Buy, bye

Mike Wallace, CBS News ‘60 Minutes’
Sad, funny, undeniably authentic, Tabloid Baby tells the tale of what befell too much of mainstream television news over the past couple of decades as the bad drove out the good.

Maury Povich
Burt was there for the birthing of tabloid, he became the heart of the genre, and now he’s written the Bible.

Paula Zahn, Fox News Channel
It was a fun read. I laughed out loud!

Jim Ryan, Good Day New York, WNYW-TV
This one is terrific! This one puts you there. It gives you the flavor of being there and it gives you the kind of off-the-wall gonzo journalism that was going on there!

J. Max Robins, The Robins Report, TV Guide
Tabloid Baby is a compelling, vodka-laced chronicle that pulls back the curtain on the helter-skelter world of tabloid TV. Celebrities’ bad behavior—illicit sex, substance abuse, betrayal and revenge— are commonplace in the weird world of Tabloid Baby… Some of the incidents in Tabloid Baby are laugh-out-loud funny… I can corroborate how accurately he captures the era… Kearns does his subjective best to show how the tabloid genre stripped away pretensions from the news. He demonstrates how a bare-knuckle style of reporting often produced exclusives, while occasionally even bringing insight to the most sensational stories of the decade.

John Strausbaugh, New York Press
He helped change forever the way the news gets told on TV. Kearns is defiantly, happily unapologetic. That’s part of what makes his memoirs such an absorbing read. Tabloid Baby is a funny, brash, packed-with-anecdotes account of his role in the trashing (my usage) of TV news. If Kearns lays on the mythologizing a bit thick–his portraits of colleagues like Steve Dunleavy come straight out of 1930s hero-worship of the two-fisted, whiskey-pounding newspaper reporter–it’s probably just because he’s looking to sell HBO the movie rights, and why not. Besides, even his heroes show their warts, and portraits of powerful media figures like Barry Diller, Diane Dimond, Anthea Disney and Jeff Greenfield are boldly unattractive. On the broad scale, Tabloid Baby is a simple and familiar tale about the Aussification of the news: that is, it’s about the enormous, and many would say enormously detrimental, impact Rupert Murdoch and his piratical Aussie crew have had on news, both in print and electronic, both here and in England, over the last decade. On a more petty level, various other famous asses get satisfying comeuppances in Tabloid Baby. He tells some great Hollywood-sleaze stories.

The Straits Times, Singapore
Pop culture history of the best sort -- dishy, gossipy, delivered with the unerring ear of a TV reporter for the good soundbite and a healthy dose of cynicism. A rough and tumble, zippily-entertaining pop history of the birth of American tabloid television. In this kiss-and-tell, after a fashion, book, he provides the lowdown on how American television reporting got from the buttoned-down, WASP mentality of anchors like Walter Cronkite to the sleaze-driven mania of the Lewinsky phenomenon in the 1990s.

Today’s Librarian magazine
Tabloid Baby is a realistic account of how the medium of television emerged from the mass of “infotainment” programming it now embraces. A master at taking the reader behind the scenes, author Burt Kearns goes one better and shows in detail who’s calling the shots and the cut-throat nature of the business. Kearns relates the down and dirty to us—all first hand. The industry philosophy of “do whatever you have to do to get ratings, no matter who you hurt” is the underlying theme throughout the book, and Kearns’ experience as the former executive producer of A Current Affair and Hard Copy makes him more than qualified to give us this accurate account. The reader is given the obvious advantage of hearing about the people, the drinking, the sex, the drugs, from someone on the inside who lived, ate, and breathed tabloid TV shows. Kearns’ book has all the makings of a best-seller. It pulses and moves, and, like the medium it speaks of, presents us with a hook, teases us, and leaves us wanting more. As a former television show producer, I know many of the people Kearns writes about. Like myself, many in the industry will be nodding their heads in agreement, and the ones who won’t are those who will know they’ve been found out and that the jig is finally up. Throw away any other book you’ve ever read about television shows, and welcome to the real world of Tabloid Baby. It’s powerful, addictive reading, and despite the 500 pages to go through, I kept wanting more. Sequel?

Neal Travis, The New York Post
The navel-gazing that's going on at the TV networks right now will be enhanced by the publication of Burt Kearns' enthralling book, Tabloid Baby in which the veteran of shows like A Current Affair and Hard Copy reveals the M.O. of the programs that changed the way the medium covers news.

Steve Dunleavy, The New York Post
Con men, criminals, celebrities, politicians - all seemed to remain part of A Current Affair’s extended family, even when we beat them up. Burt Kearns, in his new book "Tabloid Baby," takes us on a delightful and raucous romp through that world. It was a world that will never be seen again. The wildest bunch of pirates imaginable. I know because I was there. In eloquent if sometimes brutal prose, Kearns, a senior producer on the show, unmasks all the usual suspects, which would guarantee that Tom Brokaw wouldn't let himself be buried in the same cemetery as any of us. "We'd taken television to a delirious and dangerous edge," Kearns writes. In varying doses of scandal, celebrity, crime, politics and morality, the tabloid television tales riveted a nation for a decade and Kearns grabs it all in print. The title of the book, "Tabloid Baby," tells you how it all went full circle until Kearns goes respectable, marries beautiful British TV anchor Allison Holloway and has a lovely son called Sam. All wrapped up in Los Angeles suburbia. Those wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine. Of course, I normally would have sued the son-of-a-gun for what he wrote about me, but I can't - it's all doggone true.

Frank DiGiacomo, The New York Observer
In the opening pages of Tabloid Baby, television producer Burt Kearns’ memoir about the rise and fall of tabloid television, he writes that New York Post reporter Steve Dunleavy, "the ageless legend with his silver pompadour, eagle beak profile and rakish charisma, was the paragon of everything that made journalism romantic and dangerous. He was friend to cops and criminals, bums and kings. He knew the words to any show tune you could toss at him." And then Mr. Kearns gets to the point: "Dunleavy, it was said, would fuck anyone, do anything–fuck anything–for a story." In journalistic parlance, that is the nut graph to Mr. Kearns’ first-person account of his immersion in the sweaty, up-all-night 120-proof world of tabloid television that media mogul Rupert Murdoch brought to America when he imported a band of Australian "wild pirates," as Mr. Kearns referred to them in a phone interview, to run the American TV and media properties that he had purchased… Indeed, if the book justifies anything, it’s that Mr. Dunleavy deserves his title as the Keith Richards of tabloid journalism.

The Sunday Age, Melbourne, Australia
Young enough to be Steve Dunleavy’s son, Kearns arrived in New York City from a sleepy suburban newspaper the night John Lennon died, and elbowed his way up in television newsrooms before getting his big break—working with Dunleavy and several other Australians to set up the hugely successful tabloid show A Current Affair. It was a rollercoaster ride, and prompted Kearns to write a book about the era—a rollicking number called Tabloid Baby. It’s during the launch that he coins the Keith Richards line about his old mate, whom treats as a loveable but eccentric uncle. There’s plenty more where that came from, in the book.

The Australian, Sydney, Australia
“What’s wrong with you?” my wife asked, as I lay in bed on Saturday morning, recharging the batteries, laughing, chortling and giggling. I was just reliving a part of my past, utterly engrossed in Burt Kearns’ book, Tabloid Baby. It tells the rip-roaring, devil-may-care, booze-fueled story of the explosive rise of tabloid TV in the U.S. Kearns tells it all in a vivid, brutally honest account that is riveting, funny, yet ultimately sad. Not only do the central characters fall, one by one, victims of booze, fatigue and Hollywood politics, but so does the genre itself… In a sense, Tabloid Baby is a tabloid history of tabloid itself; a potted, bovrilized, cut-to-the chase story about a ten-year TV subset of the wider newspaper genre that grew, blossomed, and wilted within the 20th century… The tabloid era maybe well behind us now, but that’s why Tabloid Baby is such a good read—it’s pure nostalgia; a portrait of the way we were, for those who may prefer to forget…

Ed Breslin, Seek Books Update, Seekbooks.com
Tabloid Baby provides as much high-octane entertainment as any Hollywood expose, and, in the bargain, it concerns a very serious subject, and sheds a sharp light on it: the nature of journalism at the dawn of the millennium. Every big news story of the 80s and early 90s is showcased in here. What’s more, Burt Kearns proves the old journalism adage that the story behind the story is often the best story. All of these guys would have attacked the Great Wall of China with a safely pin if a great story had been on the other side. Reading about them in Tabloid Baby, you feel that Burt Kearns has done for them as marauding journalists what Robert Louis Stevenson did for pirates in Treasure Island.

Connie Martinson Talks Books (PBS & Beverly Hills Courier)
Burt writes like a young Harold Robbins, fast paced, character descriptive and true situations that do not always speak well of the teller. It is, as Burt says, an uncensored account of the revolution that gave birth to 21st century television news broadcasting. Burt’s story of office politics from A Current Affair to Hard Copy is riotous.

LA Weekly
The best parts of the book are his candid confessions of the sleazy tactics — ranging from stealing a Joey Buttofuoco tape off a New York satellite feed to copying the infamous Rob Lowe sex tape off an Atlanta television screen— that got him into trouble. Kearns also pops off some good caps at pompous media figures, including Jeff Greenfield, who greeted a tabloid cameraman who baited him during the O.J. trial by saying, “This is the kind of lack of civility that I really think is unfortunate.” And the boozy, Vegas-stomping, strip-club-hopping, Sammy Davis Jr.–fawning life he describes, in vomit-in-the-office-trash-can detail, is emulated by mainstream media personalities today.

Tim Blair, The Australian
Kearns's book is a brutal chronicle of how exposure to the Australian tabloid ethos drove him to the brink of alcoholism.

News of the World, London
TV boss confesses… Sensationally!

The Jerusalem Post
A lively, compulsively readable account of his experiences as a producer at the American tabloid television shows A Current Affair and Hard Copy!

The Hartford Courant
Kearns relates dozens of raucous adventures in his new memoir, Tabloid Baby. It's a rollicking remembrance that romanticizes tabloid TV, as if the shows A Current Affair and Hard Copy were Hearst and Pulitzer battling over the Spanish-American War in the early days of yellow journalism. Kearns, however, suggests that the respectable press has always overstated the differences between itself and the tabs. To him, a tabloid story is simply one with a lot of emotion, real characters and a moral at the end -- a story with all the elements and drama of real life. He's started a new Web site -- tabloidbaby.com -- that promises links to the best tabloid stories of the day, and he revels in how they come from places people might not expect, like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Morning News.

The Malibu Surfside News
Tabloid Baby is as entertaining a read as the television shows it describes. The book chronicles the last great communication revolution of the 20th century, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the birth of a new approach to network news.

The Palisadian-Post, Pacific Palisades, CA
We cannot print the title of Chapter 4, but Kearns’ new book Tabloid Baby features detailed accounts of scandals involving Rob Lowe, the Kennedys and everything else he covered during his decade in tabloid television. Producing for A Current Affair and later Hard Copy, Kearns did anything, sometimes resorting to illegal measures, to get the story. Kearns never claimed that such stories were vital information to American viewers… To him, the torrid tales served a much different purpose: humor.

Victor Neufeld, executive producer, ABC News 20/20
I enjoyed the book a lot. I am a closet "Current Affair" aficionado here at ABC News… although some of what I learned happened at the program from reading the book I trust would never happen here!

The Web Page, TV Guide
A hilariously scandalous account of the birth of tabloid TV!

Salon.com
Tabloid television isn't dead. Shows such as A Current Affair and Hard Copy that thrived on news, gossip and scandal and brought the world dramatic reenactments and hidden-camera scoops were simply made redundant. Burt Kearns was a producer on both of those shows. To hear him tell it, tabloid TV simply morphed into network news magazines, syndicated talk shows, ceaseless cable "news" coverage and those morning programs where the men all wear sweaters and the coffee is decaffeinated.

The Chattanooga Times & Free Press
Do you remember when the national news shows were serious, dull and only watched by your parents who felt some obligation to turn it on before dinner? Do you remember when all that changed? During the '90s, the lines that once divided real news, real life and real entertainment were completely erased and replaced by a TV gumbo that includes cop shows, paramedic shows, judge shows and more news magazines shows featuring real people than there are real people. Burt Kearns was there at the beginning, and he has written a book about tabloid TV and its rise to prominence and eventual merger with "real news." Tabloid Baby is the story of how shows like A Current Affair and Hard Copy, with their behind-the-story stories of real people, went from industry joke to industry leader to the industry norm…

The Trumbull (CT) Times
At times his life sounds as if he escaped from one of those old-time movies such as The Front Page, about newsmen who planned stunts, lied, stole stories and would do anything to get The Big Story first!

The Daily Grind, Radiodigest.com
One of the most popular radio show guests the last week or two has been Burt Kearns, author of the tabloid TV memoir. Has he got stories!

Barry Farber, nationally-syndicated radio host
Burt Kearns is one of the early revolutionaries who changed television forever and put it between the covers of Tabloid Baby. He didn’t only write about it, he lived it. He made that particular piece of TV history happen!

Art Bell, nationally-syndicated radio host
A great book!

Bill Diehl, ABC Radio Network
You ruffled some feathers with this book. You named names—you didn’t pull any punches!

Joey Reynolds, WOR’s nationally-syndicated radio host
An excellent book. I want everybody who listens to my show to buy this book. You’ll love it!

Nick DiGilio, WGN Radio, Chicago
Bridges have been burned like you would not believe with this book! It’s incredibly entertaining. You’ll rip right through this book. Very entertaining—and honest. Boldly honest.

John Carney, KMOX Radio, St. Louis
Opens up the world of tabloid television as you have never seen it!

Paul Harris, KTRS Radio, St. Louis
Burt has great stories in his tell-all book!

Bill Handel, KFI Radio, Los Angeles
I was riveted. The stories don’t stop. They are incredible! This fun book gives you a glimpse of how influential TV is and who the players were at a really fascinating time in media history. The behind-the-scenes accounts are absolutely hilarious. The folks involved are often funny, smarmy, and sometimes even pretty likeable.

Karen Grant, KSRK Radio, Monterey
Tabloid Baby really is a hoot!

Ross Stevenson, 3AW Radio, Melbourne, Australia
What a ripper book! I bought a separate copy for the programme director. He too declared it a beauty. A great read. Well done!

Chaunce Hayden, Eyada.com
It’s a great book! I swear to God, Tabloid Baby is the real deal. No one has the balls to write what he wrote, knowing the consequences. And he knew what would happen! I think Burt is the best tabloid journalist in America!

George Pennacchio, Hollywood Wrap Weekend, ABC-TV News
Explicit! Author and former TV tabloid producer Burt Kearns writes all about the rise of tabloid TV in a book guaranteed to cause a scandal!

Caslon Analytics, Australia
A tabloid-flavoured expose of the birth of the Fox television network. It replaces Alex Block's Outfoxed: Marvin Davis, Rupert Murdoch, Joan Rivers & the Inside Story of America's 4th Television Network!

Willamette Week, Portland, Ore.
Hilarious exposé of the news we love to hate!

Steve Powers, Ph.D., co-author, "How To Watch TV News"
An insightful, incisive, and revealing history of the last television revolution of the twentieth century. With his combination of detailed reporting, novelistic approach and raw honesty, Kearns spins a compelling, rousing adventure that takes the reader behind the scenes of the decade’s most important as well as most sensational news events. This is the first and best insider account of a movement that changed the face of television news.

Jonathan Vankin, MediaNews Extra!
Good reading for journalists. A three-fisted insider's account of the early days of tabloid TV!

John Austin, Hollywood Inside Syndicate
Tabloid Baby could even be considered ”The Front Page” of the millennium, the “Boogie Nights” of journalism. We found it to be an utterly fascinating look at tabloid (TV) journalism that we didn't even know existed. Kearns has revealed more "dirt" than we expected. Celebrities, we are sure, will not like being exposed by such an "inside source"- nor will other members of the media. From our inside knowledge of tabloid journalism after thirty five years in the newspaper & TV business, we can assure you that Kearns has given us a really realistic account of what goes on. Believe us, this book is undeniably true and authentic. You can be rest assured that you, the reader have been given the obvious advantage of reading about the people, the drinking, the sex, the drugs, from someone on the inside who lived, ate, and breathed tabloid TV.

Anita Talbert, E! Entertainment TV & syndicated gossip columnist
A fantastic compendium of the history of Tabloid TV-- from a man who lived it. Stars better be braced! Kearns is sparing no expense on anyone and no one is safe. It is 500 pages of scathing tell-all right from the horse’s mouth… all the behind-the-scenes scandals that have never seen the light of day. Right now there are lots of celebrities squirming in discomfort. Between this book and Heidi Fleiss’s memoirs, no one in this town is safe!

Dr. Franklin Ruehl, Ph.D., cable TV show host
Tabloid Baby earns my highest commendation. It reveals the innermost secrets of the world of tabloid television like no other book!

Carol Vitale, The Carole Vitale Show
We are in love with this book, Tabloid Baby. Never a dull moment!

John Cluckie, Under the Covers with John Cluckie
This book is fabulous! It’s full of celebrity sleaze and scandal and gossip. A must read!

Linn Taylor, Screentime Access, Sydney, Australia
A rip-snorting, page-turning, knee-slapping trip down television's memory lane--the good and the bad--written by a talented wordsmith who lived through the era--helped shape it--and came out alive! If you've ever wondered how television is made--look no further for a reference book!

Brett Hudson, star of CBS’s Hudson Brothers Show
This is one of the best books I have ever read! Burt Kearns is the author of the millennium. Having been in show business my whole life, I can honestly tell you that Mr. Kearns has written the "behind the scenes" truth of the television industry. Tabloid Baby is a winner. I can't wait to see the movie!

Luke Ford, lukeford.net
An absorbing book!

Jan Thomas, Good Evening Norway TV
Entertaining and funny! Very funny! Read this and find out what’s going on behind the scenes!

Eames Yates, Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker
Tabloid Baby tells a truth that I have demanded from myself and others. It is a brave and daring look at those who have given their lives, their families, their fortune and their health to bring to the American people the stories that tell them who they are, what they are, and why they are.

Joe Hamill, Court TV
This book is nothing less than an underappreciated masterpiece. Cast as a memoir, it is also, perhaps, the most densely-packed and exhaustive inside history of the phenomena of Tabloid TV during its reign.

Michael Raffaele, author, "The Editor: Steps to Saving A Dying Newspaper"
Tabloid Baby was TREMENDOUS. It is a breath of fresh air and should be taught in J-Schools (and bars) across the country.

Rafael Abramovitz, legendary Tabloid TV correspondent
Burt Kearns is a very lucky man. Because best friends don’t sue!

79

Rupert Murdoch is 79 today.

Send your birthday wishes to rmurdoch@newscorp.com.

JB Blunck recalls Affair with Murdoch

The brave glory days of tabloid television are far behind us, but many of the original innovators, all pups when they changed the medium, journalism and the world, are still out there pushing new media forward from all different angles Among the foremost: Joachim Blunck, "JB" to those in the know, media entertainment professional who was among the core group of producers who created and launched A Current Affair in the 1980s. A key player in the book Tabloid Baby, the former Baltimore City Paper and Village Voice art director went on to play a key role in the development of the FX network and is recognized as an innovator in new media across the board, from independent filmmaking to web design.

Long based in Los Angeles, JB was interviewed this week by old pal Russ Smith on Splicetoday.com. JB hits all the hot button topics of mainstream and new media, while also looking back on the days working for Rupert Murdoch in the tabloid television trenches:

ST: You worked for Rupert Murdoch for a number of years, with A Current Affair, Good Day New York and the FX Channel. How much interaction did you have with Murdoch and how much autonomy did he give you and your colleagues? What led to you severing ties with News Corp and do you regret it now?

JB: In my early days at News Corp it was still a relatively small company on the executive side. One of my many hats was to work at the corporate offices on a variety of things for Murdoch. I had my share of meetings and interaction, and got a good fly-on-the-wall view. It was during that time that I gained enough trust to be thrown into Fox with a couple Aussie journalists, and basically set loose to do whatever had to be done.


A Current Affair was the answer to Murdoch's request for an evening news show. Murdoch had considerable interest in our progress— he regularly spoke to us, and was present at a couple early, formative meetings— but the interpretation and execution was left to us. Peter Brennan was the editorial heart and soul of the show; I worked the visual style and got it to air. Sound familiar? We were housed at the Fox NY station, the former Metromedia WNEW. There was no help— we were Murdoch interlopers. I remember putting together equipment and people, spending what would become millions of dollars without regard for the internal accounting systems. The show went from concept to air in less than eight weeks. If anyone ever asked "by whose authority," I just said "Rupert." That was fun.

"People often think back
to A Current Affair
as tawdry and salacious,
when in fact it was just
good tabloid reporting
with a twinkle in our eyes.
We were renegades
with a healthy sense of humor."

...In my time at News Corp I was never afraid for my job, and always felt supported. I left after moving to Los Angeles. New York was an oasis in the television system, and our distance from Hollywood and proximity to Murdoch made things easy. As long as we succeeded and delivered, we were left alone. In LA, everyone gets into your business and looks for ways to either piss on or co-opt your work. It wasn't fun anymore, and I had my fill.

ST: When A Current Affair started its buzz-meter was off the charts in New York, with personalities like Steve Dunleavy and others landing in the gossip columns and just a lot of excitement around the show. I imagine it was a rush to be a major domo on the show, if exhausting. What was the atmosphere like? Maybe like an extended coke/meth high or something different? And how do you look back on those Fox shows today? I see that you did the "Color Correction" for the film Outfoxed.

JB: Not drugs, but an awful lot of liquor. We had a phone extension installed in the bar across from the office. We were reinventing storytelling for television. No one had ever seen anything like it, and we were too naive to say no to anything that was suggested. We were renegades with a healthy sense of humor. It was very much the same outlaw mentality that we had at City Paper.

People often think back to ACA as tawdry and salacious, when in fact it was just good tabloid reporting with a twinkle in our eyes. If you got the joke, fine, if you didn't, at least you were entertained. In our first month we got a positive review in The New York Times! The reviewer got it. For the most part, so did the audience, and the rising ratings just fueled our daring.

"Murdoch is fearless
and incredibly smart.
He listens, considers, decides,
and often provides the initial idea
that fuels the machine.
He's the last of the old-time journos."

Aside from the preppie murder, Jim and Tammy Faye, and all the other big stories that we led with simply because no one else did (that changed, didn't it?), the one I remember with a laugh was the Peter Holm story. Holm was a dumb hunk of a Swede who was being divorced by Joan Collins. He sued for palimony in LA Court. We put together, in a day, a show (live to air at the time) that was a mock telethon to raise money for Holm. Our studio had been used for years for the Jerry Lewis Telethon when it came from New York, so in the rafters were phones, tables, chairs, risers, decorations, all the stuff you needed to do a telethon. We set up the studio with mock phone banks populated with celebrity lookalikes (and Cindy Adams), did a backdrop with a tote board that looked like a big thermometer (The Peter Meter), recorded tape packages with New Yorkers and what they would donate (a slum apartment, food from the trash, etc), ran a text zipper on the screen with amounts people were giving (all fake—Joan Carson $1000… Joanna Carson $10,000), and had the telethon portions of the broadcast hosted by one of our reporters in a tux.


Maury Povich, of course, would not lower himself to our descending levels, and hosted the "show" from his usual set. The show did include an actual package about the trial, but the capper was a satellite interview with Holm as he left court that day. He, of course, could hear our show in his earpiece between Q&A sessions with Maury. While a viewer would have seen the obvious satire, hearing the show interspersed with Maury’s conversation seemed to give a different impression. After the show was over I got a call in the control room from our producer in LA. Holm wanted to know how much money we'd raised.

ACA, Good Day, the FX shows and everything else all had the same sensibility. I had the time of my life. Of course, we begat a tectonic change in news. There are no more tabloid news magazines. Everything is just tabloid, and without the consideration and execution that we invented. News is now salacious and tawdry, and increasingly stupid.

Not much of a story with Outfoxed. I do color work on occasion to bridge between producing assignments. It was a four-day gig. The producers of Outfoxed made some good points, but on the whole they were as misinformed as everyone else.

ST: Do you follow the continuing acquisitions, plotting, subterfuge, etc. of Murdoch today, and do you think, as is commonly thought in some quarters, that he's an evil media force? Or, rather, an old-fashioned entrepreneur?

JB: Success breeds detractors. Murdoch succeeds. He is fearless and incredibly smart. It was always an eye-opener seeing him run a room. He listens, considers, decides, and more often that not, provides the initial idea that fuels the machine. In media, he's the last of the old-time journos.


Politics aside (and I think Fox News is awful), his moves in publishing were always copied, whether it was changing the game with the unions or using technology to further coverage and production. He's leading the charge to save what's left of real reportage. The Wall Street Journal and Harper Collins will be among the first on the iPad. Murdoch understands more than anyone that newspapers represent power, and that he and the rest of the industry failed to understand the impact of the Web. Unfortunately, his people screwed up MySpace. My impression is that the touchpad moves are being encouraged directly by him. Will it all work? Dunno.

Click here to read the complete Splice Today interview with JB Blunck.

Everybody hates Roger (Ailes)

The New York Times reports in a front page profile that Fox News boss Roger Ailes is "at the pinnacle of power in three corridors of American life: business, media and politics... the best-paid person in the News Corporation last year..." and "the most successful news executive of the last 10 years."

That doesn't sit well with the new wife and adult children of Ailes' boss, Rupert Murdoch, as is stated clearly by Rupert's son-in law, the British pubic relations man Matthew Freud in paragraph 14 of the piece:

“I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to."

And that says a lot!

(We remember Roger's when corporate machinations and needling led Rupert's son Lachlan to bolt the company in 2005, leaving Roger to take his job in charge of Fox stations and cancel the competitive revival of A Current Affair. Sounds like the Time article is notice of the war ahead as Rupert nears his eighties.)

MURDOCHS SPLIT??!!

Crikey reports. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation outlets do not. Murdoch spokesmen will neither confirm nor deny. Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng have been married ten years (just like Tom and Nicole. Sorry, boss.).

UPDATE: We can't find the item on the Melbourne-based Crikey site, though others, including the Sydney Morning Herald, have referenced it.

Murdoch to charge for access to his news sites; Tabloid Baby "has no plans to charge readers for our exclusive content"

Rupert Murdoch said today that News Corp will start charging for access to all its news sites across his media empire.

“Quality journalism is not cheap,” Mr Murdoch said. “An industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting.”


Murdoch was scant on details for such business models today, which could include online subscriptions, charging fees to read single stories and selling content on new platforms such as mobile reading devices. (We tried to read the New Yorker's Michael Savage article online today and found we had to be a paid subscriber. We'll findit somewhere else).

Tabloid Baby, which will soon announce major innovations on its web operation, has no plans to charge readers for our exclusive content.

Spokesman Sam Peters (above) said, "Mr. Murdoch is the innovator. If anyone's going to make the transition from print newspapers to the Internet age the boys here hav ebeen pioneering and make sure reporters get salaries, it'll be him. We'll see how the Boss fares and we know that once Murdoch starts charging, the days of free mainstream news sites on the Web will soon be over. But we'll be looking to advertisers, not the punters, to pay the bills."

Pulitzer outrage: Evidence shows Sig Gissler turned 2009 prizes into "Soylent Green deathbed handjob for terminally-ill newspaper industry"

The scandal over the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes expands today as the Pulitzer administrator's unilateral rejection of Tabloid Baby's nomination is shown to reflect a general anti-Internet bias while revealing yesterday's awards as little more than a Soylent Green deathbed handjob for a terminally-ill newspaper industry.

The claims that the nomination of TabloidBaby.com for its exclusive, groundbreaking coverage of the United States-based effort to plant professional baseball in Israel was blocked unfairly by Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler (before the Pulitzer committee could see or judge it) is supported by other coverage and statements by Gissler himself.

Tabloid Baby’s nomination was encouraged by the Pulitzer committee's December 8th announcement that the 2009 entry field would be expanded to include "news organizations that publish only on the Internet." No Internet-based news groups, however, were among the Pulitzer winners, and in announcing the prizes yesterday, elderly former print journo Gissler admitted that the awards were a sop to the ailing print industry.

From Reuters:

“The strength of the prize winners' work shows the power and significance of print journalism, said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzers.

“Newspapers are suffering badly in the recession, with massive job losses, elimination of sections and cancellation of home delivery. A few have ceased publication, slashed salaries and filed for bankruptcy.

"’The watchdog still barks. The watchdog still bites,’ Gissler said. ‘Who would be doing this day to day if we didn't have newspapers?’

“None of the prizes went to stories about the economy or the financial crisis..."

The same Reuters dispatch shows that gatekeeper Gissler and the committee may indeed have been biased against the word “Tabloid”— not to mention this site’s praise of Rupert Murdoch as a champion of journalism (and former boss):

“The Wall Street Journal, one of the nation's most prestigious daily papers, did not win a prize this year.

“The paper has not won a Pulitzer since Rupert Murdoch bought it through News Corp's purchase of Dow Jones & Co in December 2007. In the previous 10 years, the Journal won Pulitzers in all but two years.”

Ultimately there were no online winners in the 2009 Pulitzers.

From Editor & Publisher:

“There were 65 online-only entries this year, the first time it was allowed, but 21 were rejected because they came from news sites that do not do ‘primarily’ original reporting and are mainly ‘aggregators.’"

TabloidBaby.com, it should be pointed out, is not an "aggregator," and has been lauded for its original reporting— reporting that is all too often stolen by the print media without attribution. It has in fact, called out major newspapers for doing so-- which may have been another factor in Gissler's decision to cut off Tabloid Baby's nomination at the knees.

James Brady

"Jim Brady was a step ahead of us as we pushed through the crowd to greet Steve. Brady took Dunleavy’s hand, gave his shoulder a squeeze, told Steve he’d be missed and that now was the time for him to write the autobiography. Brady, a former Murdoch man who writes the celeb profiles for Parade and Forbes, broke the story of Steve’s infirmities..."

Damn it!

This site is turning into an obit page! But tribute must be paid to James Brady, a tabloid legend who wrote for Page Six, New York, Parade, Forbes and many other publications, and edited The Star. He was a writer who, like Neal Travis, added class to the operation and gave gossip a good name. The last time we saw him was at Steve Dunleavy's farewell bash. He was 80 when he died on Monday.

From James Brady's Forbes column on Dunleavy's farewell:

"...It's probably my fault for leaving the party early, but when I went out into West 46th Street, not a single punch had yet been thrown, a cop or fireman thrown out, an editor or publisher pummeled, an ear bitten off, or Rupert-- standing there happily amid the scrum-- cornered by any number of bores, but not being chewed by anyone. Not with Steve Dunleavy, shakily but faithfully, there at his side.

"Loyalty most places is pretty rare, so it was nice being at the Bourbon Street Bar, remembering 1974 when I was broke, writing and hosting a New York magazine cable TV talk show for nothing, when Murdoch came to America to stay, hiring me to run his new tabloid, and nothing ever again would be the same. For me or for any of us."

Scholar’s new book: “Tabloid Baby sketches out anxious, Darwinian, hard-drinking, sexually virile, homosocial workplace and interpersonal carnage!"

"The book Tabloid Baby, Burt Kearns’s ego-fixated first-person account of how he 'invented reality television,' sketches out an anxious Darwinian work world peopled by hard-drinking, sexually virile men driven to success in the homosocial workspace imported successfully by Rupert Murdoch via A Current Affair and Hard Copy in the late 1980s...

"One learns from this storytelling time a guiding moral— the sense that brutal career and labor volatilities bring with them acute lures and seductions. The narrative lesson is intended to serve well the hungry film/TV aspirants, interns and production assistants, who, like Kearns, have enough sexual and producing confidence to exploit in the interpersonal carnage that lies ahead..."

-- from Production Culture:
Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television
by John Thornton Caldwell (2008, Duke University Press)

As work winds down in 2008, we head into the year that will mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of the controversial, lauded memoir, Tabloid Baby. The book that Mike Wallace called “sad, funny, undeniably authentic," Maury Povich called “The Bible,” Seekbooks Update said “provides as much high-octane entertainment as any Hollywood expose," and The Australian called a "compellingly good read” resonates even stronger than it did upon its publication and subsequent blacklisting by the major news and entertainment conglomerates it skewered (Rupert Murdoch and Fox Television being a notable exception).

Tabloid Baby has also been referenced as an authoritative source in a number of books, including Marvin Kitman’s Bill O’Reilly bio, The Man Who Would Not Shut Up and Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and The News.


But a new book takes the cake! Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television is written by distinguished scholar John Thornton Caldwell, a professor at the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television.

Professor Thornton's school bio notes he is “a media studies scholar and filmmaker” who’s "authored and edited several books… critical and theoretical writings... has been a keynote and plenary speaker at various institutions and international conferences”:

“He is the producer/director of the award-winning documentaries 'Freak Street to Goa: Immigrants on the Rajpath' (1989), a film about 'the migratory pattern of "hippies" in India and Nepal,' and 'Rancho California (por favor)' (2002), a troubling look at migrant camps that house indigenous Mixteco workers within the arroyos of Southern California's most affluent suburbs."

Professor Caldwell writes about Tabloid Baby in the context of his books overarching argument that one can learn a lot about the production of culture by looking at the cultures of production.


Tabloid Baby, he writes none too admiringly in the very first chapter of this landmark textbook, cuts to the heart of survival in the “unstable,” “unregulated” world of tabloid, syndicated and reality television.

Buckle up!

Here's an excerpt from Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television:

...Intermediaries in non-network television work worlds favor their own set of narrative stereotypes. One trade story—in the genre of “I drank and bullied my way to the top”—serves as a variant of the suffering, surviving, and seduction genre. The story arc cultivates the volatility and unruly quality of the work worlds within which nonmainstream TV is produced. The book Tabloid Baby, Burt Kearns’s ego-fixated first-person account of how he “invented reality television,” sketches out an anxious Darwinian work world peopled by hard-drinking, sexually virile men driven to success in the homosocial workspace imported successfully by Rupert Murdoch via A Current Affair and Hard Copy in the late 1980s. With satisfaction, Kearns takes credit for beating and breaking legitimate TV news with tabloid TV (which legitimate news finally came to copy) during this period. Typical of many career allegories and user guides for this unregulated cadre, Kearns writes with the same confrontational tabloid approach that he “mastered” in his series. Chapter titles like “Lesbians, Cripples, and Clowns” and “Rob Lowe’s Big Dick” provide contexts for female marginalization. Women are identified by the quality of their breasts, as in “Riva, who despite her tweetybird voice was a grand billowing bird, with even grander and more billowing breasts.” Women are demeaned... whereas men are rewarded for their masculine sexual capabilities. Kearns describes his collaborators as the “Wild Bunch” and the “wolfpack,” which essentially allegorizes Kearns’s entire production company as a gang of sexual-professional predators.

The effect of such an account presupposes that some industry players have a kind of bloodlust for savage competition and career advantage. One learns from this storytelling time a guiding moral— the sense that brutal career and labor volatilities bring with them acute lures and seductions. The narrative lesson is intended to serve well the hungry film/TV aspirants, interns and production assistants, who, like Kearns, have enough sexual and producing confidence to exploit in the interpersonal carnage that lies ahead.

Other industry work sectors are also still largely separated by gender. If Kearns and Schrader tell tales of sexual advantage and confrontation as masculinist skill sets, another subset of the surviving-and-seduction genre offers career guides outlining female sexual behavior and workplace voyeurism as vocational competencies…

Clearly a wide range of inclinations informs these narrative practices. The labor narratives of Kearns and Schrader map out a work world defined by interpersonal volatility, on the one hand, and predatory masculinist aggression as vocational competencies, on the other. By contrast, the labor narratives of Davis, Harris, and Hanssen and Gottlieb underscore the importance of unsubtle highly calculated forms of female sexual gamesmanship in the office. Both strategies—predation and seduction—are somewhat logical given the slippery and unstable nature of the nonunion, nonguild work worlds being explained for readers who want to work in them (tabloid television, D-work, networking, promotion and personal branding)…

Asked for comment, Tabloid Baby author Burt Kearns said, "I'm deeper than I thought."

Dunleavy postscript: Once were warriors

Most apparent from the crowd at Steve Dunleavy’s retirement party earlier this month was its substantiality in terms of journalistic background and accomplishment. The number of editors, writers, reporters, media professionals, tabloid journos and pop culture stars was a reminder that the tabloid television genre began as something very different than what was mutated from its drippings, as show business and network news bystanders insinuated themselves into the mix, leaving a legacy of having, as The New York Times pointed out partially erroneously in its Dunleavy tribute, “inspired a lot of what is on television today, like TMZ.com, Court TV and Fox News Channel.”

True enough that Roger Ailes appropriated the tabloid template stamped by Peter Brennan and perverted it for sordid political ends that gave the world the war in Iraq and the increasingly desperate and hysteric GOP talking point parrot Sean Hannity, and though the Times erred in stating that Court TV is “on television today”-- it was replaced by truTV nine and a half months ago-- it’s saddest to think that what was begun in New York City’s grittiest and most legendary local television news operation and what shook the television newsworld to its very core would be reduced in Timesian arrogance to the slime of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com and its inconsequential whitewashed syndicated television sister, who work in an amoral, immoral celeb-sucking netherworld that runs absolutely counter to the taboid teachings of the giants who gathered in the Bourbon Street Bar on West 46th Street on the evening of October 6th to say goodbye or at least pay tribute to the greatest giant among many.

TMZ? Read Tabloid Baby to learn the background of its shaved bronzed midget frontman and the women who nurtured his rise. And read Tabloid Baby to find what The Times and others in the "mainstream" dare not admit: that the true influence of Steve Dunleavy, A Current Affair and the tabloid revolution is reflected in the pages of the New York Times, the staffing and coverage of the network news organizations and stories and news that envelope our culture in a 24/7 cycle.

At that party earlier this month, Dunleavy himself sat with his back to the bar, roped off from the crowd at a high table with his wife Gloria at his side and behind her, always deep in conversation, Rupert Murdoch, looking very much like a rumpled newspaper boss, not the international billionaire mogul with the exotic young bride; his hair streaked Grecian Formula black and not the orange or aubergine we’d read about in the Vanity Fair article on the flight from LA a few hour earlier.

Jim Brady was a step ahead of us as we pushed through the crowd to greet Steve. Brady took Dunleavy’s hand, gave his shoulder a squeeze, told Steve he’d be missed and that now was the time for him to write the autobiography. Brady, a former Murdoch man who writes the celeb profiles for Parade and Forbes, broke the story of Steve’s infirmities. He wrote a belated tribute in Forbes last week which we reprint even more belatedly:

Brady On Media
Dunleavy And The Boss
James Brady 10.09.08, 6:00 AM ET

He's one of the last of the old-time big city newspaper leg men, and now the legs are shot, so last Tuesday, a rainy night at a vintage gin mill in Manhattan's theater district, a bunch of us got together to serenade the outrageous Steve Dunleavy into hard-earned retirement at age 70.

I don't know that many of the old press lords--Luce or Hearst or Joe Pulitzer or Jock Whitne--attended goodbye parties for booze-lubricated reporters in their employ, but Rupert Murdoch did. The Dow had plummeted by 777 points the day before, the Jewish holidays had just begun, Murdoch's New York Post was cheerleading for McCain and Palin, and there was Murdoch in a gray suit, coming in from the rain, past the bagpipers and firemen, the movers and shakers, the cops, the pretty girls and half the Post's city room, to say goodbye to a man who'd worked for him 40 years.

Dunleavy had commandeered for himself a familiar bit of bar, where he stood, sober if somewhat shaky, greeting well-wishers but refusing to rest his skinny butt on a bar stool. Steve, long ago, worked for me back on the National Star, a supermarket tabloid Murdoch launched in 1974, but I told that story in this column months ago, when Dunleavy first confessed his legs were going and he might have to pack in his column for the Post. (See "'Dirt' On TV.")

Steve's last week began in extraordinary fashion when The New York Times ran a thousand-word feature on him. The Post and the Times have been feuding so bitterly in recent years, this was the equivalent of a Tass editorial in praise of Capitalism. Tim Arango wrote the Times piece, quoting not only Murdoch but old rivals Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, Post editor Col Allan, and Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning.

I especially liked Jimmy's line, "Steve is one of the three people in America who loves Rupert Murdoch. In a time of listless reporting, he climbed stairs. And he wrote simple declarative sentences that people could read." Breslin then derided today's newspaper sentences, "52-word gems that moan, I went to college! I went to graduate school college! Where do I put the period?" Hamill, who once shared with Dunleavy a mutual distaste, appeared to have mellowed, saying of Steve, "He always had this energy. I always thought he was writing his columns like he was double-parked."

After I chatted up Dunleavy, urging him to write another best-selling potboiler while he was still alive, and demanding had he been, in Aussie slang, a "wanker" or a "poofter"? "I was a wanker, mate, but never a poofter." Then, with a bottle of Corona, I worked the room, chatting up editor Col Allan, who may not own a necktie, but who was actually jotting notes, covering the story; columnist Cindy Adams; lanky, red-haired reporter Cynthia Fagen ("the carrot"); and rock critic Dan Aquilante ("You gave me my start on Page Six!"). Also in attendance were firefighters' union leader Steve Cassidy; Ed Burns, the retired cop whose sons Ed and Brian make movies; PR guru Howard Rubenstein; former Post publisher Marty Singerman; Richard Johnson and Paula Froelich of Page Six; restaurateur Elaine Kaufman; some TV types and a gent from Bamberger's in Newark.

At the door, they were handing out eight-page mock-ups of the Post, packed with stories and pics of the evening's hero: Steve with Reagan; with Castro; holding the gun that shot Lennon; with Joey Buttafuoco; Mike Tyson; the Boston Strangler; Bill O'Reilly; at home with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate; arm-wrestling with Mike Bloomberg; with Geraldo; asleep in a city room chair. Ray Kerrison, who was our racetrack columnist from those first days at the Star, wrote a loving reminiscence, headlined, "50 wild years of news and booze with the man who's king of both.

It's probably my fault for leaving the party early, but when I went out into West 46th Street, not a single punch had yet been thrown, a cop or fireman thrown out, an editor or publisher pummeled, an ear bitten off, or Rupert--standing there happily amid the scrum--cornered by any number of bores, but not being chewed by anyone. Not with Steve Dunleavy, shakily but faithfully, there at his side.

Loyalty most places is pretty rare, so it was nice being at the Bourbon Street Bar, remembering 1974 when I was broke, writing and hosting a New York magazine cable TV talk show for nothing, when Murdoch came to America to stay, hiring me to run his new tabloid, and nothing ever again would be the same. For me or for any of us.

"Dunleavy will be your chief reporter," Rupert said then. "Just don't go drinking with him." A week later, my "chief reporter" and I were having the first of many at Tim Costello's bar. As Dunleavy was quoted in the Times: "I always had dreams of dying at the desk. It's frustrating not doing what I love best, and serving--I know it sounds corny--the one who I admire the most. Murdoch. The boss."