The Work of the Last Real Newspaperman
Veteran sportswriter Jonathan Snowden reflects on the life and legacy of Rupert Murdoch, the mogul who understood what the news business was all about
I’m on vacation, so my good friend and veteran sports journalist — someone I was reading1 nearly two decades ago; the world is of 2025 is indeed flat, much like pay for writers!) — has stepped in with a story on Rupert Murdoch’s impact on the news industry. Like it? Subscribe to for more great work (his recent story of the Kota Ibushi/Kenny Omega partnership is a real treat).
You want to know where the news went? It didn’t die of old age. It was murdered. Strangled in a clean, quiet room by men in suits who wouldn’t know a story if it held a gun to their head.
I remember when the news had a smell. It smelled of wet ink and cheap paper, and the guy selling it on the corner who hadn’t had a bath in a week. It was a product. A real thing. You held it in your hands. It cost a nickel, maybe a quarter, and for that coin, we had to give you something. A fire. A murder. A horse that was a sure thing at Aqueduct. A politician with his hand so deep in the cookie jar he came out with crumbs up to his elbow.
The whole racket was built on that transaction. You made it cheap, and you sold it loud. The headline had to scream at you from the newsstand. It was a fight for that quarter in a man’s pocket—and you didn’t win by being polite.
The fella who owned the paper, the proprietor, he wasn’t some public trustee. He was a king. A feudal lord, and the paper was his castle and his cannon. A guy like Hearst, or Pulitzer, or that wild Australian who came later, they weren’t in the business of informing the electorate. They were in the business of selling more papers than the other guy. It was a game of chicken, a war of attrition. You won by having more nerve than the other guy, by being willing to bleed longer.
Modesty wasn’t a virtue—it was a path to bankruptcy.
And the newsroom? Forget your Ivy League schools. The newsroom was a factory floor, loud and dirty. The guys writing the stories were working stiffs, barely white-collar, guys who knew the city because they drank in its bars and got chased down its alleys. They were "hacks" in the best sense of the word—craftsmen who could bang out a story on a deadline with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth and a hangover pounding in their skull. It was a workingman’s trade.
There was an honesty to it, you see. A brutal, beautiful honesty. The proprietor’s biases were right there on the front page in 72-point type. He was trying to sell you something—a story, an idea, a candidate—and you knew it. It was a straight transaction.
Then came the great betrayal. The money stopped coming from the reader and started coming from the advertiser. And that’s when the soul of the business was sold, cheap.
In time, the incentives flipped completely. The customer wasn’t the guy on the couch anymore, the family handing out sections of the paper at the breakfast table; it was the company buying the ads. And advertisers don’t like trouble. They don’t like controversy. They want a safe, quiet place to sell their wares. So the brawling city editor, the king who threw his weight around, was replaced by a new kind of animal: the careful manager. The man in the gray suit, whose primary job was to ensure that nobody got offended. Especially not the sponsors. The news became a product designed not to be interesting, but to be inoffensive. It flew in the face of how papers had always existed in America:
Newspapers and newsmen have been troublemakers in American history almost from the first creaking of a press in New England nearly three centuries ago. Those early printers had no sense of missionary zeal. They were merely businessmen with a special advantage—they created something—and an enormous disadvantage. The drawback was, and is, that a newspaper is somewhat akin to a loaded pistol: just about anybody can use it.
I saw it myself, up close. I was a writer, covering “art” for the kind of people who don't go to museums. Low culture, they call it. I covered the fight game among other things. At every combat sports site I worked for, you’d see the banner ads for the big events. That was the money that paid for our rote and crappy work. You think that didn’t influence the coverage? We all saw it. A major paper I won’t name suddenly gets real interested in the UFC, gives ‘em extra pages, right when the UFC is buying half-page ads every month. Coincidence? Don't make me laugh.
Sometimes the game was right out in the open. I was at one website, we’d get these frantic emails from on high. One of the editors was trying to break into television, so he’s pulling stories, killing any piece that had a bit of criticism in it. Can’t have the guys with the money thinking you’re a problem. Other times, it was hidden better. One fight promotion would control the advertising with partner brands and dole it out to the media outfits that were covering them "the right way." The media companies bent the knee to power. Readers? Fuck them.
It all went wrong with the television first. This glowing box in the living room. From the start, it was never about the news. It was, as the smart guys who studied it wrote, conceived mainly as a medium of entertainment. The whole point was to sell soap, cars, and cigarettes. News was just the stuff they put on between the real shows, the sitcoms, and the variety hours. And it could be awkward. The news was often about things that were ugly or upsetting, and that’s no way to get a housewife in the mood to buy a new refrigerator.
People talk about a "golden age" of television news, from the fifties to the seventies. That’s a fantasy.2 The three networks had a monopoly, handed to them by the government. There was no competition. The money from shows like I Love Lucy was rolling in so fast that they didn’t know what to do with it, so they could afford to run the news as a prestige operation, a loss leader to keep the feds happy. It wasn’t an age of journalistic virtue; it was an economic anomaly.
The moment the cocoon was ripped open by cable television and real financial pressure, the business revealed its true colors. The "decline" wasn’t a fall from grace. It was a return to what it had been all along: a business selling ads. And the face of that business, the man they all point to as the saint of that phony golden age, was Walter Cronkite.
Uncle Walter, The Company Man
They called him the most trusted man in America. Uncle Walter. He’d come on the screen every night, with that calm, deep voice, and tell you, "And that's the way it is." It was the biggest lie of all. Walter Cronkite wasn’t the last of the great newsmen. He was the first and the greatest of the great news salesmen. He was the prototype for the whole timid, corporate, ad-friendly news business we’re stuck with today.
His job wasn’t to go out and dig up a story. He was an anchorman. The term itself tells you everything. He was there to hold things steady. His own boss, a fella named Sig Mickelson, said Cronkite’s gift wasn’t reporting—it was his ability to explain the pictures the camera was already showing you. He was a narrator. A pleasant, reassuring presence who made the ugly news of the day go down a little easier. He was the perfect guy to have on before the commercial for headache medicine.
And don’t let them tell you he was above the show-business side of it. The history of TV news is the history of what they call "infotainment," and Cronkite was a pioneer. This is a man who hosted a show called 'You Are There,' where they’d re-enact the signing of the Declaration of Independence as if it were breaking news. He was on a morning show where one of his co-stars was a lion puppet named Charlamagne. This wasn’t some embarrassing side job; this was what it meant to be a television newsman. His famous turn on Vietnam, where he went on the air and said the war was a stalemate, was powerful only because it was so rare. For once, the narrator stepped out from behind the curtain. The rest of the time, he was just the calm, steady voice of the establishment.
The whole idea that the nation gathered around the television every night to be enlightened by Uncle Walter is a myth built on a monopoly. People watched him because, as one history of the business put it, "for many years, they had virtually no other options." In most towns, the three network newscasts were on at the exact same time. It was Cronkite, or Huntley and Brinkley, or the guy on ABC. That was it. The minute people had a real choice, with cable TV, the audience for network news started to decline, and it has been dying ever since.
Cronkite’s real genius was that he was the perfect vessel for advertising. He didn’t agitate you. He didn’t get you angry or excited. He soothed you. He created a state of calm, passive acceptance. He got you ready for the sales pitch. To hold up Walter Cronkite as the ideal of journalism is to admit you don’t know what journalism is. It’s to celebrate the guy who was the best opening act for a toothpaste commercial the news world has ever seen. He wasn’t an ace reporter. He was the template for the system that killed reporting.
The Last Pirate
So if Cronkite was the face of the new, safe, corporate news, who’s the real heir to the old guys, the brawlers and the buccaneers who built this business on ink and nerve? You have to look in the one place respectable people refuse to look. You gotta look at the pirate they all hate, the guy they call the Antichrist.
You gotta look at Rupert Murdoch.
Now, I’m not saying the man’s a saint. He’s a shark, and he’s swallowed a lot of good people whole. But he is a throwback. He’s the last of the great proprietors, a man who actually believes the paper itself is the product. He gets his hands dirty. He’s in the newsroom, screaming about headlines, demanding better pictures, starting fights. He believes a newspaper has to earn that quarter with stories that are loud, rude, and visceral. That’s the old religion.
To the respectable crowd, the word "tabloid" is an insult. To Murdoch, it’s a business plan. It’s about making a product that’s so sharp, so emotional, so damned efficient that a regular person, a working man, will want to buy it. His newsrooms aren’t quiet libraries; they’re "id places,"3 full of noise and chaos. They’re run by guys who are more likely to have a rap sheet than a PhD.
This is the way it used to be.
Murdoch’s whole career has been a war on the idea of "respectability." He looks at a paper like the New York Times or one of the blog sites staffed by graduates of Brown living in the city with daddy’s money and sees a private club for elites who care more about impressing each other than they do about their readers or the guy who owns the joint. He sees a lazy monopoly. And he goes to war. He understands that in a competitive world, you have to sell the damn paper.
The great irony is that the establishment sees Murdoch as the great destroyer of journalism. But what if he’s the only one left who’s practicing a version of it that can actually survive? The modern, respectable newspaper is dying. It’s boring, it’s timid, and its advertisers are fleeing to the internet or disappearing entirely. It has no fight left in it. Murdoch, for all his sins, is still in the business of creating a product that people want to read or watch. His papers and networks are alive. They’re vulgar and they’re biased, but they’re not boring. His sin isn’t that he’s a bad journalist. His sin is that he’s a good, old-fashioned businessman in a field that started pretending it was a church. He is the ghost of newspapering past, come back to haunt a business that has forgotten how to throw a punch.
The great joke on Rupert Murdoch was that the American market, the one he wanted more than any other, wouldn’t buy what he was selling. He came here with the formula for his British tabs, the Sun and the News of the World, tucked in his pocket, thinking he could run the same racket. But America wasn’t a nation of guys buying a paper at the newsstand on the way to the factory. It was a country of suburbs and supermarkets, and his brand of loud, brawling, working-man’s news never quite took. His American papers, like the New York Post, became beautiful, money-bleeding obsessions, but they weren’t the all-conquering force he’d built in London.
Any other guy would have packed it in. But Murdoch, he’s a throwback, a man who believes in the product. And if the package is wrong, you find a new one. He couldn’t sell his British tabloid in an American newspaper, so he put it in the one box that was in every home in the country: the television.
Fox and then Fox News became his true American tabloid. He and his man Roger Ailes took the whole ethos—the combativeness, the raw emotion, the us-against-them mentality of Fleet Street—and beamed it into the living room. It was self-consciously downmarket, loud, and opinionated, a working-class antidote to the fusty, respectable news of the networks. It was designed to be visceral and entertaining, aiming to provoke the establishment it claimed to despise. It was a product built not on journalistic pretense but on a simple, powerful idea: giving a massive, underserved audience exactly what it wanted.
The old newspaper proprietor, frustrated by a country that wouldn’t read his papers, finally figured out how to sell them. He just did it on television.
The Country Club and the Curb
The whole business turned upside down the day it stopped being a business that sold a product and became a product that sold advertising. It created a timid, careful, respectable kind of news that is now dying of its own boredom. Success stories in the modern age, such as Substack and Defector, are also refugees from another time, selling their wares directly to customers.
Murdochian, in function if not tone.
And so here we are, in a country with two kinds of news. You’ve got the news made in the country club, and you’ve got the news made on the curb.
On one side, you have the modern newsroom. It’s the kind of place Murdoch walked into at the Wall Street Journal and thought he was in an "insurance company"—a place that was "quiet, orderly, businesslike," and absolutely dead. It’s staffed by kids with fancy college degrees. This "professionalization" of the business was the final blow. It created a new class of journalist —a person who belonged to the same clubs as the people they were supposed to be covering, or aspired to. Their job wasn’t to afflict the comfortable; it was to comfort the comfortable, to become them, to make sure the cocktail party invitations kept coming. They became managers of the status quo.
On the other side, you have the gutter. You have the Murdoch newsroom, a place of chaos and energy, a place that still has a connection to the street because it’s still trying to sell news to the people on it.
It was easy for America to turn on journalists because, in many ways, the journalists had already turned on a large portion of the country. The profession transformed itself from a working-class trade, where reporters were often not even college-educated, into an Ivy League-dominated one. This "professionalization" created a new class of journalist, one that was increasingly disconnected from the lives and concerns of a vast swath of the public. The news they produced was pitched to their peers, an aspirational model of what they believed people ought to know, not necessarily what a diverse mass audience wanted to know or cared about. Many viewers and readers grew suspicious and resentful of this "elite-defined" news. They saw the mainstream as little more than biased propagandists for an arrogant elite they would never be a part of. Didn’t even aspire to be a part of. They didn't see their interests reflected in the sober, Olympian style of the networks, which felt a thousand miles away from their daily lives.
This simmering resentment created a perfect opening for the next wave. The rise of the internet and a new, brasher media culture exploited this divide and turned it into a canyon. To a public already cynical about the news and the people who created it, the raw, often unverified, and opinion-heavy content found online was a feature, not a bug. This new media landscape, which paved the way for the social media age, thrived on a tone of mockery and anti-establishmentarianism, fueling the public's distrust and making the divide between the newsroom and the living room starker than ever before.
Very few will survive this brave new world, which is actually a return to a harsher age. And the one man in the mainstream who still operates by the old rules—who says the news itself has to be a loud, bombastic, opinionated, and interesting product worth a man’s nickel—is the one man the whole establishment despises. Rupert Murdoch. He’s the last guy who remembers it’s a racket. And in this clean, quiet, dying world of American news, maybe what we need most is a few more racketeers.
editor’s note: His books Shooters: The Toughest Men in Pro Wrestling and Shamrock are two of my favorite wrestling/MMA-related reads of all time.
editor’s note: Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News is an excellent social history of the construction of that particular fantasy.
editor’s note: All of Michael Wolff’s work, including this 1999 profile of my friend Russ Smith, is highly readable.
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