There’s a photograph of Rupert Murdoch taken in December 2007 shortly after his News Corp purchased Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Recreated in a scene in Succession, it shows Murdoch standing atop a makeshift platform of copier paper boxes to address the WSJ’s newsroom.
Where Murdoch was once depicted as something of a colossus — in 1977, Time put him on the cover as King Kong astride the Twin Towers — this photo shows him for what he had become in the early 2000s: a 76-year-old with a bad dye job whose 30-something wife, his third by that point, was overheard to say “Are you going deaf, old man?” He didn’t look like a media mogul; he looked old and feeble.
Since that photo, Murdoch has only gotten older and feebler. He had a pie thrown in his face while testifying at the House of Commons; he shut down News of the World after a phone hacking scandal involving celebrities, royals, and Milly Dowler, a murdered 13-year-old girl; he lost his multimillion dollar Bel-Air home to a fire; he got divorced twice and broke an engagement; he suffered a serious back injury slipping on a boat; he paid a $787.5 million settlement to voting machine company Dominion; he lost $125 million he’d invested in Theranos; and had an ugly family feud play out in the courts and the media.
And yet, Murdoch is still standing atop a platform of paper.
This week, the 94-year-old launched the California Post, a print and web news organization that aims to cover California largely from the point of view of people who despise California. A spinoff of the New York Post, which Murdoch acquired in 1976 and managed to bring to profitability by 2021, this new paper is undoubtedly the final edition from a man who has been buying, launching, and folding papers since before most of his employees were born.
If the California Post is a legacy play for Murdoch as he approaches his centenary, it’s a sad one.
Then again, Murdoch’s legacy was always going to be his coarsening of the culture, his diminishment of journalism, his undermining of democracies, and his elevation of demagogues while wasting vast sums of money. In that respect, the California Post is a perfect final gesture for the man who put topless models on Page Three of The Sun, Tucker “You’ve been a bad little girl” Carlson on Fox News, and Donald Trump in the White House. Think of the California Post as one last arthritic middle finger to the world.
The whole thing is, as a Fleet Street hack might say, the dog’s breakfast. In its first three days, readers were treated to a piece with quotes from Mayor Daniel Lurie about the supposed evils of harm reduction weirdly swerves into a paragraph that notes (why?) “unlike Minneapolis’s Mayor Jacob Frey or Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Lurie has worked with President Trump on managing immigration enforcement in his city”; a repackaging of a WSJ story from last week (that Fox News also redid) about hotel rooms lacking bathroom doors is less an example synergy than lethargy; something something Sydney Sweeney (previously in TMZ, also a Fox outlet); a five-byline exclusive wherein the Post team watched the president sign an executive order to federalize the rebuilding of Los Angeles neighborhoods destroyed by the Eaton fires which will assuredly happen; a piece about gas prices that plays like an old Mr. Show with Bob and David sketch; an opinion piece that blames the so-called billionaire tax on communists (huh?) by a Miami-based right-wing influencer and marketing person for Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund that could have been output by an LLM trained on Ed Anger’s My America column from the Weekly World News; oh, and an interview with Bill Maher, Hollywood’s answer to a question no one asked.
The California Post’s ads, wheatpasted around town, say it’s for people who “Live in Two States: California and Reality,” but it’s more accurately described as for people who moved here from New York and are still bitching about the bagels. It’s hard to imagine anyone — not the reddest of red Bakersfield Republicans or Orange County’s most Mar-a-Lago-faced residents — picking this thing up for $3.75 when they can get all the news about Hollywood hypocrites and Governor New-scum from Macedonian teenagers on Facebook.
That is, if they could find a copy. I called around to the few remaining newsstands in San Francisco and Oakland and none carried it; some hadn’t even heard of it. For now, this splashy new West Coast paper is mostly a content vertical tucked into the pop-up choked New York Post website.
To call California Post a rag is to insult the usefulness of rags. At best, it’s an unfrozen artifact of a different era when OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings still roamed the freeways; at worst, it’s a Simpsons site gag come to life.
If Rupert Murdoch dies tomorrow, ending his long and storied career of global empire building and journalistic standards lowering and leaving behind so many disgruntled children and ex-wives, the California Post surely won’t make it into the first paragraph of his obituaries. But Milly Dowler probably will.
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to clarify that the California Post quoted Mayor Lurie but did not interview him.
