New York Times media reporter Jonathan Mahler indulged on Saturday in a celebration of a rival paper, the New York Daily News , and its recent hard turn to the left, as shown in the tabloid’s spurt of vulgar anti-conservative headlines – like the one calling NRA president Wayne LaPierre a terrorist – that have gone viral on social media.
The Times ’ online headline, “Drop Dead? Not The Newly Relevant Daily News ,” refers of course to it's rival's infamous 1975 headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The Daily News also rehashed its own headline recently to attack Ted Cruz for his crack about “New York values.” You guessed it: “Drop Dead, Ted.” That passes for “relevance” among the left and the NYT.
Mahler took us inside the liberal hive mind, buzzing with giddy self-congratulation over yet another puerile attack on Republicans, while the Times dutifully reprinted the controversial Daily News covers that made liberals go giddy.
In a few minutes, he had what he thought was a promising candidate: “CRAZY, STUPID LOVE.”
Mr. Rich walked it out into the newsroom for feedback. The paper’s copy chief, Jon Blackwell, proposed an alternative: “I’M WITH STUPID!”
“I said, ‘Yes, that’s much better,’” Mr. Rich recalled recently at the paper’s offices in Lower Manhattan. “That’s a winner.”
Where someone else may see desperate liberal hackery at work, Mahler saw “continuing cultural relevance.”
It was the latest in a series of attention-grabbing covers that have shifted the conversation around the struggling paper. Just a few months ago, after an aborted sale and sweeping layoffs, The News seemed to have completed its devolution from the model of a big-city tabloid to a battered symbol of the diminished state of America’s newspapers. But the recent string of covers, which were all widely shared on social media, have sent a very different message -- if not about the paper’s long-term financial prospects, then at least about its continuing cultural relevance.
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The News has certainly been going for it, most notably with its provocative front page after December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS,” read the headline, accompanied by screen-grabs of tweets from a variety of conservative politicians offering “thoughts and prayers” to the families of the victims. The next day, the cover of The News identified the head of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, as a terrorist.
Mahler devoted a single sentence suggesting the left-ward political slant of the new Daily News before pivoting to praise the headlines.
Predictably, the News was denounced on the right and celebrated on the left for the way it chose to frame the story. But whatever one made of the paper’s San Bernardino covers, they demonstrated that the front-page headline -- “the wood,” in tab-speak -- can still pack a punch, even if most readers are encountering it on their smartphones....
Mahler neutrally relayed the Daily News nastiness.
The news has cooperated with The News’s efforts to attract notice. A vocal champion of immigrants’ rights, the paper has had a field day with Mr. Trump -- “he makes it easy,” said Mr. Rich -- as well as Ted Cruz, who committed the unpardonable sin of criticizing the city. The candidate’s attack on Mr. Trump’s “New York values” produced the headline “DROP DEAD, TED,” alongside an image of the Statue of Liberty raising a middle finger to Mr. Cruz. Even Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The News’s bitter tabloid rival, The New York Post, provided good fodder with his recent engagement to the former supermodel Jerry Hall. “BEAUTY AND THE BEAST,” blared the next day’s front page, with a photo of the couple. (“Low-hanging fruit,” Mr. Rich said of the Murdoch cover.)
Mahler insisted it wasn’t all flash: “Newsroom morale seems to have improved somewhat...Under Mr. Rich, the paper is showing some signs of moving in a new direction, or rather an old one, returning to its roots as a crusading tabloid. In October, The News created a new “long-form” reporting and editing unit largely dedicated to exploring social issues. And, of course, there are those covers. Whether they represent a fleeting gift from an unusually generous news cycle, a great tabloid’s final bloom, or, just maybe, the beginning of a rebirth is anyone’s guess.
Mahler strenuously avoided labeling the political thrust of the Daily News as left-wing or liberal but “populist.”
Such cheerleading for a purported rival paper is particularly galling when compared to the Times’ long hostility toward the city’s other tabloid paper, the New York Post , whose right-leaning populism the Times finds ugly indeed, especially when it comes to Islam-related issues.
In 2007 the paper defended a controversial principal of an Arabic-language school and blasted its rival for causing her so much trouble. Richard Perez-Pena in 2009 focused on the Post ’s “doggedly conservative slant ” in a story focusing on the paper’s circulation struggles.
And Post owner Rupert Murdoch is a peculiar obsession at the Times as well as the Daily News , with former editors Bill Keller and Howell Raines attacking Fox News and Murdoch by name in print.
On a recent afternoon, Jim Rich, the editor in chief of The Daily News, sat at his computer playing around with front-page headlines, a few well-chosen words that would capture the day’s biggest news: Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary.
