The New York Post is a vile newspaper, its pages full of resentments and lies, racist fearmongering, casual misogyny, xenophobia, and right-wing propaganda. I should know, since I read it every day.
If that strikes you as conflicted, you should hear out some of the Post writers and high-profile readers who spoke to Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo for Paper of Wreckage, their compulsively readable oral history of the newspaper—founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, though they couldn’t get him on the record—under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch, who in 1976 began the process of turning this staid, liberal tabloid into a template for the venture he would launch two decades later: Fox News.
“Everybody I know in show business reads it,” the filmmaker John Waters testifies. “Some people say, ‘How can you read that?’—people who refuse to read it and are haughty about it. Lots of liberals. I’m a liberal, but not that kind of liberal.”
Having spent my formative journalistic years at the Post’s onetime rival, the New York Daily News, I read Paper of Wreckage with a bittersweet jealousy. We always thought ourselves the better paper, but where did that get us? Having been eviscerated by a hedge fund, the Daily News is on its last legs. The newspaper that once boasted 2.5 million daily readers, and which occupied an Art Deco redoubt on 42nd Street (with the enormous globe in the lobby that appeared in Superman, in which the paper had been rechristened as The Daily Planet), doesn’t even have a Manhattan newsroom anymore.
The Post, meanwhile, chugs along. Its post-Rupert future remains uncertain, but for now it occupies a psychically important place in the conservative media ecosystem, a growing number of nimbler competitors like The Daily Wire notwithstanding. That has to do, at least in part, with the fact that one of its more famous and loyal readers once resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, Trump probably wouldn’t have gotten there if the Post had not pioneered the politics of white resentment, first tailored to the working-class whites of Brooklyn and Queens and then, with the advent of the internet, broadening that appeal to an audience well beyond New York.
“Without Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post, there’s no Fox News,” says Bill Bigelow, who worked as a city desk assistant at the paper in the late 1970s. “And without Fox News, in my estimation, there is no Donald Trump.”
During my time at the News, I heard stories of the old days, when copy boys fetched whiskey in paper cups for editors too busy to go down to Costello’s, the famed journalists’ haunt that closed in 1973 (though attempts to revive the legendary watering hole continued until quite recently). By the aughts, very few reporters still kept bottles in their desks. And their antics were less frequently celebrated than reported to human resources.
Without Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post, there’s no Fox News,” says Bill Bigelow, who worked as a city desk assistant at the paper in the late 1970s. “And without Fox News, in my estimation, there is no Donald Trump.
It was never a secret how the Post became so successful. “Rupert loves the playfulness and mischievousness of the paper,” Gary Ginsberg, an executive who worked for Murdoch, says. “He loves that it punches well beyond its financial weight for sure. The fact that the company is willing to tolerate losses every year is testament to the Post’s nonmonetary value.”
Murdoch bought the paper from Dorothy “Dolly” Schiff in 1976 for about $30 million. Given how moribund the Post had become, some welcomed the news. “The Post is an orphan that has been adopted,” one reporter told the Times—adopted by a bunch of wild Australians, imported wholesale by Murdoch and empowered to run roughshod over the newsroom.
The Australians upped the Post’s metabolism, but they had appetites of a non-journalistic variety, too, which a New York teetering on the edge of social collapse could all too easily satisfy. “The Australians brought this kind of madness and booze, let’s do [multiple] editions a day and stay up all night, have some laughs, and who cares what the facts are,” says Bigelow, the one-time city desk assistant.
The most colorful of the Australians was Steve Dunleavy, a right-wing, harder-drinking version of Jimmy Breslin or Pete Hamill. Dunleavy died in 2019, and most of the remembrances of him here aren’t especially kind: “Everybody hated Dunleavy because he was a sensationalist,” goes one typical recollection. But a profile of Dunleavey by The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, published in 2000, remains unrivaled for its ability to lovingly invoke the ravages of old-school journalism (“His pallor was that of a rotting cod”).
Which brings me to the problem with oral history. It often feels more like the script for a documentary than the material for a book. No number of characters can compensate for the narrative power of a single, coherent voice. Especially given the role the Post came to play in our national politics, and its destiny to be one of the last two mass-circulation daily newspapers in the city at the center of the world, I hungered for a presiding voice, someone to tell us how we, and the Post, got here.
It’s not entirely a mystery, the trajectory of the media industry having long been obvious to anyone with an internet connection. As the American University communications professor Margot Susca writes in Hedged, investment funds have gobbled up many local newspapers, eviscerating them in the process. And the advent of social media only deepens the crisis. Some 17 percent of adults now get their news from TikTok, according to Pew. The figure is more than twice as high (39 percent) for young adults.
Just flipping through this book, then, is a winsome pleasure, whatever you think of the Post. The Post is not, by any means, a great newspaper, but it makes for a great story, and journalism needs those during these dark days of pivots and retrenchments. Sure, the newsroom may have been the Delta Tau Chi frat of Animal House fame, only with a working printer—but at least they had a newsroom. What one finds now is a bunch of alienated millennials, pecking away at laptops in crammed Park Slope apartments, looking for new ways to rewrite the latest Chappell Roan controversy.
One Post reporter remembers going dancing at Xenon, the legendary and long-defunct Theater District nightclub, with a photographer. “He put a popper under my nose,” she recalls. “I don’t remember what a popper is—amyl nitrate? I had never had one before. That’s the last I remember because when I woke up, I had been dragged off the floor. I fainted. I guess we were on some kind of story.”
Some kind of story indeed. There is something irresistible about the Post, something that preys on our desire for outrage, gossip, and drama. Democracy may die in darkness, as The Washington Post’s motto goes, but don’t you want to know about Angelina Jolie’s rumored new boyfriend or a Bronx landlord’s “fart complaint”? Both of those items are on the Post’s homepage right now—but I know, you were too busy reading the latest ProPublica investigation to notice.
A news ecosystem ruled by celebrity gossip, political propaganda, and inconsequential click-bait may do wonders for Murdoch’s bottom line, but an increasingly uninformed populace is the inevitable result. The Post “is a piece of conceptual art,” the former Daily News music critic Jim Farber says in Paper of Wreckage. “You can’t take it at face value.” Thing is, many people do.