Book review: Breaking the news: The sordid and legendary days of the ‘New York Post’

In the summer of 1977, Gotham endured a heat wave, a black-out, and a serial killer stalking the streets. 

Their newspaper having been recently taken over by Rupert Murdoch, some intrepid New York Post reporters came up with a cunning plan to lure the so-called Son of Sam from the shadows. 

Armed with a gun, one reporter would dress up as a woman, another would pretend to be her boyfriend while the couple sat in a parked car, and a photographer lurked in the back seat to capture any attack.

All involved eventually thought better of the elaborate, potentially fatal ruse but that the idea was even considered offers an insight into the often demented culture of the city’s tabloid newspapers. 

A world laid wonderfully bare in Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media, Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacamo’s rollicking oral history of the New York Post since 1976.

Aside from being a shoo-in for most brilliantly-titled book of the year, it’s a work that chronicles perhaps the last half century in history when newspapers still mattered. 

A sentence all the more poignant when savouring so many tall tales involving a cast of outrageous characters. 

None more so than Steve Dunleavy. Columnist non-pareil, the permanently sozzled Aussie turned up to cover court cases with vodka bottles clinking in his bag, and once pretended to be a grief counsellor to snag an interview with the mother of one of Son of Sam’s victims.

That this carry-on became part of his outsized legend illustrates that the Post was, like all tabloids, far more concerned with getting the story than observing traditional journalistic ethics. 

Rules were bent. Judgements sometimes skewed. Editors once ran a front-page story about the break-up of a property developer named Donald Trump’s marriage rather than devote the space to the release of Nelson Mandela.

Trump is a recurring character in this narrative. Before The Apprentice convinced Americans he was a successful billionaire and set him on a path to the White House, he often phoned the Post newsroom desperately pleading for coverage and mentions in its pages. 

Although Murdoch, who gets a well-rounded portrait beyond the usual caricature here, despised him and all he stood for, he put the newspaper fully behind his candidacy when it was good for business, and the organ has ended up becoming risibly Trumpian in recent years.

Founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801, the Post is the oldest continuously published newspaper in America and the one that gave us “Headless body in topless bar”, a pop cultural monument universally acknowledged as the finest headline in history. 

A boozy, bawdy place to work in the American decades forensically excavated here, journalists were cautioned upon signing contracts that only their first stint in rehab was covered by the employer. After that they were on their own.

As somebody who spent most of the 1990s working in The Sunday Tribune, where the newsroom was a similarly raucous, foul-mouthed, and hilarious theatre, thrumming with manic energy and infectious dynamism, this is an often wistful read. 

No newspaper alumnus could possibly savour these yarns without growing nostalgic for those bygone days and nights.

In the weeks after Elin Nordegren took a nine-iron to his Cadillac and shattered his public image forever, the Post ran 20 consecutive front-page stories about Tiger Woods, one more than it had devoted to the 9/11 terror attacks. 

A stat that speaks multitudes about the paper’s celebrity obsession and unerring commercial instincts, it somehow doesn’t get mentioned in the book. 

A minor quibble. This is an entertaining, fast-paced, and hilarious read. Like the Post in its heyday.