Anyone surprised by the results of the recent presidential election—and President-elect Donald Trump’s astounding series of Cabinet and senior adviser picks since then—has not been reading the New York Post. Thanks to Rupert Murdoch and his red, white, and black tabloid, the fault lines that produced the seismic shocks of the last few weeks were triggered 47 years ago.
When the Australian press baron assumed full control of the Post at the start of 1977 after acquiring it from banking heiress Dorothy Schiff, the tabloid was a liberal Jewish newspaper—so far left that, according to former Post reporter and future New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, interview subjects would deride the Post as “that pink newspaper.” And in the 1950s, its liberal heyday, the Post became known for raking the muck surrounding such powerful figures as red-baiting demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy and urban developer Robert Moses.
Murdoch’s makeover of the tabloid was likened by another former Post reporter to “Sid Vicious taking over the Philharmonic.” He quickly imported reporters, editors, and tabloid tricks from his Fleet Street and Australian papers. Buxom young women in bikinis began to appear in the Post (albeit more demurely than the topless “Page 3” girls featured in his London paper The Sun), while fear-mongering headlines, like “24 HOURS OF TERROR” and “WE’LL BEHEAD THEM,” demanded attention, if not 25 cents, from New Yorkers passing by newsstands.
The longer, thoughtful stories that distinguished Schiff’s Post disappeared. Articles became short, sharp, and shocking, and were retrofitted to jibe with headlines written in advance. The most pervasive change that Murdoch brought to the Post’s pages was best described by one of the paper’s former books editors, Mackenzie Dawson: “I always felt like the Post covered New York like it was an opera.” Indeed, the paper created heroes and villains and depicted New York in melodramatic tones, both comic and tragic, with a substantial helping of the bizarre.
And as it evolved, the Post sometimes referred to these characters in provocative shorthand. Sydney Biddle Barrows, a socialite who ran a high-end brothel, became the Mayflower Madam; hotelier Leona Helmsley was dubbed the Queen of Mean; Amy Fisher was the Long Island Lolita; both Mob boss John Gotti and Donald Trump became—in different decades—Teflon Don.
The Post’s turn to the right happened gradually. The first politician Murdoch bet on was Democrat Ed Koch, at the time an also-ran in the city’s competitive 1977 mayoral race. To shove Koch over the finish line in the Democratic primary, Murdoch employed techniques that shocked veteran political operatives. Newspapers traditionally confined their candidate endorsements to the editorial pages, but in August of that year, the Post gave Koch its seal of approval on the front page. Slanted articles about Koch’s standing in the race followed. Future Times reporter and editor Joyce Purnick, who covered the campaign then and refused to take part in those stories, described it as “like being on a little island surrounded by polluted waters.”
One of the paper’s biggest pollutants was Roy Cohn, who came to prominence as McCarthy’s general counsel. Cohn became one of the paper’s best sources—so much so that it sat on an early tip about his eventual disbarment for unethical conduct.
