The New York Times praises Steve Dunleavy

In tomorrow's (Monday's) paper:

A 'Tabloid Guy' Calls It a Night
After 41 Year With Murdoch

By TIM ARANGO

Published: September 28, 2008

There are so many stories about the life and times of Steve Dunleavy, the longtime New York Post columnist and even longer-time Rupert Murdoch acolyte, that some, inevitably, have evolved over the years.

Many of the tales involve copious amounts of alcohol. But not this one. It goes like this: As a young copyboy in Australia 55 years ago, Mr. Dunleavy was so hungry for a story that he popped the tires of his father’s car at a murder scene. His father, a photographer at a rival paper, could not get to the post office to transmit photos, and Mr. Dunleavy, then about 15 years old, earned his paper a big scoop.

That is how Mr. Murdoch remembers it.

Mr. Dunleavy tells a different version. Yes, he punctured the tires of a car, but it was owned by his father’s newspaper and he did not know his dad was there. And it was not a murder but the story of a group of missing hikers.

“That story gets told and told, and each time it gets a little bit more whiskers on it,” Mr. Dunleavy said.

After 55 years in journalism — 41 of them spent working for Mr. Murdoch — Mr. Dunleavy is seeing the curtain come down on his career. He has been an unabashed friend to police officers, firefighters, civil servants and the occasional mobster and the scourge of polite society and liberals.

In his heyday, Mr. Dunleavy was the personification of Mr. Murdoch’s brand of tabloid journalism, both in print and, for 10 years beginning in the mid-1980s, on television. He was an on-air reporter for “A Current Affair,” a news magazine whose sensationalized mix of crime and celebrity inspired a lot of what is on television today, like TMZ.com, Court TV and Fox News Channel.

“Steve was very much involved in educating America about the joys and pleasures of tabloid journalism,” said Col Allan, editor in chief of The New York Post. “In many ways, Steve has represented the News Corp. culture — that is, hard work, hard play, laughing.”

Mr. Dunleavy also tweaked the political landscape of the city, proving that populism in New York City could come from the right and not just from the cadre of well-known left-leaning columnists of the time, men like Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton and Jack Newfield.

“Politically, the notion that there could be a populist, right-wing columnist in New York seemed almost inconceivable at the time, but that’s exactly what he was,” said Jonathan Mahler, author of “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning,” a chronicle of New York City’s turbulent times in 1977, and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. “All of the iconic New York columnists were liberal, and Dunleavy was like the party crasher.”

There were times when his political instincts seemed to lead him astray, such as his championing of Wayne DuMond, who had been convicted in Arkansas of raping a distant cousin of former President Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas at the time of the rape.

Mr. Dunleavy wrote a series of columns defending Mr. DuMond, who was eventually paroled, only to be convicted of murder in Missouri. And of course, Mr. Dunleavy has steadfastly refused to accept any criticism of the police — perhaps most notably by supporting the officers who were convicted in the case of Abner Louima, who was assaulted in the bathroom of a Brooklyn precinct in 1997.

But Mr. Murdoch has always liked party crashers, being one himself. Long before the News Corporation, his media conglomerate, conquered the world with cable news, movies and satellite television, it was an Australian newspaper company looking for a toehold in the United States. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Dunleavy was working in New York for United Press International, the wire service, which had its office in a building that also housed the foreign correspondents for Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers. It was there that Mr. Dunleavy met Mr. Murdoch, whom he now refers to simply as “the boss.”

In a nearly three-hour chat last week at Mr. Dunleavy’s home in Long Island, where he lives with his wife of 37 years, Gloria — hours in which he drank just two cans of Budweiser — he was uncharacteristically contemplative, melancholy even, but funny all the same.

He is in frail health, he says, because of back problems, which prevent him from moving around easily — although he insisted on fetching his second beer himself. Mr. Dunleavy and his wife have two sons, one a police officer, the other a soldier who has served in Iraq.

“I always had dreams of dying at the desk,” he said. “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.”

It is a relationship that has spanned more than four decades, one that put Mr. Dunleavy, now 70, at Mr. Murdoch’s side as he popularized tabloid journalism.

“He was livelier than Solomon, and he was always the most entertaining reporter,” Mr. Murdoch recalled in a telephone interview last week.

Of Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Dunleavy says, “even though he’s done so well in TV and movies, I think if you asked him, he’d say he’s first a newspaperman.”

After working for several years as a correspondent in New York for Mr. Murdoch’s Australian and British papers, Mr. Dunleavy was tapped for a Murdoch start-up business in New York, The Star, a supermarket tabloid to compete with The National Enquirer. In 1976, Mr. Murdoch bought The New York Post, which was then a liberal newspaper.

“Murdoch took it over and Murdoch-ized it,” said Mr. Mahler. “And Dunleavy was at the center of it.”

In 1977, Mr. Dunleavy’s reporting on the infamous Son of Sam serial murder case reinvigorated The Post. Before Mr. Dunleavy hopped on the story, The Post had basically conceded it to The Daily News’s Jimmy Breslin.

“They kept spiking his copy,” said Mr. Murdoch, “while Breslin was leading every day. It was just killing The Post and killing Dunleavy. So I made a change because of that.” Mr. Murdoch brought in new editors, and Mr. Dunleavy began earning his own scoops — in one instance by sneaking into a hospital, dressed in clothes that looked like hospital scrubs, to interview a victim’s family.

“Steve is one of the three people in America who loves Rupert Murdoch,” said Mr. Breslin. “In a time of listless reporting, he climbed stairs. And he wrote simple declarative sentences that people could read, as opposed to these 52-word gems that moan, ‘I went to college! I went to graduate school college! Where do I put the period?’ ”

Mr. Hamill used to drink with Mr. Dunleavy at Costello’s, an old Manhattan saloon favored by reporters.

“He always had this energy,” Mr. Hamill said. “I always thought he was writing his columns like he was double-parked. He was a tabloid guy in every fiber of his body. If it didn’t have conflict, he didn’t want to write it.”

In 1988, the federal government forced Mr. Murdoch to sell The Post because he had bought a television station in New York, WNYW-Channel 5 (five years later, he reacquired the newspaper out of bankruptcy). It was around this time that Mr. Dunleavy’s television career was born on “A Current Affair.”

Recently, invitations went out to a slew of New York city journalists, police officers, lawyers, firefighters — and who knows who else — inviting them to a party given by Mr. Murdoch this week to celebrate Mr. Dunleavy’s retirement. Note that the party is not being held at Langan’s, the Midtown Manhattan bar around the corner from The New York Post’s newsroom that for years served as Mr. Dunleavy’s office.

He had a routine, normally arriving at Langan’s around lunchtime for a day of reporting. “You’d always know if he was hung over from the night before because he would have a cold beer right away,” said Des O’Brien, the owner of Langan’s. “He’d work the phone all day and various people would come in and out. He’d put in a full workday.”

If Mr. Dunleavy seems like a character out of a movie — the gruff, hard-drinking troublemaking journalist — that is because he is. Robert Downey Jr.’s role as an Australian TV reporter in Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” is said to have been based on Mr. Dunleavy. He was also a character in “The Bronx Is Burning,” which was made into a mini-series on ESPN.

“When I first came around, there was some very good newspapermen in New York,” Mr. Dunleavy said. “But increasingly, they started leaning on this Columbia School of Journalism thing. That you wanted your mom to be proud. That it was a profession.

“Journalism is a craft, like being a master plumber. We wore white collars, but we were blue collar.”

This generational clash became evident to Mr. Dunleavy years ago when he was on the campaign plane for Robert Dole, the former senator who ran for president in 1996, and saw younger reporters heading off to health clubs at the end of the day.

“As soon as we’d stop, we’d go have a gargle,” he says. “I think the younger generation is far better served going to the gym rather than the gin mill. No question about it. But we learned from our elders.”

Mr. Dunleavy gets to Manhattan infrequently nowadays, usually only when he has to see doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital, leaving voids at Langan’s, The Post’s newsroom and Elaine’s, the Upper East Side restaurant that was Mr. Dunleavy’s other favorite nightspot.

One night last week at Elaine’s, Elaine Kaufman, the proprietor, recounted the time that Mr. Dunleavy left the bar with a woman during a snowstorm and was hit by a truck. “He didn’t want to go the hospital,” recalled Ms. Kaufman. “And then there he was on the gurney.”

Mr. Dunleavy has not written much lately — he has been in a sort of unofficial retirement while he tends to his health. If he never writes again, his last byline was a tribute to his friend Tim Russert, the late NBC newsman.

“I laugh easily and loudly, but like so many of us, sometimes not sincerely,” Mr. Dunleavy wrote in June. “But with Tim, you responded with more than just a belly laugh — you’d end up in hysterics with tears streaming down your face.”

Probably more than a few can say the same about Mr. Dunleavy. “He’s a legend in his time,” said Mr. Murdoch.

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."

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.

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."

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."

Let us now praise Page Six

Yes, there’s a big scandal breaking with the New York Post’s Page Six, as its editor Richard Johnson ships out to get married.

Page Six will be thirty years old in January 2007. So now's as good a time as any to remind ourselves of its place in tabloid history and popular culture, and to remember our great departed brother, Neal Travis, who helped give birth to Page Six and fed it through its Wonder Years.

We don't know Jared Paul Stern, who's accused of trying to extort a billionaire in exchange for nice stories, but we've been seen on Page Six, we've been seen with the team, and we won't kick 'em when they're down--or at least seem to be.

From Vanity Fair:

It was "Page Six” that broke the news in 1983 that the city's cultural-affairs commissioner, Bess Myerson, had hired Sukhreet Gabel, daughter of the judge who happened to be presiding over the divorce trial of Myerson's boyfriend, Andy Capasso-an incident that would eventually make its way into the national press. And people are still talking about the column's coverage of the public sexual favor that former New Line production chief Mike De Luca received at the 1998 William Morris pre-Oscar party. More recent "Page Six" scoops have included Donatella Versace's rehab stint and Spears's engagement to Kevin Federline.

Mostly, though, "Page Six" serves to provide a daily, pointillist portrait of an increasingly ephemeral culture. The Page's hallmarks are alliteration ("portly pepperpot"), memorable word choice ("canoodling," "bloviator"), an unswerving adherence to the creed that conflict is good for business, and the regular reward and punishment of the latest bad boys and "It girls" seeking the limelight. The exploits of 80s "Deb of the Decade" Cornelia Guest and actor Mickey Rourke have receded, only to be replaced in good time by the adventures of socialite-actress Paris Hilton, actress-dipsomaniac Tara Reid, and current "self-described It boy" Fabian Basabe, whose manhood was recently mocked on the Page after he was pantsed at a party.

Those who have felt the sting of the Page-- or complained that they've been steamrolled by an editor or reporter who carried a grudge-- don't always see what's so entertaining about the column. And there are those who contend that "Page Six" has become as fervently right-wing as the rest of the paper. But when it's doing what it does best-lampooning pomposity and ostentation and sticking it to lying publicists--"Page Six" provides a caffeinated kick the city has come to depend on. It's difficult to imagine how the New York Post would survive without it.

"Page Six"'s DNA can be traced directly back to the man who introduced Australian Rules tabloid journalism to America's genteel Fourth Estate in the mid-70s. The story begins in the days of hot-metal type and IBM Selectrics, when Rupert Murdoch, the driven Melbourne-born media baron… whose assets then included The Australian and the London Sun as well as "the Murdoch mafia"-- a band of hard-drinking, fiercely loyal newspapermen who would follow their stern-faced leader anywhere-- hired James Brady in 1974 to serve as the editor of the National Star (known today as the Star), the supermarket tabloid Murdoch started as part of his initial foray into American media… And when Murdoch bought an ailing liberal tabloid, the New York Post, in 1976, he put Brady in charge of developing a feature that would herald the paper's new ownership and direction: a gossip column.

Murdoch, according to James Brady, wanted the Post's new gossip page fashioned after "William Hickey," a gossip column that ran from 1933 to 1987 in London's Daily Express newspaper. Named after an 18th-century Irish rake, who, as penance, chronicled his drunken, scandalous life in a memoir, the column was written and edited by a changing cast of characters that once included the well-known British gossip Nigel Dempster. The Post's new column would work on a similar premise: a group of reporters would gather and write up brief, pithy stories about the powerful and famous and file them to the column's editor, who would imbue them with a unifying voice and plug them into a modular format…

By the time Murdoch actually began publishing the paper, Brady says, he himself had already been tapped by his boss to head his newest acquisition: New York magazine. Editorship of "Page Six" then fell to the natty, elfin Neal Travis, a New Zealand-born product of the Australian tabloid scene. His recruits included a young Post reporter named Anna Quindlen, who already had one foot in the door of The New York Times.

Remarkably, since Travis himself departed "Page Six" in 1978, only a handful of editors have presided over the column for any length of time. Claudia Cohen succeeded Travis, and when she left, in 1980, Brady returned for a two-and-a-half-year stint. Up next was Susan Mulcahy, who wrote a book about her experience, My Lips Are Sealed. She was followed, in late 1985, by Richard Johnson, who is the current editor of "Page Six" and the column's iron man, having held the top byline for more than half of its 28-year existence. There have been a few notable cameos too, including longtime Post columnist and former A Current Affair personality Steve "Street Dog" Dunleavy. And, surprisingly, given the disdain that was once heaped upon the profession, a number of people who worked for the Page have been Ivy League graduates...

Why Judith Regan got fired

Rupert Murdoch has fired Judith Regan.

Word came tonight, meant to be buried as a weekend begins, just as Rupert's NewsCorp Christmas party was getting into swing, with Bill O'Reilly whispering in the ears of grudging production assistants about loofahs, and Sean Hannity telling yet another associate producer that he really does know Charlie Daniels. The brilliant, toxic editrix, who made writers out of Hannity and Howard Stern alike, went too far with her scheme to create and promote the OJ Simpson If I Did It, Here's How It Happened book and informercials.

We told you the firing was in the cards:

She embarrassed the boss.

On Nov 18, we asked What came first? OJ Simpson or the manuscript? and brought up the possibility that the "ghostwriter" for the Simpson book--Regan's former lover and murder trial witness, Pablo Fenjves--had concocted the book, then sold it to Simpson:

"Consider the 'evidence': Fenjves has made a living by using his imagination and, he was involved in the Simpson case, he works in the imaginary crime genre, he conjures crime scenes for the small screen, and he writes in other people's voices. This sounds to be right up his alley. And Regan, the genius packager, could have seen this as a way to right all those wrongs she wrote about in her own very disturbing Drudge Report "confession"...

On Nov. 20, it was reported: "O.J. Simpson says his ill-fated 'If I Did It' book was not a confession and that the title wasn't his idea. In a telephone interview Wednesday with WTPS-AM radio, Simpson said that he told the writer he had 'nothing to confess.'"

Earlier that day, wrote: "Rupert Murdoch is a very forgiving boss. He'll shrug off scandal, he'll laugh off journalistic crimes, he'll ignore breaches in social etiquette, he considers 'ethics' to be a county outside London. But he does not like to be embarrassed in front of his friends or become a mockery to his colleagues on that Mister Burnsian level of power. The fact that he gave up all those ratings and all those book sales from Judith Regan’s brainstorm... means that Regan embarrassed him greatly with her scheme..."

Had she played it right, had she been more respectful of the public's intelligence, had she not come up with that unhinged and obviously cynical explanation of her motivations, and had she not so lied so blatantly in claiming that she didn't pay Simpson, Judith Regan might be clinking glasses with Mike Darnell in Century City tonight.

But she'll be back...

Why Steve Dunleavy has been missing in action

It was ten years ago this morning that Burt Kearns awoke at the Paramount Hotel in New York City to find a message had been slipped under his door. The note read: "Frank Sinatra died. See you in L.A. Steve." Hours earlier, Burt had been facing Dunleavy in a sitdown in an Italian restaurant across the street from Langan's on 47th Street, trying to assure the tabloid legend that what he'd written about him in his forthcoming book was not going to get him arrested or deported. Dunleavy was not entirely reassured, but in the months to follow would be one of the few tabloid television heavyweights (Maury Povich, Rafael Abramovitz & Eames Yates were among the others) to support the memoir Tabloid Baby publicly without knowing what potentially toxic secrets were lurking between the covers.

We've been aware of Steve's absence from the pages of the New York Post since December, when he'd offered to write a column on the Roman Catholic Church's ban of the song Danny Boy at funerals, and have known about his health issues for months, but we haven't let on because mateship trumps scoopship, and one thing Steve Dunleavy has taught many of us is the value of mateship.

Now Steve's let the cat out of the bag, or the cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river, but in any case, it was his decision how and when to talk about it. He did this morning, with his old mate Jim Brady:

James Brady On Media
Desperately Seeking Dunleavy
James Brady 05.15.08

Star reporter for the New York Post, tabloid TV news hound, best-selling author--colorful, brawling, carousing Australian Steve Dunleavy was missing in action.

Dead? No, there would have been an obit. Stopped drinking? Not bloody likely, mate. Had Rupert Murdoch in a pious moment sacked the rogue? Not Murdoch's fiercest, most loyal and longest-running attack dog. Yet not a single, outrageous bylined story in three months. Where was Steve Dunleavy when the newspaper and nation needed him?

"It's m' legs, mate," he said when I called his Long Island home. "Sitting or lying down, no problem. It's the walking. You remember how I sprinted from bar to bar? Today I lurch from bar to bar." He blathered on about some long-time hereditary problem with his legs--vascular, something about pressure on a spinal disc, three hours of tests at Mount Sinai.

"I went to some Mickey Mouse Long Island doctors, which was my mistake. I spent two months in the Keys, sun and salt water, a little condo we have, but it didn't help. I don't use a cane but have an old shillelagh. Then Roger Wood (long-time Post editor in chief) suggested, "Go see that boy Howard Rubenstein (the PR guru). He represents every famous doctor in town." They've put me on five weeks of meds. If that doesn't do it, there's always the surgery option."

And is he drinking now? Dunleavy sort of failed to respond to that one. "Rubenstein is on top of things," he said evasively.

I sought to console my old partner in crime. "I miss work terribly," he said. "But I can't go out. If I were running up a daily 'thumb-sucker,' [his dismissive term for a Frank Rich-type opinion column] I could do it from home. But I have to be out reporting."

Dunleavy began life as a 16-year-old copy boy on the Sun in Sydney. "Five dollars a week. Then I moved to the Sydney Daily Mirror and earned my cadet ship. My dad was a famous press photographer on the Sun and we became very competitive." (He once deflated the old man's tires to beat him on a story).

And wasn't Dunleavy "a tea boy" on the South China Morning Post? "No," he said huffily, "I was a reporter by then." UPI hired him in London and in 1966 sent him to New York where he worked the 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. trick in the old Daily News Building on East 42nd Street. "UPI was a great organization then, but cheap. You didn't ask for a $10 raise because your boss probably didn't make that much."

Murdoch hadn't yet invaded America but had a news bureau upstairs in the same building, and when Dunleavy "bumped into Neal Travis in the elevator," he took on a second, part-time job "as a casual," as a freelancer was then known, afternoons. "I could use the money." He went full time in November 1967 for Rupert's bureau. "An exciting time, Charles Manson, the 1968 riots, Vietnam."

When Murdoch launched his tabloid weekly, then the National Star, in 1974 and hired me for $50,000 as an editor (I also wrote the gossip column free under a pen name), he introduced Dunleavy. "He'll be your chief reporter but don't give him a title or any authority. And don't drink in the same bars he does."

The Star newsroom on Third Avenue was a roughneck operation, mostly Aussies and Fleet Streeters, but some steals from the Daily News. Plus a freelance stringer named R. Couri Hay, today a flack for nightclubs and the darling of East Side society women, but then a bowtie-wearing errand boy innocent of grammar, punctuation, or spelling. Evenings Hay hung about, making long-distance personal calls, rifling desk drawers and reading people’s mail, and when Dunleavy caught him, he chased him around the room, cursing and throwing ashtrays at him.

It was rarely dull. There was the night a blizzard buried Manhattan and Dunleavy, "reclining" with a young woman in a snowdrift outside Elaine's, and had his foot run over by a snowplow. Snarled Pete Hamill of the Daily News, "I hope it was his writing foot."

When Murdoch bought the Post, along came Dunleavy. "Son of Sam" was Jimmy Breslin's story. But Dunleavy scored a nice "second day" beat by wangling a 3 a.m. at home interview with Sam Carr and his dog, shouting "police reporters, police reporters," when the startled Carr pulled a cocked pistol.

As Teddy Kennedy was concocting alibis for the drowning at Chappaquiddick, Dunleavy and Ray Kerrison spent a week at the Cape where, to prove or disprove something, Dunleavy stripped to swim the swift-flowing channel as Kennedy allegedly had. "I was an Australian and a swimmer," he said. And when the story and photos of the swim ran next morning, said Dunleavy, "The place looked like Jones Beach with 30 or 40 reporters in the water."

When Elvis Presley's disaffected bodyguards offered to tell (or sell) their story, Dunleavy was dispatched to Dixie where he and the bodyguards, sequestered and drinking in a rural motel, cobbled together a series of stories for the Post--and for a paperback original, destiny struck! On the book's official pub date, Presley died. Elvis, What Happened went straight to No. 1 on The New York Times list and stayed there 16 weeks.

All this notoriety led to his being put on TV. "The Boss sent me to Channel 5 News and I didn't know a damned thing about television, but I learned." That led to the syndicated Murdoch show, A Current Affair, anchored by Maury Povich, and a spin-off called The Reporters.

Celebrated for first-punch fights at Costello's now defunct saloon and for sleeping overnight in a straight-backed wooden chair in the Post's city room when the paper was on South Street, in recent years Dunleavy has been favoring a booth at Langan's, a pub near the Post's current midtown HQ, for his recuperative overnight naps.

And if the brave new meds don't kick in, and the legs don't respond, would Dunleavy agree to an operation? "Don't want to, and face it, mate. No one wants to operate on a 70-year-old man who's burned the candle at both ends. And in the middle."

(...a tip of the Tabloid Baby hat to David Peterkin for keeping us informed...)

Pussy masala & paranoia: Is Roger Ailes "exposé" the Tabloid Baby of the Fox News generation?

This site is an offshoot of the book Tabloid Baby, Burt Kearns' landmark exposé and history of the tabloid television era launched twenty years ago by Rupert Murdoch and his brilliant Aussie pirates.  Burt was a lieutenant to the genius television journo, producer and A Current Affair creator Peter Brennan and wrote brutally but affectionately about his mentors as he took readers through the genre's (and his own) highs and lows on its way to being appropriated by the networks.

The genre was also politicized when Republican party operative Roger Ailes got onboard the Fox bandwagon and twisted many of Brennan's tabloid television principles and innovations for blatant political means with Fox News. Now one of Ailes' lieutenants is spreading his own expose. Dan Cooper has written a poison pen letter to his former leader, and posted its rambling "prologue" on the Internet.

Naked Launch is the name of the proposed book, the contents of which seem intended less to inform and expose than to embarrass.

Sure he's got the political blather we've heard time and again:

"Lots of people have dissected the Fox News Channel for evidence of bias. They're all missing the point. Of course it's biased. As you read ahead, you'll understand that in a manner never before understood. This is the point: Fox News is about indoctrination, not bias. The indoctrination was always hidden, as it is in the best advertising. Roger Ailes spent much of his life running political campaigns. He was never a journalist, and in fact he despised journalists. Fox News is not journalism, it’s a political campaign..."

But the guts try to make Ailes look like a demented monster-- a demented, politically incorrect monster!:

"One day during the launch, Roger and I had a huge blowup. It was one of many, but this one shook the building. The tongue-lashing I took from Roger was so personal, and so degrading, and it was done in front of so many of my subordinates, that afterward I stormed into a Fox attorney's office and charged him with abuse... subsequently, several News Corporation lawyers apologized to me for Roger's conduct, and made him apologize to me... Finally I agreed. I walked into Roger's office. He sat me down and told me, with a shocking display of warmth, that I should understand, and this is, like everything else in this story, a word-for-word quote: "I'm a diagnosed paranoid".

...Let me share with you a story about a typical boy's club meeting on a typical day during launch. Roger liked boy's club meetings, five guys at the most, because we could all talk macho and compare the anatomies of women in the office. I was not macho. These meetings made me very nervous. I had no feats of daring to boast about. Roger had parachuted out of airplanes and injured one of those spit-shined leather-clad tootsies. I was too scared to make salacious comments about women in the office. Like everyone, I had taken classes in workplace behavior. Not Roger. 'How about those bazookas on that Indian girl, or whatever the hell she is!' Squirm squirm. 'Pussy masala on the menu today?'...

"News Corporation was full of Australians. Rupert Murdoch was born in Australia. When you worked at News Corporation in those days, wherever you went people were talking that Ozzie way, calling you 'myte' and getting 'aggro' if you pissed them off.

"So, naturally, at News Corporation, you got used to hearing these Ozzies talking. Roger got used to it too, but not like the rest of us. Roger got used to mocking the Australians, because it never occurred to him that he couldn't bully his way out of any sort of offensive behavior..."

Not only was Ailes sexist and insane, but he made fun of the Aussies! Aah, too much...

So is Naked Launch the Tabloid Baby of the Fox News generation? Well, it does take readers inside meetings and behind closed doors, it does not always speak well of the author, and there's an unneccesary shot at legendary and respected Fox News executive Ian Rae (who received an apology from Burt for his depiction in Tabloid Baby).

But from what we've been able to gather, Cooper's tenure with Ailes ended back in 1996-- predating the end of Tabloid Baby's timeline. There's also no documentation for his words, the anguished tone has already led some commentators to suspect that portions may be bullshit, and what we've scanned through seems built more on revenge than confession.

With more than a decade to think about it, we'd venture that Cooper should have thought about doing what Burt did. "First I wrote the angry version. Then I rewrote it."

And he would have been better served had he whipped the raw material into a hot book proposal rather than vomiting it onto the web. For now, Cooper's soliciting donations-- "If you enjoyed the Prologue, please consider paying as little or as much as you'd like"-- like Radiohead did with their new album.

And he's looking less like Burt Kearns and more like Stuart Goldman (look it up).

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.

The Sunday Age: The New York Postman

Melbourne, Australia

by ANDREW RULE

STEVE Dunleavy is at the bar, telling war stories. He is as thin as the wisp of smoke curling from the cigarette in one hand, but his voice is as strong as the vodka and tonic in the other, the accent almost surviving 40 years away from home.

He's on the natty side of well-dressed, still handsome in a rakish way, with the trademark quiff of silver hair that, a lifetime ago, was surely a Sydney lair's sharp brushback.

The wide boy from Bondi has been called a lot of things in his time, not all of them printable, but one description - ``the Keith Richards of journalism"- gets him pretty right, even if he does look more like Peter O'Toole than a Rolling Stone. The comparison underlines not just his astounding survival of decades of hard living but his fierce dedication to his craft. 

It's only rock'n'roll but he likes it, and has stayed true to his one true love, resisting temptations to do something easier than chase the next story. And, at 60, he's still got what it takes to make the grade in Gotham City.

Building a reputation as the ultimate tabloid newshound has made Dunleavy famous, if not rich, in his adopted country. His boss, Rupert Murdoch, might be the most powerful Australian in America, but he wouldn't be as recognised - or as loved - in the street as Dunleavy, who's worked for him for years.

These days he's back writing a column for the New York Post, the smudgy tabloid he made infamous in the 1970s and 1980s before playing his part in taking the genre to television.

Not that Dunleavy wastes much time at the Post office, which is on the 10th floor of the Sixth Avenue skyscraper from which the man he calls ``The Boss" rules the News empire. If he's not out of town on assignment, then he's mostly in his usual spot here at his usual bar, an upmarket Irish pub called Langans in West 47th Street around the corner from the News building in midtown Manhattan.

On the wall behind the bar there's a poster with a picture of him over the slogan DUNLEAVY FOR PRESIDENT. He holds court among a floating group of media identities who drop in during the afternoon to tell him things and hear him dispensing advice, wisecracks and stories from a bottomless fund garnered over 45 years on the road and polished smooth with time and re-telling.

When he was a kid on the Sydney `Daily Mirror' Dunleavy let down the tyres of a rival to beat him to a crime scene. The rival was his father, Steve Dunleavy senior - a photographer for the Sydney `Sun'. Later, father and son were rivals again in the chase after the `Kingsgrove Slasher'. Young Dunleavy hid in an outhouse, hoping to catch the crook and cover himself in glory, when he heard the deadbolt lock the door from outside. He stayed locked in while the `slasher' was arrested a few yards away. The man who turned the lock? His father, paying him back for the flat tyres.

Dunleavy is charming and courteous to all, but tough as well - somewhere between an old ballroom dancer and an old lightweight fighter. Which isn't surprising, as he did a bit of both in his youth. Put him in a bow tie and he'd be the boxing referee from central casting - a surefooted showman at home in centre ring. Poker-faced, nimble - and as wise, as Runyon would have said, as a treeful of owls.

It's tempting to think Runyon would have loved Dunleavy. If only because the Australian who found his spiritual home in New York City is perhaps the closest thing living to the legendary newspaperman who also migrated there - from the west - nearly a century ago.

Runyon dearly loved characters, and as a character Dunleavy is 24-carat box office. People are drawn to him.

Burt Kearns, for instance. Young enough to be 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 but shortlived tabloid show A Current Affair.

It was a rollercoaster ride, and it prompted Kearns to write a book about the era - a rollicking number called Tabloid Baby billed as ``the first and best insider account of a movement that changed the face of television news".

Kearns, now a television producer based in California, is back in New York to launch the book. It's during the launch that he coins the Keith Richards' line about his old mate, whom he treats as a lovable but eccentric uncle. There's plenty more where that came from, in the book.

``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 writes.

``He was friend to cops and criminals, bums and kings. He knew the words to any show tune you could toss at him. He could do more dialects and accents than Sid Caesar. He was a master raconteur and joketeller, his words a perfectly constructed Shakespeare of the street."

Dunleavy, sent to cover an execution, had been invited by the prison authorities to witness the condemned convict's death. He watched as guards buckled the terrified man to the electric chair with large seatbelts, winced as smoke rose from the twitching body when the current was turned on. Later, he leant over to one of his crew and stage whispered: ``Who says seatbelts save lives?"

The old street dog, as Kearns calls him, would do anything to get a story, but remained pure by his own peculiar standards - untainted by pretension and hypocrisy, although he'd plead guilty to most other vices.

He was one of a push of larrikin Australians who, working for Murdoch, the outsider, recruited American disciples like Kearns and tilted at the established networks' television news - eventually changing American news coverage forever. It was intoxicating at the time- though not necessarily, he admits now, for the better.

Dunleavy had become a star of print with the Post at the height of its fame - the Son of Sam serial killer coverage and ``Headless Body in Topless Bar" headline were in his time. But after switching to Murdoch's television enterprise he became a national figure on prime-time television. By the time he returned to his desk at the Post three years ago he was a legend of the tabloid genre he had helped define in the United States.

He was, some say, the inspiration for the tabloid reptile reporter in the film Natural Born Killers.

Then, of course, there were his books.

With a wife he ghosted The Happy Hooker, the memoirs of call girl Xaviera Hollander. His novel, The Very First Lady, concerned a woman who murdered her way to become the first female US President. But it was Elvis: What Happened? that really made his name. The book, which exposed Presley's sordid life of drugs and violence, was instantly controversial because the King of Rock died only two weeks after it was published.

Dunleavy made about $25,000 from the Elvis book, a tidy sum in 1977, but nothing compared with the millions the best-seller made for Murdoch. Dunleavy didn't care. He was happy to get the story first, driven only by the fear that he'd be beaten and content that his junkyard-dog loyalty would be rewarded by an organisation that would take care of him for life.

Once, during his time in television, Dunleavy responded on camera to charges by another author, Albert Goldman, in `Life' magazine, that his book had caused Presley to kill himself.

The interviewer, a friend, put Goldman's accusation to Dunleavy, who snatched the magazine and threw it to the studio floor, snarling: ``This is absolute garbage!"

The director asked him to do it again. Dunleavy shrugged, smiled calmly, then did it all again, snarl and all. Take two.

Afterwards he grabbed a colleague and said, deadpan, ``This book, this accusation that I killed him, that he committed suicide, mate-" His eyes lit up and he blurted gleefully: ``I really think it's true, you know! I think I really killed Elvis."

These days he has the column - often filed from Langans bar - the Manhattan apartment, the Long Island house, and the reputation that makes every day like an episode of This Is Your Life. It's a long way from where he started.

Born at Bondi just before the war, he was educated at Randwick High, where he played rugby and played up. A copy boy at 14 on the Sydney Sun, he talked his way into a cadetship with the Mirror, where he was in opposition to his photographer father.

He chuckles over the rivalry with his father, who was a colorful character, too, it seems. In the 1950s, when Frank Sinatra was in Australia with Ava Gardner he pushed Dunleavy senior's big Speed Graphic camera into his face. The photographer couldn't get to Sinatra to even up, but he punched his bodyguard Hank Sanicola instead. When Steve junior finally got to interview Old Blue Eyes in the 1980s, he had the satisfaction of thinking about that story.

After earning his spurs in the Sydney tabloid wars, young Dunleavy left in 1959, aged 20. His first stop was the Philippines ``poncing around getting drunk", he recalls. Then he worked for the Stars and Stripes in Tokyo for two years. ``In those days you could work for a newspaper and freelance for another."

He also worked in Hong Kong, on the South China Morning Post and the Far East American, ran his own bar, and did song and dance as a sideline before leaving the East under mysterious circumstances, smuggled out with a price on his head after running foul of the triads.

In New York his rabid winner-takes-all attitude was a winner. He was home. As news editor of Star magazine, he ``exhibited a greater handle on the middle and lower-class American psyche than any graduate of an American journalism school," claims Kearns. His tongue-in-cheek reactionary patriotism won him, hilariously enough, the American of the Year Award from the far-right wing John Birch Society.

Then, of course, came the 1970s and his time as metro editor of the Post at the pinnacle of its time as leader of the yellow press, stirring up fear, excitement and opinion.

He's been back to Australia only four times in 40 years. The long trip across the Pacific combined with the no-smoking rule don't make visits more likely in future.

Regrets?

None that he'll admit to. He says some people see him and his ilk as a ``cross between a pimp and a private eye". He chuckles and says, ``Waal, I don't worry about it. Because we were honest to our product. We take no prisoners. We make no excuses. If we got caught it was curtains. If we won, we were the victors. One thing we weren't were hypocrites."

His creed, he says, is: ``Don't complain ... but don't explain."

Of his longtime boss, Rupert Murdoch, he says loyally: ``He is the most vilified American since Mad Dog Coles was shot in Chicago." He pretends not to hear suggestions that the otherwise ``fearless" tabloids aren't quite so brave when it comes to turning the spotlight on Murdoch's domestic affairs.

And the biggest story?

The old brawler flicks this aside with ease. ``The one you did yesterday," he cracks.

Seconds later, he gets serious. When man landed on the moon in 1969, he muses, he was booked into a bed and breakfast place, covering the Ted Kennedy scandal after Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in the wayward senator's car at Chappaquiddick.

Exactly 30 years later, in mid-1999, he slept in the same bed in the same place, covering the death of Ted's nephew, JFK junior, when his plane went down.

``Ted gets bumped off the front page (on the anniversary of Chappaquiddick) because of the death of his own nephew," he says, shaking his head at this enormous coincidence as he fishes another Parliament cigarette from the pack on the bar.

He even claims to remember the room rates. In 1969, it was $38 a night. Thirty years later, it was $320. How can you doubt a man who comes up with details like that?

It's lunch time and the crowd swells in Langans. One of the new arrivals pulls up a stool next to Dunleavy and orders a cheeseburger and coke for lunch.

He is thirty-something, good-looking, well-dressed and a sharp talker. Dunleavy introduces him as Sean Hannity, a friend of his. Hannity says wistfully that he'd love to stay and have a drink and a talk, but he's gotta do the show, y' know.

Hannity, it turns out, does three hours of drive-time radio followed by two hours of prime-time current affairs television in the biggest market in the US, which is probably as big as there is on Earth. There are huge billboards with his picture on them around the city. He's big time in the big city with the bright lights.

So, how does he rate the old Aussie at the bar?

``Dunleavy?" He smiles. ``He holds court here every day and dispenses wisdom and people listen. Yeah, he's still cutting edge."