention of readers and some politicians but the decision proved controversial with civil libertarians, lawyers, and some police officials. Mobs showed up outside the homes of many people whose names were published. One sex offender identified in the paper committed suicide. At the height of the public frenzy, Dr. Yvette Cloete returned to her home in Wales to find the word “paedo” (for the British rendering, paedophile) scrawled in red paint on her front door. She was a pediatrician, not a pedophile, apparently the target of mistaken and misspelled identity.
A mob chased a family with no links to pedophiles from their home. Three hundred people appeared at the home of another man whose sole transgression was to sport a neck brace much like the one worn by a sex offender who lived nearby. And a full-scale riot broke out outside the apartment of a pedophile in the coastal city of Portsmouth. Under duress from officials, the paper backed down on “name and shame” but not on its campaign for “Sarah’s Law.” The disappearance and death of Milly Dowler in 2002 sparked similar concerns and fed the paper’s crusade.
Over time, Brooks became known for her news judgment, at once calculating and impulsive. But she became memorable for her ability to endear herself to those in positions of influence and power. Inside News Corp, she stood alone in her ability to ingratiate herself with not just Rupert but his adult children, too. In the testosterone-drenched alleys of Fleet Street, Brooks proved memorable for her wrath to those who challenged her.
Labour MP Chris Bryant never forgot what happened to him in the months after he asked her unwelcome questions at parliamentary hearings in 2003. A few months later, pictures surfaced of Bryant clad only in briefs from a gay online dating site. The Mail on Sunday, a tabloid rival to the News of the World and the Sun owned by Associated Newspapers, broke the story. But Bryant contended the Sunday Times and Sun feasted on it, quoting from his randy messages to other men in consensual private exchanges through the site. At a moment when online dating was just starting to seep into the public consciousness, the exposure of Bryant’s pseudonymous cyber come-on provided rich material for the British tabloids. But it lacked a public policy component or even the reliable hook of hypocrisy: Bryant was unmarried, openly gay, and had pushed for the government to relax laws cracking down against sexual activity by gays in public places. The coverage from News International’s titles felt like payback time.
The payback arrived in person as well. Bryant felt the sting of Wade’s casual cruelty at a party thrown by News International at the Labour Party conference a few years later.
“She 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 as she 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
“THE 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 often cloaked 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 roll legend Ike Turner predeceased his wife, whom he had abused physically. The Post’s headline was “Ike ‘Beats’ Tina to Death.” Assuredly few outside the paper found that funny. Another, showing a photograph of a man who fell onto the subway tracks taken moments before his death, simply said: “Doomed.”
Murdoch had broken into the American market in 1973 by purchasing the San Antonio Express-News, the only daily he could acquire; the next year he created the National Star to compete against the more established supermarket tabloid, the National Enquirer.
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