Dish (36 page)

In the sixties, Dunleavy worked for several Asian newspapers, including the
South China Morning Post,
and then in the seventies he caught the attention of Rupert Murdoch. The publisher—then in the initial stages of what came to be known as his “Australian invasion” of the American media market that would ultimately lead to a dominant presence in the newspaper, book, magazine, television, and movie industries—was launching the
Star,
his four-color tabloid, to compete with the
National Enquirer.
Impressed with Dunleavy’s tenacity, his working-class sensibility, his energy, and his lack of scruples, Murdoch hired him as the
Star’s
chief reporter.

“If you wanted a miracle cancer cure, a flying saucer, a Hollywood scandal or a rip-off of an upcoming book in the guise of a ‘review,’ Dunleavy was your man,” recalled Jim Brady, who was the paper’s editor. “He wrote fast, he wrote, if necessary, all night. He knew policemen and shysters and charlatans and never took ‘No Comment’ for an answer.” Dunleavy did more than just break news. “One of his great achievements was a ‘hooray for America’ column decorated with his picture and, I believe, several American flags,” Brady continued. “The fact that Steve was an alien had nothing to do with it. He lashed out every week at the commies and pinkos and wimps and perverts he knew were scheming to take over.”

Dunleavy was a slender, stooped man with a roguish Outback accent. He had an exaggerated pompadour haircut and chainsmoked Parliaments. In New York he became as notorious for his drinking and brawling—”going to the knuckles,” as he called it—as for his right-wing politics and tabloid antics. He was never a graceful writer; in fact, when the journalist Pete Hamill learned that Dunleavy’s foot had been run over by a car, he joked, “I hope it’s his writing foot.” Nonetheless, Dunleavy could concoct eye-catching headlines. He became a favorite of Murdoch—who had deeply involved himself in the
Star,
personally approving page layouts and rewriting stories—and when the Australian tycoon bought the
New York Post
from Dorothy Schiff in 1976—promoting “Aussie Takes Gotham” cover stories in both
Time
and
News-week
—he appointed Dunleavy city editor. Dunleavy presided over the
Post,
where circulation had fallen below 500,000 and annual losses exceeded $50 million, during its fierce battle for New York tabloid supremacy with the
Daily News.
He was the man responsible for notorious Post headlines such as the legendary “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” and for the fevered coverage of the 1977 blackout, “24 HOURS OF TERROR.”

But the story that put Dunleavy on the map was the Son of Sam serial murder case. Since July 1976, when eighteen-year-old Donna Laurie was killed with a .44 pistol while sitting in a car outside her family home in the Bronx, the city had been stalked by a homicidal maniac named David Berkowitz. The police, however, did not know his identity and referred to him as the Son of Sam. “There’s only one game in town and that’s Son of Sam,” Murdoch told his staff, which began pursuing the story relentlessly. In the summer of 1977, after two more people had been murdered, the
Daily News’s
star columnist Jimmy Breslin began addressing columns to the Son of Sam, who read the columns and wrote replies, which the
News
duly published. On July 31, when another woman was murdered, the
Post
ran the headline “NO ONE IS SAFE FROM SON OF SAM.” Dunleavy, imitating Breslin, began to publish personal appeals to the killer to surrender to Dunleavy himself. These tactics, however egregious, doubled the
Post’s
circulation to 1 million. Some of its most controversial ploys occurred after Berkowitz was finally arrested. A
Post
photographer snuck into the jail and took a picture of the suspect as he slept in his cell. Another
Post
photographer, together with a
Daily News
photographer, was arrested for trespass after breaking into Berkowitz’s Yonkers apartment. The
Post
published the photographs under the headline, “INSIDE THE KILLER’S LAIR.” The
Post
also obtained letters, reportedly by paying for them, that Berkowitz had written to a former girlfriend and published them under the headline “HOW I BECAME A MASS KILLER BY DAVID BERKOWITZ,” a headline that prompted criticism in the
New York Times
and the
New Yorker
and that Murdoch later apologized for, admitting that it was “inaccurate and wrong.”

To many journalists, the entry of the once-liberal and literate
New York Post
into the tabloid war came to epitomize the alarming debasement of their profession. Two years after the Son of Sam media frenzy, Osborn Elliot, the former editor of
Newsweek
who at the time was dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, wrote an article in the
Columbia Journalism Review
viciously critical of Murdoch’s values. “It is no longer enough to judge the paper solely by journalistic standards,” Elliot wrote. “Here we enter a moral universe in which judgments are of a different order altogether, suggesting, as they do, that the matter ought not to be allowed to rest after the press critics have pronounced their anathemas. For the
New York Post
is no longer merely a journalistic problem. It is a social problem—a force for evil.”

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.

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.