Feb. 3, 2000 The Australian
Sydney, Australia

Tall Tales of Trash TV
On Media
By Mark Day

"What’s wrong with you?" my wife asked as I lay in bed on Saturday morning, recharging the batteries, laughing, chortling and giggling. It was a fair question because staying late in bed is not my habit these days and neither, she complains, is laughing.

There was nothing wrong. I was just reliving a part of ‘my past,’ utterly engrossed in Burt Kearns’ book, Tabloid Baby. It’s been out in the US since late October and it’s available here through Amazon.com, and it tells the rip-roaring, devil-may-care, booze-fuelled story of the explosive rise of tabloid TV in the US.

What made it compelling (500 pages devoured in two days) reading for me is that I know all the central characters (except the author); they’re Australians! I worked with them all, and in one case (ahem, the most excessive) I may well have been responsible for unleashing his brilliance and atrocities on the world.

Tabloid TV stormed the staid world of US TV news soon after Rupert Murdoch founded the Fox network in 1985. Just as Murdoch had shaken up Fleet Street—the home of the tabloid genre—he saw opportunities outside the square in the US. As Kearns writes, Fox "aimed for a spot somewhere below the belt of America’s lowest common denominator," and when Murdoch wanted a magazine show—A Current Affair – to lead the charge for Fox News, "he looked no further than this own team, the wild and unruly Australian journalists who manned outposts of his NewsCorp print empire."

Kearns nominates Peter Brennan ("a genius"), Steve Dunleavy ("a legend"), and Wayne Darwen ("the wild child") as the three key Australians in the ACA team, although others star in cameo roles – Peter Faiman, Ian "The Pig" Rae, Neal Travis, (US-born) Gerald Stone and Gordon Elliott.

I worked with Dunleavy when he first arrived in New York, on the run, it is said, from Japanese mafiosi, in 1966. Later, when I was editor of the Sydney Daily Mirror, Peter Brennan was my news editor for a while before he went to Channel Ten’s Good Morning Australia, and Wayne Darwen was a cadet with a quick eye and a good turn of phrase who rarely failed to turn up a bright angle. I sent him to the New York office on a short-term gig. He never returned.

At ACA, and later the knock-off imitators it spawned (Hard Copy, Inside Edition, Now It Can Be Told, Premier Story, et al) the Aussies became, in Dunleavy’s words "the wildest bunch of pirates imaginable—a brazen bunch of bandits who ambushed, conned, begged, borrowed, bought and charmed to grab that story."

Their subjects were the stuff of the supermarket trashy weeklies— National Enquirer, Star, Globe, Weekly World News—and to get it to air, they cheated, lied, and, if they didn’t actually make things up, they put a massive eggbeater through the facts. Wayne Darwen, for instance, proposed a story on JFK’s gay lover. He had no proof, of course, but he did have someone willing to say he was. See?

Their trade was learned on the streets of Sydney during the tabloid wars between the Daily Mirror and the Sun. Kearns retells the famous story of Dunleavy, a young reporter for the Sun in the 50s, slashing the tyres of the Mirror’s car to beat his opponent—his father, a photographer—to a story.

It was no less competitive during my time as editor in the mid-70s. I was sometimes furtively warned not to ask how our frontline reporters such as Mike Munro and Col Allan got their stories: it was safer not to know.

This Sydney training was taken on to new battlegrounds in the US in the decade from the mid-80s. Even to outer space: Brennan broke new ground when he put to air "exclusive" video pirated from a rival‘s satellite feed.

The men in white shirts who ran Yankee TV before the wild bunch of Aussies unleashed their talents were bewildered and bemused as they saw the raw, gutsy, tell-it-like-it-s approach grip the audience. Ratings rose, making millions of dollars and underpinning Fox’s underdog battle against the incumbent networks.

Kearns tells it all in a vivid, brutally honest account that is riveting, funny, yet ultimately sad. Not only do the central character fall, one by one, victims of booze, fatigue and Hollywood politics, but so does the genre itself.

Murdoch’s soldiers grabbed US TV by the scruff of the neck and shook it up. But it was unsustainable, because the audience for their sock-it-to-‘em style of reporting was at the bottom end of the demographics. Tabloid TV attracted trailer-park demographics in their droves, but advertisers were looking upmarket. ACA’s viewers were Macy’s shoplifters.

There were a number of attempts to take the shows up a notch or two, invariably accompanied by a decline in viewers.

In a sense, Tabloid Baby is a tabloid history of tabloid itself; a potted, bovrilised, cut-to-the chase story about a 10-year TV sub-set of the wider newspaper genre that grew, blossomed, and wilted within the 20th-century.

The evolution of the tabloid genre illustrates the merging of information and entertainment, often to the point where the veracity of information is subsumed by the desire to provoke a laugh.

Sure, we still have plenty of newspapers publishing in the tabloid (half-broadsheet) format. Sure, these papers tend to report more, but shorter and tighter, accounts of events than the so-called "quality" papers, and sure, they are generally more popular, in terms of sales, than the broadsheets.

But these days, tabloids in Australia are nothing like the screaming afternooners that died more than a decade ago. They have taken on more serious, quality approach, delivering more in-depth material with less frippery.

They still seek to have an element of fun, but today’s tabloids are more likely to ask that they be trusted rather than laughed, chortled or guffawed over.

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.