What might happen to the news pages of The Wall Street Journal if Rupert Murdoch succeeds in acquiring Dow Jones? The historical record varies. When Murdoch bought New York magazine and The Village Voice in 1977, he barely changed their editorial policies. But his takeover of the New York Post the previous year was a different story.
When Dorothy Schiff acquired the Post in 1939, it was in financial trouble. Schiff turned it into a lively tabloid that reflected the left-leaning politics of its readers -- often Jewish, frequently members of the unionized working class, or of the intelligentsia that identified with them. She hired liberal editorial writers like James Wechsler and Max Lerner. She fostered the careers of great reporters like Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill. Under her guidance the Post broke the story of Richard Nixon's slush fund. It helped bring down Walter Winchell and Robert Moses. It supported the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War. Although Schiff seldom appeared in the newsroom, she approved and commented on every major story and every minor column in the paper.
Dolly, as she was frequently called, also kept a careful watch on the bottom line. And she was rewarded for her tenacity when four of the seven competing daily New York papers folded in the mid-1960s. From 1968 through 1973, the Post's circulation averaged just under 700,000 copies daily, and its net retained earnings hovered around $1,250,000 annually.
But national trends within the newspaper industry were ominous. Total readership was dropping. Americans increasingly got their news from television and radio. The Post's circulation and advertising linage began to slip. Despite annual revenues that remained steady at about $40 million, the paper's net profit dropped from just under $1 million in 1973 to less than $500,000 in 1975. In 1976, the paper was projected to lose money for the first time in decades. Dolly's best bet to salvage the Post was to find a buyer who was prepared to spend money with little chance of getting it back.
Enter Rupert Murdoch, a young entrepreneur from Australia, by way of London. In 1952, 21-year-old Murdoch had inherited his first paper, the Adelaide News, from his father, an influential Melbourne publisher. The Australian, an upmarket broadsheet that he founded in 1964, was the country's first national newspaper and was a lone respectable counterweight to the trashy journals that were the basis of his growing reputation.
In 1969, Murdoch acquired the failing London Sun and made a huge success by combining operations with the Sunday News of the World. Next he turned to America, where he first purchased two papers in San Antonio. In 1974 Rupert started the National Star, a weekly tabloid, with which he hoped to challenge the supermarket gossip sheet, the National Enquirer. The Star failed in that chase, but Murdoch was undaunted. In the spring of 1976, with an international empire that now included more than eighty newspapers and magazines as well as television stations in Australia and England, he put out feelers about buying the Post.
By mid-November, Schiff and Murdoch had a deal. Murdoch paid Dolly $31 million for the paper. From her point of view, she had made a sound business decision that also satisfied her sense of responsibility: she cashed out of a money-losing situation and preserved the paper.
Announcing the sale, Dolly said, "Rupert Murdoch is a man with a strong commitment to the spirit of independent, progressive journalism. I am confident he will carry on vigorously in the tradition I value so deeply." Murdoch said that the Post would continue to be a "serious newspaper." He later told a reporter from the Times that "the political policies [of the Post] will stay unchanged." The honeymoon didn't last long.
Weeks after taking over, Murdoch appointed Edwin Bolwell, an Australian who had worked on newspapers in Canada, as editor. Bolwell planned to stir things up. "I hope to make the Post lively but not irresponsible," he told the Times. "We want to entertain and inform at the same time, make it the most readable paper in New York." To carry out his intentions, Bolwell imported a group of Murdoch veterans from Australia. An old Post hand said that the Australians "didn't know East Side from West Side. They didn't know New York, and they didn't care."
In fact, they may-unwittingly-have had an intuitive sense of the changing politics of many of the Post's longtime readers. Working-class and outer-borough Democrats were affronted by increasing urban crime, civil unrest, and the deterioration of New York's social services. Aware that their growing conservatism dove-tailed with his own political views, Murdoch changed the paper's political cast from left to right. He supported law-and-order Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani and attacked liberal Governor Mario Cuomo. In the 1980 Presidential election, Murdoch's Post supported Ronald Reagan, whose administration it continued to champion. No friend of organized labor, Murdoch first outmaneuvered the Allied Printing Trades Council and then drove the Newspaper Guild-whose members may have been the last advocates of Schiff-era liberalism -from the paper. He repeatedly used the news and editorial pages to further his professional and political interests.
Dorothy Schiff never publicly criticized the radical turn in political persuasion of the Post's editorial and news pages. But the difference between Murdoch's public promises and his actual behavior on taking over might give current owners and readers of the Wall Street Journal something to ponder.