Free Murdoch's World by David Folkenflik

height of the scare over the Son of Sam serial killings in the New York City boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, Dunleavy wrote a florid front-page piece advertised by the headline “Gunman Sparks Son of Sam Chase.” Readers learned right before the article’s conclusion that the gunman was not the Son of Sam at all.
    After helping to launch A Current Affair , Dunleavy surfaced yet again for Murdoch on the early Fox weekend show The Reporters , another hour of gossip and crime. “In its first couple of years,television was considered a foul little business that no self-respecting journalist wanted anything to do with,” Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote at its debut in 1988. “Fox Broadcasting is trying to bring those days back.”
    The Reporters didn’t last long, but Dunleavy never lost his luster with Murdoch. Fox did not need to develop refined taste. The early reality Fox show Cops , an exceptionally cost-effective production that taped raids by patrolling police officers on low-level criminals, frequently beat its competition in the ratings. The Simpsons , a spin-off ofTracey Ullman’s comedy show, became a breakaway hit. Married with Children , coarse by anyone’s definition, helped brand the network as edgier and younger than its network elders and prefigured some of its recent successes, such as Seth MacFarlane’s animated Family Guy .
    Meanwhile, local Fox stations conjured up newscasts with a brisker, more tabloidy feel. By 1992 Murdoch decided that the local stations Fox owned and ran itself would no longer carry CNN’s feed (which he had obtained from CNN founder Ted Turner at a dear cost). In 1995 Murdoch brought to New York one of his foremost British executives, Andrew Neil. To be precise, Neil was a Scot, like Murdoch’s grandfather, but not stereotypically dour. The mirthful former reporter and editor for the Economist had served for nearly a dozen years as editor of Murdoch’s Sunday Times ; he was also the founding chairman of Sky TV, later merged into BSkyB, today one of the most important holdings that News Corp and the Murdochs control. Neil came to the US to help guide the creation of Fox News.
    The birth of Fox News sprang from Murdoch’s decision to create a television empire around sports, as he had previously in Australia and the UK. In 1993 Fox bought the rights to broadcast the games of the NFL’s then dominant NFC division, swiping football from CBS for nearly $1.6 billion.“We’re a network now. Like no other sport will do, the NFL will make us into a real network,” Murdoch exulted to Sports Illustrated . “In the future there will be 400 or 500 channels on cable, and ratings will be fragmented. But football on Sunday will have the same ratings, regardless of the number of channels. Football will not fragment.”
    He was right. And he wanted a winning weekly bookend for football to strike at another top-rated CBS program. “At that stage, Rupert Murdoch had in mind to set up a Fox News answer to 60 Minutes ,”Neil told me. “It was to be an hour-long news show going out after the NFL football program on Fox.” His costar was to be Judith Regan, a young woman who had sliced her way to the top-selling echelons ofthe book publishing business. Smart, and possessed of finely sharpened elbows, Regan had by this point been rewarded with her own imprint, ReganBooks, at Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing house. Neil started getting uneasy as Murdoch brought in a consultant to help punch up the concept of what news would look and sound like on Fox. The idea of creating a show yielded to the idea of creating an entire cable network—a niche news channel.
    The new network would speak to viewers who felt the rest of the press was too liberal, like the New York Times , even 60 Minutes itself. The consultant had been a political strategist for Presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, the