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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
What do the barking heads of Fox News Channel and other Murdoch media have that CNN, Rather and Donahue don't? A true, virtuous, tabloid soul.
Aug 22, 2002 | It was just after 7:30 at night when I booed Ted Kennedy.
Not a discreet boo, either. Not a delicate murmur of derision from the string section. It was the full bellows, and not an inconsiderable bellows, as my friends will attest -- a raspy-throated, bloodthirsty yawp straight out of the darkened balcony of some backwater 'rassling arena. It heretofore had been reserved for butter-fingered shortstops, pacifist prizefighters, marginally ambulatory racehorses, Woody Allen's Bergman period and Black Oak Arkansas. It never had been -- and it never has been again -- directed at any progressive politician. (OK, once, but that was Ralph Nader, and it was 3 in the morning on Election Night, and Fred Barnes was grinning at me on the television set.) But I let the senior senator from my Commonwealth have it that night. He was trying to kill my newspaper.
In 1988, I was in my fifth year at the Boston Herald, a doughty little tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, who was then only dreaming of controlling the universe, and who'd not yet gotten fully into the business of subletting Speakers of the House. I'd come to the Herald from the Boston Phoenix, a former "underground" newspaper that redefined itself as "alternative" when it started making $4 million a year.
Suffice it to say that the respective philosophies of the two newspapers were a matter of comparing apples to andirons. The Phoenix was still classically liberal. Meanwhile, confronted with an issue of public policy, the Herald invariably would size that sucker up and arrive at an editorial position that should've been subject to carbon-14 dating. How, my good liberal friends asked me, could I go to work for ... them?
First, I told them, they asked. Second, I was becoming a sportswriter. Rupert loves sports. It makes him feel close to the common man -- which means Rupert doesn't have to reach so far to pick the common man's pocket. And last, they doubled my salary -- not a big deal, to be sure, given that the "alternative" media generally pays as though its paper is still stapled to lamp posts in Harvard Square.
So basically, for four years, I'd gone to ballgames, dropped the occasional subversive one-liner into my copy, and read the editorial page for laughs. Alas, the senior senator read it seriously, and he also read the city-side columnist who referred to him -- regularly, indelicately and accurately -- as "Fat Boy." The senator got revenge in his heart, and he soon saw his opportunity.
Murdoch owned TV stations in New York and Boston, where he also owned newspapers. It can be argued that the revenue from the TV stations kept the newspapers alive. But for him to legally do this, the Federal Communications Commission had to waive its rules regarding cross-ownership. In December 1987, working with Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., Kennedy got a rider tacked onto an appropriations bill that prohibited the FCC from repealing the cross-ownership rule, or allowing waivers to it. This would effectively force Murdoch to choose between his Boston TV station and the Herald.
A number of us trooped down the block to J.J. Foley's, Boston's last great newspaper saloon, to await the end. None of us was under any illusions. If Murdoch sold the newspaper, and we all knew that his head was in television at this point, it would die. There was no great love for the way Murdoch did business -- once, after his Fox network famously lost millions on a failed late-night talk show, I wore a button to an NBA playoff game that said, "Joan Rivers Got My Raise" -- but now, even though we were a small part of a massive global empire, it was as though we were lined up against some pitiless establishment to which none of us, not even Rupert, ever would belong. We were the guerrillas in the highlands, outmanned and outgunned. Venceremos, mate. We were the true alternative press, and The Man was after us. And Ted Kennedy was The Man. The senior senator popped up on "Crossfire," and that's when I booed him.
It was a long, strange evening. I went off to write a column off a Celtics game. While I was there, Himself turned up on a later newscast, and he announced that he was not going to be bullied out of owning a newspaper in which Ted Kennedy could be called "Fat Boy" with impunity. He would sell the Boston TV station. He would keep the Herald.
