Llewellyn King: Brilliant, brazen Murdoch’s two-tiered approach

Rupert Murdoch accepting the conservative Hudson Institute's 2015 Global Leadership Award.

One of the Fox “News” -affiliated TV stations

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

I have watched Rupert Murdoch’s career with admiration, irritation and, sometimes, horror.

His besetting sin is that he goes too far. The fault that has landed Fox News settling with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million isn’t new in the Murdoch experience.

He is a publishing and television genius. But like many a genius, his success keeps running away with him — and then he must pay up. He does so without apology and without discernible contrition. Those who know him well tell me he treats his losses with a philosophical shrug.

Murdoch’s talent reaches into many aspects of journalism. He has nerves of titanium in business and a fine ability to challenge the rules — and, if he can, to bend them.

As an employer he is ruthless and at times generous and indulgent. I know many who have worked for Murdoch and they speak about the contradictions of his ruthlessness and his generosity, particularly to those who have borne the battle of public humiliation for him. Check out the salaries at Fox News and the London Sun.

The Murdoch story begins, as most know, when he inherited a newspaper from his father. He quickly formed a mini-news empire in Australia.

But Murdoch had his sights set — as many in the former British possessions do — on London and the big time there. While at Oxford, he was hired as a sub-editor at The Daily Express, then owned by another colonial, the formidable Lord Beaverbrook.

In 1968, Murdoch bought The News of the World, a crime-centric Sunday paper. The next year, he bought the avowedly left-wing Sun.

Here Murdoch showed his genius at knowing the makeup of the audience and what it wanted: He flipped The Sun from left politics to extreme right and, for good measure, stripped the pinups of their bras.

That was a hit with men, and the politics were a revelation: Murdoch had defined a conservative, loyalist and anti-European vein in the British newspaper readership that hadn’t been mined. He went for it and soon had the largest circulation paper in Britain.

After he bought the redoubtable Times and Sunday Times, the Murdoch invasion was complete. He had also been instrumental in the launch of Sky News.

Money rolled in and political power and prestige with it — although there is no evidence that he sought formal preferment, like a peerage.

On to New York and U.S. newspapers.

Here the formula of sex and nationalism foundered. He didn’t succeed as an American newspaper proprietor except for deftly keeping The Wall Street Journal a prestige publication.

However, he brilliantly – with several bold moves — built a television network. Then, in the cable division, he applied the UK formula: Give the punters what they want.

In Britain it was sex and nationalism. In America, it was far-right jingoism. Murdoch gave it to Americans just as he had given it to the British: in large helpings of conspiracy, paranoia and nationalism.

In his tabloids, royal and celebrity gossip was the mainstay after right-wing Euro-bashing and breast-baring. He paid well for sensationalism and that attracted a seedy kind of private investigator-journalist, prepared to go further and deeper than his or her colleagues. Corruption of the police was the next step, along with telephone bugging and other egregious transgressions.

Eventually, it all came tumbling down. Murdoch had to appear before a parliamentary committee, fire people and, in a strange move, he closed The News of the World, as though the inanimate newspaper had been breaking the law without anyone knowing.

In fact, he had gone too far. The joyful music of the cash register had led to a wilder and wilder dance.

He damaged his legend, his papers and all of Britain’s journalism. He also lost the opportunity to buy control of Sky News.

But Fox was a joy. Oh, the sweet music and the wild dance! Give them what they want all day and all night. Give them their heroes untrammeled and their own facts. And finally, the election results they, the punters, wanted to believe, not the ones that the polls posted.

You can see the two-tiered approach that has worked so well for Murdoch working again here. Some respectable publications and some vulgar money makers, like his respected The Australian and his raucous big-city tabloids; in Britain, the respected Times and Sunday Times and the ultra-sensational Sun; in America, the respected Wall Street Journal and the disreputable Fox Cable News and his other remaining newspaper, the skallywag New York Post.

For a remarkably gifted man, Murdoch can do some appalling things and has genius without bounds.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Ditch your optimism: U.S. democracy is imperiled

We are an optimistic people. And in today's world, there's the rub.

By nature, we are sure that the extremes of any given time will be corrected as the political climate changes and elections bring in new players. The great ship of state will always get back on an even keel and the excesses, or omissions, of one administration will be corrected in the next.

Maybe not this time.

The norms uprooted by President Trump are possibly too many not to have left lasting damage to this Republic.

Consider just some of his transgressions:

· We have abandoned our place as the beacon of decency and the values enshrined in that.

· America's good name has gone up in smoke, as with the Paris climate agreement and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear forces (INF) treaty.

· The president has meddled in our judicial system by intimidating prosecutors and seeking to influence judges.

· The president has blown on the coals of prejudice and sanctioned racial antagonism.

But above all, Trump has tested the constitutional limits of presidential power and found that it can be expanded exponentially. He has expanded executive privilege to absolute power.

Trump has done this with the help of the pusillanimous members of the Senate and the oh-so-malleable Atty. Gen. William Barr – his new Roy Cohn.

The most pernicious of Trump’s enablers, the eminence grise behind the curtain, gets little attention. He is Rupert Murdoch, a man who has done a lot of good and incalculable harm.

The liberal media rails -- indeed enjoys -- railing against Fox News but has little to say about the 88-year-old proprietor who, with a single stroke, could silence Sean Hannity and tame Tucker Carlson (whom I know and like).

But Murdoch remains aloof and silent. The power of Fox is not its editorial slant but that it forms a malignant circle of harm. It is Trump’s daily source of news, endorsement, prejudice, and even names for revenge.

There are two other conservative networks, OAN and Newsmax. But neither has the flare that Fox has as a broadcast outlet, nor acts as the eyes and ears and adviser to the president.

I am an admirer of Murdoch in many ways. But like a president, maybe he should get a lot of scrutiny.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, where they dominate, have rejected climate change, and possibly played a role in the country not being prepared for the terrible wildfires.

In Britain, he has stirred feeling against the European Union for decades. His Sun, the largest circulation paper, is Fox News in print and was probably the template for Fox having campaigned ceaselessly and vulgarly against Europe.

After long years of watching Murdoch in Britain and here, I know the damage he can do and why he should be named. I must say, though, that Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, better than before he bought it.

The Democrats, to my mind, present a sorry resistance. None of their presidential candidates has delivered a speech of vision, capturing the popular imagination.

Democrats search the news for the latest Trumpian transgressions and get a kind of comfort by seeing, by their lights, how terrible he is. But there is none of the old confidence that the president will be trounced in the next election and the ship of state will right itself because it always does.=

Maybe it will list more.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Brexiteers have no clear road map so it's fear and chaos for business

Anti-Brexit demonstration in Birmingham, England.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Blimey! What a cock-up!

That is what you might say in British vernacular about the mess that Britain is dealing with as it struggles to leave the European Union by March 29, 2019.

With the deadline in clear line of sight, there is no exit plan and Britain is becoming -- depending on whom in the Great British Divide you ask – either critically alarmed or hysterically impatient.

British industry and the whole import-export infrastructure are in panic. Supply lines need to be adjusted and possibly new ones established. Manufacturers are wondering whether it will be possible to continue as Britain-based or whether they should up and move to Europe. The British motor industry, which is not owned in the United Kingdom any longer, is a case in point. Jaguar and Land Rover may be iconic marques, but they are Indian-owned, and will they always be made in Coventry, England? Can London remain the financial center of Europe when Paris, Dublin and Frankfurt are scrambling for the title?

On the impatient side, Brexiteers are screaming for an end to the European linkage no matter what.

In the middle, and in a muddle, is Prime Minister Teresa May, distrusted by the extreme Brexit supporters and considered incompetent by the “Remainers,” who still hope that there will be a miraculous reprieve from the referendum vote of June 29, 2016.

Collectively, the British media are not helpful. Most of the press (especially but not exclusively those newspapers controlled by Rupert Murdoch) is for leaving, often vociferously so. When it appeared, in the latest development, that more time may be granted for Britain to find solutions to the thorniest issues, such as the Irish border question, they howled in unison for faster action.

The newspapers, representing almost the entire readership of daily newspapers in Britain, have fought for Brexit and fight against reconsideration: The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Sun are adamantly and relentlessly for Britain getting out, mostly with little regard to the consequences.

You cannot consider these newspapers without understanding that they have played the same role as Fox News in the United States in inflaming nationalism and worries about sovereignty -- a word that has been taken out of history’s locker for the purpose of stirring up antagonism to Europe.

The newspapers I have cited have been aggressively antagonistic to Europe for decades and were, it could be argued, decisive in the “advisory” referendum in which the British public voted to leave Europe by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent. The die was cast for the most extraordinary change of direction ever voted by a democracy.

The Brexiteers had the advantage of passion, a well-oiled disinformation campaign and the wild-card endorsement of Boris Johnson, the clownish but clever politician who wants to be prime minister beyond all else. David Cameron’s government, which called the referendum, misjudged the electorate through over-reliance on the polls.

Hopes that Parliament will finally assert itself, take charge of Brexit and call another referendum or nullify the first on the grounds that it was not constitutionally binding, are fading. There is wide acceptance in Britain that the nation is set to sail into waters uncharted -- stormy but somehow having the lure of the nation’s explorer past.

Economists are not so sure, and business is looking at decampment to the European mainland.

The Brexiteers see a glowing new era for Britain, which shed its empire with little pain at home, and they may feel this will happen again. British creativity has always been one of its great strengths; for example, creativity in technology which contributed to the success of the empire, including John Harrison’s chronometer and James Watts’s steam engine.

The British will continue to create, to be sure. But how will they sell their creations if they have exempted themselves from their largest market?

The United States, if we do not choke off all immigration, can look forward to a surge of British talent coming across the Atlantic.

Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. A native of Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia), he was a journalist in England before moving to America, where he has been a columnist, editor, publisher and international business consultant. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

Llewellyn King: The triumph of ruthless uber-cynic Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch.

Liberals get apoplectic at the mention of the Koch brothers and, by the same token, conservatives gag at the mention of George Soros.

Yet, it can be argued, another rich man might have had a much larger effect on the politics of this century: Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch is the uber publisher and broadcaster of our time, and manipulator of public opinion. In Britain, he is courted by prime ministers and in the United States by politicians, left and right. Since the emergence of Fox News as the champion of the angry white voter, he has been the comfort and the looking glass of one Donald Trump.

Murdoch is a phenomenon. He is courageous, opportunistic and blessed with an unparalleled ability to divine the often-hidden aspirations of his readers and viewers.

He also does not care what people think. That may be his greatest strength. He does what he damn well pleases and his success at doing that is played out on the world stage. He has gained the social and cultural recognition of media supremacy but has not sought them.

He loves making newspapers, making television, making money and making trouble.

His British newspapers — more than half the people who read a newspaper in Britain read one owned by a Murdoch company — backed Britain’s seemingly suicidal vote to leave the European Union.

The tone of his anti-European ravings was summed up on Nov. 1, 1990, when Britain turned its back on European monetary union with the now famous front-page headline “Up Yours Delors!” in The Sun, Britain’s largest circulation daily newspaper. At the time, Jacques Delors was president of the European Commission.

The Sun was not content just with its headline: It advised all its readers to turn toward Europe and make an obscene gesture. Not exactly sophisticated reasoning, but good at getting the nationalistic sap up.

The same thing you can get on Fox day after day from Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham, and the thin gruel of reason served up by the breakfast team. Gruel, it must be noted, that is nourishment and justification for President Trump.

I still marvel at what amounted to Murdoch’s conquest of British newspaper publishing. It was genius: He identified a right-wing, jingoistic streak in the British working-class male and he went for it with chauvinistic fury — and naked female breasts on Page 3. Murdoch’s legendary conservatism did not extend to women in front of the camera. If raunchy sold, raunchy it would be.

It paid off and enabled Murdoch later to take over the legendary Sunday Times and daily Times and to finance his American adventure, where something of the same formula applied to cable television has been diabolically effective.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Britain played a key role in the Brexit vote. It is less clear whether Fox played a role in Trump’s election, but it did not hurt. The trick in publishing or broadcasting to an ideological base, a conservative strategist once told me, is to keep the faithful, not to change minds. More troubling is the effect Fox has as an enabler for Trump’s more egregious actions, and his banal but damaging attacks on the media.

Fox floats the idea the mainstream media is a kind of monolithic, left-wing conspiracy and Trump amplifies it. Between Fox and Trump, they toss the mendacities back and forth until the authorship is lost. It is awesome to think mainstream can be turned into a pejorative just through repetition.

Murdoch is a conservative, except in journalistic vulgarity and when it is advantageous to go left, as he did in Britain when he backed Tony Blair and Labor in 1997. In New York, he cultivated the Clintons — maybe as insurance, maybe just as the entitlement to know power that goes along with his own power, or he may just have liked them.

Having been curious about Murdoch and his ways — and at times lost in admiration — since he figuratively invaded Britain in 1969 and seen the good and the bad that followed, I think he toys with politicians and is amused by his ability to influence events. Not much more and not much less.

There is a British expression for stirring things up: putting a bit of stick about. No one has put more stick about than Murdoch and he is not done. Tune in to Fox tonight and just see.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s  also a long-time columnist and international business consultant, now focusing on the energy sector. For many years he published Washington-based newsletters about the defense and energy sectors. Before then, he was an editor at newspapers in Britain and the United States. He's now based in Rhode Island.

David Warsh: With new editor, is The Wall Street Journal at a big turning point?

SOMERVILLE, MASS.

Ever since John Dryden turned the Roman poet Horace back on himself with a gentle aside, “Even Homer nods” has been a useful way of observing that the most accomplished story-teller occasionally loses the thread of the narrative.

The old saw came to mind last week when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. replaced the editor of The Wall Street Journal. 

The WSJ, for most of a hundred years, and especially after World War II, served as Homer to the Republican party – in particular the paper’s editorial page. Such was the deliberate and reassuring voice of Vermont Royster, chief editorial writer from 1958 to 1971, that the paper still reprints one of his editorials annually on the eve of Thanksgiving.

Starting with the appointment of Robert Bartley as its editor, in 1972, the editorial page began veering off course. Bartley was a complicated man, a Midwesterner, possessing many good instincts, including enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan. A sense of fair play, however, was not among his gifts. Three decades of increasingly bad sportsmanship began with the election of Bill Clinton, in 1992.

WSJ editorials proceeded in lockstep with Congressman Newt Gingrich throughout the 1990s; after they 2000 espoused the views of the faction led by Vice President Dick Cheney known as the “Vulcans”; and make common cause with the Congressional Freedom Caucus today. 

Meanwhile, the news pages remained on the same even keel under Paul  Steiger, managing editor from 1991 to 2007. After Rupert Murdoch bought the paper from the Bancroft family, that began to change. Murdoch replaced managing editor Marcus Brauchli (who had succeeded Steiger a few months before) with Robert Thomson, his fellow Australian, who was generally seen to move the news pages slightly to the right. 

Thomson was promoted in 2012 to take charge of a newly-formed publishing unit, some on whose executives had been tainted by Murdoch’s British newspapers’ phone scandal. He was succeeded by Gerard Baker, a conservative columnist for Murdoch’s Times of London.

It’s a commonplace that Fox News underwent a sea change after Donald Trump was elected, becoming something of an echo chamber, with the president tweeting commentary from its morning broadcasts and occasionally phoning in for interviews. Less noticed has been the struggle within the news pages of the WSJ. Several of its top political and investigative reporters have left in the past two years for other newspapers; Baker has been accused of showing excessive deference to the president, even as The Journal took the lead in breaking stories of hush money payments by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Meanwhile, the editorial pages led the campaign against the FBI, ultimately devising the counterattack against the Mueller investigation known as “Spygate,” that House Speaker Paul Ryan shrugged off last week.   

Murdoch himself had installed Baker by  by pouring champagne over his head. Now the British-born newsman will host a WSJ-branded television show on Fox Business Network and write a column for a weekend section of the paper.  Presumably the decision to replace him was that of Murdoch’s sons. The promotion of Matt Murray, executive editor and long-time staffer, was announced with much less ceremony. It is  hard to imagine a more poignant exemplar of traditional WSJ values than Murray’s  book,  The Father and the Son: My Father's Journey to the Monastic Life  (Harper, 1999).

It was late last month that former House Speaker John Boehner  told a policy conference in Michigan, “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”

Indeed. And in the length of time between Homer and the present day, forty years of populist agitation from the pulpit of a formerly conservative newspaper is no more than forty winks. Still, it seems like a long time to me. The other big question, of course, is who will replace editorial page editor Paul Gigot, 63, who took over from Bartley in 2001. In the meantime, though, the GOP’s Homer has shown the first signs of waking up.

David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com

Llewellyn King: Murdoch profits richly by mining resentment, tribalism and sex

Rupert Murdoch.

Rupert Murdoch stands astride the Atlantic. He is the most successful newspaper publisher in the United Kingdom and the proprietor of Fox, the most successful cable news channel in the United States.

While he has many other spectacular holdings in the U.K., the United States, Australia and Asia, those are the two pillars on which the empire stands now that he has sold 21st Century Fox Entertainment to Disney.

I believe the two pillars are linked by what amounts to the Murdoch formula: find a chauvinistic, nationalistic vein and mine it.

Murdoch blew on the embers of resentment and stoked the fires of tribalism through The Sun, his big British moneymaker, and Fox News, his American gold mine.

He understood this social stratum, whether it was in working-class Britain or spread across what we now call the Red States in America. This audience felt ignored, put upon and unloved. Its traditional champions on the left — the unions, the Labor Party and the Democratic Party — had condescended to it, but not celebrated it.

Murdoch articulated its frustrations and gave them voice not where you would expect it on the left, but on the right.

A new and exceptional book by Irwin Stelzer, The Murdoch Method, lays out how Murdoch did this and how he holds his empire together. Stelzer should know. He has been a friend and consultant to Murdoch and his many enterprises for 35 years.

Stelzer, whom I have known for 45 years, is worthy of a book in his own right. When he met Murdoch, he had already achieved success enough for many a man. He founded National Economic Research Associates and sold it well. Then, after a stint with Rothschild in New York, he enjoyed running an energy program at Harvard. Then came Murdoch.

Stelzer worked so closely with Murdoch that a rival newspaper in London described him as “Murdoch’s man on earth.” And he was.

He was sometimes the go-between for British prime ministers and leading American figures, from Richard Nixon to Richard Cheney. Stelzer made Murdoch’s case to the mighty, and he crunched numbers. Money and the power of media made this world go around.

As the title suggests, Stelzer explains in his book how Murdoch manages so diverse a company as News Corp. and how he created and grew it from the newspapers he inherited from his formidable father, Sir Keith Murdoch, in out-of-the-way Adelaide, Australia.

What emerges is a portrait of man who thinks of himself as an outsider, a loner: a practitioner of a kind of minimalist management out to war against theestablishment and its elites.

Murdoch, both as a publisher and a businessman, has been incredibly courageous. He flipped The Sun from timid left to truculent right. He also stripped the brassieres off the models on Page 3. Chauvinism, sex and celebrity gossip was what Murdoch offered, and the public could not get enough. He also broke the British print unions in a near-military move to a secret printing site in Wapping, East London, in January 1986.

In America, Murdoch pretty well failed with newspapers he purchased in San Antonio, Boston and Chicago. He has not exactly succeeded with The New York Post, but he keeps it going as a personal indulgence. He is doing well with The Wall Street Journal. But Fox News is the jewel in his American crown.

Stelzer’s Murdoch and his method is one of a small executive staff: excellent executives who are very well paid and prepared to answer a call from their boss day and night. He let really gifted people, like Roger Ailes, of Fox, run their enterprises until there was a scandal and then, bang, the locks were changed, and settlements were paid. Murdoch is generous and ruthless.

Murdoch and Stelzer were in a way made for each other, although they did argue and sometimes Stelzer lost, only to find out just how wrong he was — as when he opposed the creation of the Fox Business Network.

Stelzer acknowledges he does not like everything Murdoch does; and he should not. Murdoch has treated the world as a playground where you make money by making damaging mischief — so you hire people like Sean Hannity and tolerate the inanity. Or you court the Clintons, but back Trump.

Stelzer has been on a wild ride and he takes you along in clear, readable prose.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

By size, anyway, Fox News is part of the 'Mainstream Media'

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' on GoLocal24:

Three prominent journalists at CNN were fired the other week for inadequately sourcing a story linking Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager and Trump confidant, to a Russian investment fund supposedly being investigated by the Senate. That is as it should be, although I doubt that we’ve heard the last about Mr. Scaramucci’s past activities.

One difference between the so-called mainstream media and Republican-Trumpian outlets as Fox News is that the former’s journalism is almost always much  more rigorous than Fox and  other Trumpian-style outlets. CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post, et al., make mistakes but they correct them. Fox, such allied newspapers as The New York Post and right-wing radio talk show people assiduously avoid making corrections or apologies, however erroneous their reporting and conspiracy theories.

Even many Trumpians, whatever their wishful thinking, tend to believe reporting from the “mainstream media’’ more than from the likes of Fox News, let alone such sleazy operations as Breitbart News and the pro-Trump National Enquirer.

As for “the mainstream media,’’ note that the most watched cable news outlet is Fox and  two of thetop five newspapers in America are owned by the Republican propaganda organ called News Corp. – The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. And the consolidation of the radio business has resulted in right wingers having far more broadcast radio outlets around America than the left or the middle. Listen to your car radio as you drive around America.

Meanwhile, I’m saddened by the decline of the quality of news reporting in one of my alma maters – The Wall Street Journal. While the news reporters used to report without fear or favor on activities of both Republican and Democratic administrations, now they usually shy away from looking into the dubious activities and those in the administration of Donald Trump, who is a close ally of News Corp. czar Rupert Murdoch.

Llewellyn King: Murdoch created the formula with which Ailes built Fox News

In the beginning, there was Rupert Murdoch. He created the formula.

Then he met Roger Ailes and installed him as head of what would become America’s most successful cable news channel, Fox News Channel, also known as Fox News.

And so the formula of conservatism and sex, pioneered on a newspaper in Britain, came to television and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1969 Murdoch bought an ailing British newspaper called The Sun. He bought it from the Daily Mirror Group, then the publishers of the most successful tabloid in Britain, The Daily Mirror, and its sibling The Sunday Mirror (where I once worked). The Daily Mirror was firmly left-wing and The Sun, if anything, more so. It had started life as The Daily Herald and was owned collectively by the trade union movement.

The new owners, who used an old formula — the working class as exploited, downtrodden and hopelessly dependent on the largesse of their employers — failed to attract or excite readers.

Murdoch, fresh from Australia (although he had worked earlier as an editor in London), looked around and saw something quite different. He saw a new worker, who owned a car, took vacations in Spain (thanks to jet travel), and did not feel oppressed.

The British workers — especially working men — had thrown off the past and were now much more like the workers of Australia and the United States. It was also a period of sexual freedom.

These workers would be Murdoch’s target.

Overnight, without warning, he turned The Sun from far-left  whining to triumphant far-right throatiness. Murdoch had realized that the working man had become a man of property.

As for sex, Murdoch would go further. British tabloids had always published “cheesecake” — pictures of busty, young women in bikinis. Murdoch took off the tops: Every day, on Page Three, he published a photo of an English rose blooming in a bikini bottom. It was bold and it was brave and it worked.

The Sun, with its new brawny politics of nationalism, anti-European attitude, right-wing enthusiasm and topless beauties, was a triumph. It began a meteoric rise, almost entirely at the expense of the forelock-tugging Daily Mirror.

The formula was born: right-wing nativism and sex.

When Murdoch came to the United States, he found the society was less louche and he could not put nudity into his newspapers. Also, there was a tradition of editorial duality: Although the politics of newspapers was not concealed, readers wanted to think that the news was impartial. Murdoch bought newspapers in San Antonio, New York, Boston and Chicago, and he started a weekly supermarket tabloid.

None succeeded and gradually Murdoch sold off these properties, except for The New York Post. Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, told me that he was the first to admit that he had misunderstood the U.S. market. That is probably why when he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007, he was careful to respect that property and to change it incrementally — for the better.

But the formula was not dead. When Ailes applied it to television, it worked all over again. Except this time, the result was even more spectacular in political power and profit.

Fox News is the voice of raucous conservatism, all served up with sex appeal.

Ailes clearly has had a fascination with beautiful, blond women reading the news — and other channels are going that way.

Ailes has done more than apply the formula: He has applied it with brio. He has given the news pace. It moves along and little inventions, like “Around the World in 80 Seconds,” are part of that energizing.

I visited with Ailes when Fox News was just beginning its ascent. He was thrilled with the fact that it had just drawn slightly ahead of CNN Headline News. I do not think he realized then how potent the formula would be and what heights his creation would reach.

Llewellyn King is host of White House Chronicle on PBS.  Based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., he is a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. This originated on InsideSources.

Llewellyn King: Providence maybe needs a BIG rollercoaster for branding

If your city is mostly famous for being between two other cities, if its main claim to fame is “It’s a great place to raise children,” then it’s time for your city fathers to take a course in branding.

Cities that prosper — that bring in company headquarters, tourists and where the crazy rich want to be — have to have distinguished brands.

New York’s brand is glorious excess. It has the brand of ever higher, stranger skyscrapers. The world’s most successful media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has just plonked down $57.2 million for what looks to be the world’s most lonely living space: the top four floors of a 60-story, bronze-and-glass building of a kind that is now transforming the Manhattan skyline. Take a small plot of land, build until what you get is a slender tower that defies nature and looks as though its purpose is to challenge a strong wind.

Murdoch’s aerie has glass on four sides, and he can see forever, at the least until other towers rise up. If you want to spy on him, you will have to do it by drone. His own paparazzi might try to get a picture using a drone, but where would they publish it?

If you have a few million to spare you can still get in the East 23rd Street building. But those floors that would make an eagle jealous, have gone to Murdoch. Most of us would be scared up there: a new take on “Naked and Afraid,” because without neighbors, there is no need to wear clothes.

Cities in the United States that have done the branding thing right are New Orleans, jazz and food; San Francisco, cable cars and attitude; Boston, higher education and hospitals (eds and meds); and Chicago, wind and the uber-hub airport. Washington is a special case: great museums, the White House and the Capitol, and palpable delusions of importance.

The branding ace, running in front worldwide, is London. The Romans gave it a head start, but it was not until the Swinging Sixties that London became a destination for the globe. You would think that the place had enough branding with the old features: Tower Bridge, the Tower, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, plus the changing of the guard.

But no. London keeps adding dizzying new features to its brand superiority. There is the Tate Modern, an art gallery in an old power station; the London Eye, a Ferris wheel that has captured world attention and city imitators; a bridge across the Thames River that wobbles, and now a new bridge is planned with gardens and shops on it. Then there are the taxis — black boxes, that remind you where you are in case you have overlooked the big red buses.

The current mayor of London, Boris Johnson (who has branded himself as a possible prime minister), has been keen to preserve and protect the London brand by insisting on preserving the double-decker buses, distinctive taxis and other expensive city bric-a-brac, because it is a hell of an investment.

Sure, Paris has the Eiffel Tower, but it is aging. Rome has the Coliseum — talk about aging. And St. Petersburg has the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. But for city branding, London is in front and pulling away, as the Brits exploit the cash value of differentness.

Providence and Baltimore are two cities of which I am particularly fond. But I would urge the city leadership in both places to get a brand, a trademark. It pays. Rides (London Eye, Eiffel Tower elevators, the San Francisco cable cars) are sure winners. Could I suggest an amphibious train across Baltimore Harbor, and the mother of all rollercoasters — big, but not scary — in Providence?

Like London and New York, these days you have to think big in city branding, or you will miss the incredible fun and profit of a city being silly.

Frivolity pays. Ask London’s Boris Johnson — and share a thought for Rupert Murdoch, stuck up in the sky.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle,” on PBS. He is a longtime international media executive, consultant and columnist.

Llewellyn King: Whether good merger or bad, the M&A kings prosper

  Whether Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox ultimately succeeds in its $80-billion bid for Time Warner, rest assured the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry will do just fine. Very fine, actually.

There is such a thing as the M&A industry, but it is elusive. It has no trade association and cannot be looked up in the telephone directory. But this virtual organization is a power in the land and very, very rich.

It is made up of investment bankers, lawyers, economists, advertising agencies, public-relations tacticians, lobbyists and legal printing firms. They all swing into action like sharks alerted by blood in the water. They are a diverse crew with one thing in common: They do not come cheap.

At the top of the pinnacle are the investment bankers and their pals in the hedge-fund world, who are ready with ideas and capital if it is needed; ready to reap the rewards of arbitrage. These are the elite officers of the Wall Street Brigades; money is their North Star. They have been bred, in the best schools, to expect it as their entitlement, and they are keen to live up to that expectation.

They are retained by both sides in a hostile takeover and, however it goes, their fees will be enough on one transaction to keep them on Easy Street for years. They fly high, shoot high and live high. They are aristocrats in the kingdom of money.

Just below them come the lawyers, droves of them each offering advice on some aspect of the challenge. Each billing more for one hour than most people earn in a week. When working on a big merger, where there are billions and billions of dollars in play, the legal fees run into the tens of millions of dollars -- and nobody cares. Outside of the senior management, who expect to get extraordinary wealthy – hundreds of millions of dollars, at least -- in a takeover, it is the bankers and the lawyers, denizens of Fifth Avenue and the Hamptons, who make out beyond normal dreams of avarice, and do it over and over.

So it is not surprising that it is often bankers who instigate mergers either by pushing the ideas and the finance mechanism on the firm that hopes to be the acquirer, or persuading a firm that it is time to put itself on the market. Once a target is “in play,” as Time Warner is, anything can happen: A white-knight suitor can come along or the vulnerable company can become an acquisitor, as in the way Men’s Warehouse stitched up Jos. A Banks.

If there is a hostile battle, the advertising and public-relations people come in, cajoling shareholders to hold out or sell out. More millions are spent in this effort: No one is trying to save money when the transactions are so large.

The biggest winners are those at the top of the heap: the managements. They own stock options and shares, plus special deals are written to sweeten things for them.

Everyone engaged in the M&A industry makes money when the game is on, all the way down to the caterers, who provide the sustenance when the midnight oil is burning. A merger is a grueling and fun undertaking; the fun of making money under pressure, a lot of pressure and even more money.

Who loses? Certainly the staff of the lesser-partner firm. The conqueror calls the shots and decrees the layoffs, which are one of the principal savings or “efficiencies” of the takeover. There will be less duplication, fewer subsidiary businesses, and fewer facilities that can be consolidated.

The other loser, feverishly denied in advance of the nuptials, is the consumer; the poor stiff who purchases the goods and services that the new entity offers. These may be fewer and, almost certainly, they will become more expensive over time.

Not all mergers are bad. Actually, Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of The Wall Street Journal has resulted in an invigorated newspaper. But anyone, including myself, who has flown on the merged American Airlines and U.S. Airways has nothing good to report about service, pricing, or frequency. I'll venture that the M&A moguls are taking private jets -- wouldn’t you?

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.