The End of Reality by Jonathan Taplin

Author:Jonathan Taplin [Taplin, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

To understand how Tucker Carlson could have built what the New York Times called “the most racist show in the history of cable news” on a major network, we need to return to the Ronald Reagan era, during which the last barrier to hyperpartisan news broadcasting—the fairness doctrine—was destroyed.

In 1974, Rupert Murdoch moved to New York from Australia, where his News Corp had been headquartered since his father had died in 1952 and left him a failing newspaper company with a single viable asset: the News, Adelaide’s only newspaper. Murdoch revived the News, then set out on a campaign of acquisition that eventually included England’s two most popular tabloids, the News of The World and the Sun. He told Larry Lamb, his newly appointed editor at the Sun, “I want a tear away paper with lots of tits in it.” That’s what he got.

After moving to New York, he acquired the New York Post, another tabloid. America was too puritanical for Murdoch to put bare-breasted women on page three, but he did fill the Post with gossip, scandal, and murder. The acquisition was well timed to take advantage of the Son of Sam serial killings (eight murders by David Berkowitz in the summer and fall of 1976) and the rise of real estate braggart Donald Trump, who became a daily feature in the Post’s Page Six gossip column. A delighted Trump went so far as to pretend he was a PR man, phoning in items to the Post. He didn’t even try to disguise his voice. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz wrote in a Washington Post review of Maggie Haberman’s 2022 book on Trump, Confidence Man, “The dynamics that defined New York City in the 1980s, Haberman observes, ‘stayed with Trump for decades; he often seemed frozen there.’ Zombielike, he swaggers and struts and cons on the world’s largest stage, much as he did when gossip columnists fawned over him as The Donald.”58

But the individual who benefited most from Murdoch’s emergence as an American media baron was Ronald Reagan. Murdoch had hired Trump’s friend Roy Cohn, despite Cohn’s being a totally shady character. Since his time as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, hunting communists in the government, Cohn had taken to representing various Mafia dons and dabbled in stock swindles and perjury convictions—with four indictments in the late 1960s and early 1970s.59 Cohn’s job was to make sure that Murdoch’s political connections were secure in Washington, DC. The first important introduction he made for Murdoch, in late 1979, was to Roger Stone, then head of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s New York operations. From Murdoch’s very conservative political position, Reagan was the ideal candidate, and he delivered daily support for Reagan’s campaign in the Post. As the New York Times reported in February 1981 after Reagan’s inauguration, “Representative Jack Kemp, a New York Republican, said, ‘Rupert Murdoch used the editorial page, the front page and every other page necessary to elect Ronald Reagan President.’” Perhaps Kemp, trying to curry favor with Murdoch,

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