How the NY Post built the myth of Donald Trump and changed American media.

Former Page Six editor Susan Mulcahy shares the sizzle from her new book, "Paper of Wreckage."

It’s been almost fifty years since Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post. Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, two former Posties have worked their contacts books to record a jaw dropping oral history of the paper across the decades.

In an Q&A with The Media Mix, Mulcahy, a former Page Six editor, shares her thoughts on Donald Trump’s lies and who won the New York tabloid wars. Even Prince Harry, wise to the exploits of the Red Tops, might be shocked at some of the exploits in “Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wise Guys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters who Redefined American Media.”

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Q: Your book “Paper of Wreckage” is out and it’s had a positive reception. Why would people who have never worked at the New York Post be interested in this particular oral history?

Mulcahy: Obviously it’s a very insidery story about the people who worked there and their experience and their stories. There’s a lot of hijinks in the early days of Murdoch ownership, when Steve Dunleavy was running the City Desk, it’s jaw dropping. People, especially younger people who have lived in a more politically correct world, cannot believe, and I can’t believe, some of what went on there. I was sort of in the features room with the Page Six staff, so I didn’t even know about some of the cocaine dealing. That was astonishing.

Q: Where does Trump intersect with the New York Post?

Mulcahy: It was the road map to Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s the foundation of Rupert Murdoch’s American empire. It led to tabloid TV with [news show] “A Current Affair,” and then all the copycats that followed, which led to Fox News.

Between The Post and Fox News, those were the building blocks of Donald Trump’s media persona. NBC’s “The Apprentice,” solidified his media persona, which, as we know, is a false persona, because he’s a very bad businessman who has gone bankrupt, and he kept creating things that would go out of business. If he just had taken what his father had left him and put it in a savings account, he would have been a billionaire long before any of his recent triumphs financially.

Obviously he called in tips and he had that persona, his PR guy John Barron. Who could forget? [The Post] is not just a road map to how Trump operated, Rupert changed the media. Everybody changed the way they operated in the wake of what he started at the NY Post.

[Trump] became this larger than life character who sold papers. I mean, John Gotti sold papers, and Donald Trump sold papers. He knew this, and he would bombard all departments of the NY Post with stories about himself, to the point where, in the early nineties, when he was sort of on the wane, there were moratoriums - “Enough with the Donald Trump stories!”

He never called the whole time I was the Editor of Page Six because I was a woman. I would run stories about him occasionally, and call to check them out, and he would always lie, and sometimes I’d run them anyway, but I got very exasperated after a while, and I just stopped running as many. When the myth about Donald Trump was being created he was very smart about who he hired for PR. He hired Rubenstein and Dan Klores. [Lawyer] Roy Cohn was his mentor. He hired people that had close relationships with a lot of reporters.

I wrote a book in the late eighties [My Lips are Sealed] about my experience editing Page Six and I devoted half a chapter to what a liar he is. I called out his pathological tendencies in the lying department a long time ago.

Q: The New York tabloids were full of reporters who people really relied on and we had a shared sense of what the news was and what was happening in the City. The print tabloids, as we knew them, are really going away. How do you feel about that? Some of these characters couldn’t exist today?

Mulcahy: I find it very sad. I lived outside New York for about ten years. I lived in the Pacific Northwest, and one of the things I missed about New York was reading the tabloids. I read the Post every day, even though its national political coverage turns my stomach a lot of the time.

You know, as long as Murdoch’s alive, I'm sure the Post will continue to exist, because he loves print newspapers. I think he is more sentimentally attached to the Post than he is to his own children. I think he loves the Post but when he goes, will the kids keep it going? I sincerely doubt it.

[Former NY Post writer] Mackenzie Dawson said that The Post covered New York like it was an opera and it did. There were the heroes, the villains, the drama. There’s something very urban about that, and it really fits the character of the city. It’s covered online by other publications now and it’s much more bland to me. It's far less colorful and New York’s a colorful city, so it deserves that kind of coverage.

The NY Daily News is just a shadow of its former self, which is very sad. Their circulation has dropped so low. The Murdoch Post and the Daily News were rivals for so long, but at this point, Murdoch clearly won.

Q: How different was the paper before Rupert Murdoch bought it from Dorothy Schiff.

Mulcahy: Dorothy’s paper was in the golden age in the fifties, when they did a lot of ground breaking investigations into Walter Winchell, Joseph McCarthy and Robert Moses. They broke a lot of stories about how Moses was reshaping the landscape of New York.

They did crime stories and celebrity stories but it was a much more serious tabloid and visually it was static. Dorothy didn’t like photographs. They were small when they did run. They had respected writers. It started getting kind of sad in its final days and she wasn’t putting any money into it. She lost money for the first time in 1976 and that’s the year she sold it.

Murdoch had these two papers in Texas and the National Star (magazine) and he makes the pictures bigger and he makes it more exciting and focuses on more crime. He really did make the paper pop. The NY Daily News recognized this as their circulation was starting to slip. There were a lot of people who learned how to exist in the Murdoch circus with all of the Fleet Street craziness and yet they were able to maintain their own integrity and not play those games.

Q: Why did Rupert tolerate the losses at the Post for so many years?

Mulcahy: It built everything else he has in the US. The man was doing quite well in England and Australia; it’s not as though this is all he had going, but particularly with his purchase of the Metromedia TV stations in the late eighties which were the foundation of the Fox network; then he buys half of 20th Century Fox, the movie studio, then he buys the whole thing. The Post helped him build that multimedia empire. It was a loss leader.

Q: There are so many great anecdotes about the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn calling in tips about everyone, the judges and celebrities. Which are your favorite anecdotes from the book?

Mulcahy: Roy Cohn was what Steve Dunleavy described as the Post’s best friend, because he knew where all the bodies were buried. He was a good source for Page Six. I mean, I knew he was a reprehensible character, and I never went to his parties or anything, but he did give us stories. There isn’t a reporter in New York during that period who was covering any field: politics, media, whatever, that Roy Cohn was involved in, that didn't take stories from him.

Q: Who is your favorite New York Post character in the book?

Mulcahy: There was a purchasing manager, Miss Gerry. She was this formidable figure in many ways. She was six feet tall, a large woman and she had her hair pulled back tight. She was from the part of Brooklyn where people do not mess with you.

Mike DeMarco was running for City Council and the Post didn’t endorse him. The next year there’s redistricting and DeMarco is running again and Dick Montague [assistant editorial page editor] says we’re endorsing DeMarco and George Arzt [City Hall Bureau Chief] says: “Why? We didn’t endorse him last time and Montague says: “His Miss Gerry’s cousin and the last time she took all the furniture out of my office.”

Q: How long did it take you to complete the book?

Mulcahy: Frank DiGiacomo and I started working on the proposal in the fall of 2019. Our agents discussed it and we worked with Peter Borland at Atria Books, who was the perfect editor for this. He made wonderful changes that really improved the book. We had to cut quite a bit.

*Claire Atkinson was a reporter on the New York Post business desk between 2010-2016.

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