After 168 years of publishing, the British tabloid News of the World published its final edition on Sunday with the headline, "Thank you and goodbye." Howard Kurtz, Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, says American news outlets are also known to succumb to tabloid antics.
NEAL CONAN, host: And now, the Opinion Page. Thank you and goodbye, the words on the final front page of the most widely read newspaper in the English language. Britain's Sunday tabloid News of the World died yesterday after 168 years, a victim of self-inflicted wounds. A slow developing scandal finally reached critical mass last week and James Murdoch, the son of News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, shut the newspaper down. It turns out that people hired by the paper hacked into the cell phones of celebrities, newsmakers, a young murder victim and British soldiers killed in Afghanistan.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: But how far is too far for an exclusive? In a piece on the op-ed page of The Washington Post, Howard Kurtz argues that American news outlets are not immune to tabloid tactics. We want to hear from those of you who read the tabloid press. What keeps you interested? Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: Howard Kurtz joins us now on the phone. He's the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. You can read his opinion piece on our website. Howard Kurtz, nice to have you on the program again.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Thanks very much, Neal.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: And you wrote: The illegal phone hacking is just an extreme example of a news business that increasingly pushes the ethical envelope. How so?</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Well, I just detect a lot of clucking among the Americans about those crazy Brits and the things that they do with the tabloids in London. And by the way, your listeners probably know this scandal just got a lot whole worse with the revelation that another Murdoch tabloid in London, The Sun, apparently accessed medical records, legal records and other confidential information from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. So this is now more than just a News of the World story.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: But, you know, having covered the media beat for many years, you know, I have seen all kinds of unethical or questionable behavior by American outlets. And even in the phone hacking area, News of the World was not the first to get there. The Cincinnati Enquirer, as I write, had to pay $10 million and publish a front page apology to Chiquita after illegally and improperly accessing some voicemail messages from that company.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: That was some years ago when $10 million was still $10 million.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: That's right, a lot of money in 1998.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: And as you point out - well, for example, the John Edwards case was made public prominently by the National Enquirer, one of our own domestic scandal sheets, which paid for its sources but, nevertheless, broke a huge story.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Yeah. That's probably an example of, you know, good reporting by a tabloid. Although, personally, I am not in favor of and don't think that mainstream organizations should pay sources of information in doing reporting. You know, everything that the Enquirer reported about John Edwards, which he had denied - he denied the affair, he denied the child was his - all turned out to be right as we now know.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: But, you know, this paying for information is not just the province, the exclusive province of the National Enquirers of the world. The television networks all do the same thing. Now, of course, they will deny it, Neal. They will say, no, we would never pay for information. We pay for photos. We pay for videos. You know, that's why you had ABC paying $200,000 to Casey Anthony a couple of years back, it was about a month before she was indicted for the murder of her daughter. Of course, she acquitted last week in a very controversial verdict. But, you know, it's basically just a way around the prohibition by saying, we're not paying the source potentially for an interview. We are buying photos.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: And this can blow up in people's faces too. As you pointed out in the piece, a large payment offered to a woman who was injecting her child with Botox until the story turned out to be a hoax.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Yes, but only after she went on "Good Morning America" and told a pretty large American audience about this alleged Botox - Botoxing of her young daughter.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: I had not heard that used as a verb before.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Well, there's always a first.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: There's always a first time. The competition for the juicy story, is this the by-product of a, well, one media outlet wants to get ahead of the other? If you're TMZ, you want to beat everybody else. Or is this something that we should all bear some responsibility for?</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Well, you know, there's always been competition going back to the early days of newspapers, so I don't think that lets any of us in the news business off the hook. And I do think the public plays a role here. And one of the points I tried to make in this Washington Post piece, Neal, is that when News of the World conducted that sting against Sarah Ferguson where one of the reporters famously impersonated a fake sheikh and there was a hidden camera video and, of course, you know, she was - appeared to be selling access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, you know, I wrote about it at the time and said, this is an outrageous example of lying and deception.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Certainly, it didn't make Fergie look good, but nor did I think it made The News of the World look good. I don't think there were three people in America or even in Britain that particularly cared about the lying and deception involved. It was all, you know, let's have a good laugh at how far Fergie has fallen.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: I think what made this scandal different and what prompted Murdoch to close News of the World yesterday and has now given rise to all kinds of outrage in Britain and investigations that are going to be a headache for the Murdoch empire for some time to come is that suddenly it was no longer celebrities or a couple of rich athletes who are having their phones hacked by News of the World, either journalists or private investigators. Suddenly, it was ordinary people, ordinary blue-collar readers who's - who had been victims of the 2005 London terror bombing, or whose sons had died in Iraq or Afghanistan, or famously - or infamously I should say in one case - hacking into the phone of a 13-year-old girl who was missing, later found murdered. That hits some kind of nerve in Britain, whereas before it was just kind of seen as, you know, tabloids going a little over the top.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: And now, I would say, you know, there's no - when you have the prime minister, David Cameron, giving a speech and addressing his own relationships with people in the Murdoch empire and those of other politicians, there's no other story in Britain right now. It is a huge scandal.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: And we want to hear from those of you who read the tabloid press. What keeps you interested? 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. And we're going to get to that in just a minute. But there are some news aspects to this, Howard Kurtz, that we do need to address. As you say, there had been considerable speculation in Britain that upon closure of News of the World, the other tabloid owned by the Murdoch empire, The Sun, would start publishing its Sunday edition not so very far down the road. Again, that's thrown into question now about these new allegations.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Yeah. You know, it was kind of a shrewd bit of damage control on Rupert Murdoch's part to close the paper because it had become such a toxic symbol of corrupt journalism. That what better thing to do other than unless you have to be one of the 280 people who work there than to just make it go away as a brand and then say, you know, you're moving on. But if this scandal now spreads to The Sun and perhaps other parts of the Murdoch empire, that's going to be a significant problem for him, perhaps here in the U.S. as well.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: And in pointing out that the networks pay for, you know, family photos of the people in trouble, ABC also bought those - some pictures from one of the women who was involved in the texting with former Congressman Anthony Weiner. And in pointing out some of the plagiarism and fabrication scandals in American media outlets, I'm not trying to say that any of that is in the category of what happened to News of the World. I say News of the World is an extreme example. But it is a slippery slope.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: And as we - as our culture turns more and more tabloid, as even once respectable organizations - at least online - now publish all kinds of stuff because it appeared at Radar or TMZ, et cetera, you know, I just think now the culture of American journalism is changing as well and not necessarily what I would consider a good direction.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: And the other aspect of this that may have some significance down the road, the Murdoch effort to finish up buying the remainder, which it did not already have, of the British pay-TV broadcaster BSkyB looked like that was going ahead until last week. And now, looks like that's severely on hold.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: And I think that is a major part of the motivation for Murdoch deciding to close the tabloid is that he did, you know, did not want to jeopardize this $12 billion takeover of British Sky Broadcasting, which he wants to make a little bit more like Fox News. And, you know, it already had been controversial, but it was only supposed to be considered strictly on competitive grounds with that acquisition put too much influence in the hands of one man, one company in Britain. Now, of course, it becomes a huge political football. It's already been slowed down by the British government. It's hard to see that getting the green light from British authorities anytime soon.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: If you read the tabloid press, what do you get out of it? 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. Layton(ph) is on the line, calling us from DeBary in Florida.</s>LAYTON: Thanks for taking my call.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: Sure. Go ahead, please.</s>LAYTON: I got hooked on tabloids back in the late '80s when I lived in London. And I used to go to cocktail parties, and people would mention things about Prince Charles and his unfaithfulness to Lady Diana. I started reading The Sun, also watched other tabloids there. Then, when I came back to the States, I began to realize that tabloids were always ahead of the curve. And what would be showing up in The New York Times three and four years down the road had appeared in my local supermarket about three years before. And I started seeing it as sort of a gossipy, but at the same time someway factual way of seeing what was going on behind the scene.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Well, tabloids can be ahead of the curve, but a lot tabloid stories don't pan out. I mean, look, I enjoy tabloids. They're very entertaining. I lived in New York, and still, today, I like reading the New York Post, also of course owned by Rupert Murdoch. But the New York Post, a couple of weeks ago, just to take one example, ran an incredibly thinly-sourced story in the DSK case, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, accusing the maid, the accuser, who major news organizations have not named, of being a hooker on the side.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Now, I don't know if that's true. If that turns out to be true, it ends up in The New York Times, then your point will be proven. But I don't think that the New York Post proved that story, so, yes, it's great titillation, great gossip, sometimes ahead of mainstream news organizations, but sometimes the stories simply don't pan out.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: We may find out if it's true with the libel trial, charges brought - but, I'm sorry, Layton, you were going to say?</s>LAYTON: Well, no, I just think the classic story for me was that Prince Charles was doing everything to undermine Princess Diana. And you would go and talk to people that were sort of in their circles, and you would find out little things and then it would turn up in the tabloids, but you never heard that in the mainstream press. I don't think The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times ever mentioned anything until the deed was already done.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: Sunday Times, also as it happens, owned by Rupert Murdoch...</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Yes, indeed.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: ...but different kind of newspaper.</s>LAYTON: That's right.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: Layton, thanks very much for the phone call. Appreciate it.</s>LAYTON: Thank you.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: Bye-bye. We're talking with Howard Kurtz, who is, among other things, the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," about his piece that ran in the op-ed page of his former newspaper, The Washington Post. He is the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's go next to - this is Jay(ph), and Jay is on the line from San Francisco.</s>JAY: Hi. I'm actually a reader of The Sun and The News of the World, and I read it primarily for the sports coverage, especially for the English Premier League and for the cricket. (Unintelligible) in various papers, like the red tops, including the (unintelligible) really cover sports really well in the U.K. So isn't The News of the World a loss now getting replaced by The Sun on Sunday, or a Sunday Sun in a couple of month's time, and everyone will move on?</s>NEAL CONAN, host: But you read them online now?</s>JAY: Yeah.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: And it's the same kind of thing. I mean, their character is no different online than it is in print?</s>JAY: I'm (unintelligible) have the print copies since living in the U.S. for 13 years (unintelligible) them online.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: A little hard to compare. But for the sports coverage - and I have to say, I'm a fan of the New York - a lot of New York area professional sports teams, and I read the New York Post and The Daily News for the same reason.</s>JAY: Yeah. I mean, if you want to know what's going on for your sports coverage, it's either for the U.K. or even for European sports, you really have to read, you know, a British newspaper or the BBC website or watch a Fox soccer network, which is also owned by Murdoch. But in my view, there's more going on behind this than just the scandal with the newspapers. It really is about future media, and I think which is what Murdoch is looking at, hence why he wants to get his deal done to acquire the assets of BSkyB.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: All right. Thanks very much for the call, Jay. Appreciate it.</s>JAY: Thank you.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: And, Howard Kurtz, I think there was one wag who once said that after the first six pages, things in the New York Post are not necessarily untrue.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Right. You know, a lot of people in New York, and I - when I was very young - delivered the New York Post, you know, read it from the back because that's where this (unintelligible) section starts. But, you know, the interesting - one of the interesting things here, Neal, that also has a parallel for those of us in the States is the cozy and sometimes symbiotic relationship between the Murdoch papers in Britain and politicians. You know, I've mentioned earlier Prime Minister Cameron, he's a friend of Rebekah Brooks, who's the former editor of The News of the World and now runs the British division of Murdoch's News Corps.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: He, of course, hired - I should say Prime Minister Cameron hired the former editor of The News of the World Andy Coulson, who was arrested on Friday in the same scandal. And, you know, I've watched the New York Post, and, you know, Murdoch is famous for making his views felt within his news organizations. He's certainly a hands-on activist owner. I've watched New York Post go after the Clintons relentlessly. And then, when Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000, there was sort of rapprochement and the coverage toward Hillary turned more positive. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron sought and received the endorsement of Murdoch papers in Britain. So one of the reasons that politicians have been reluctant on both sides of the Atlantic to cross Murdoch is because his - the support of his papers can be very valuable.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: And The New York Times had a great piece yesterday about a couple of British critics of the Murdoch empire who then found themselves the object of relentless unflattering coverage. So it can be risky to take on one of those Murdoch properties.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: As another critic also mentioned some years ago, the Murdoch papers do not endorse, they campaign.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: They don't have to endorse.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: Let's go next to - this is Mustafa(ph), Mustafa with us from Berkeley.</s>MUSTAFA: Hi. I just want to add one comment. Given that I read both the American tabloids and the European tabloids, I think that the liability of what they put there, the Europeans have tabloids (unintelligible) inform in way. While here, I find them a little bit like most of a political party of another one by making things up. And this is what the regulations for, like, The New York Times, if you do something, they're more liable of what they put there. With tabloids here, they can say that this congressman or this senator or something - they can make a lie about it, and they can cause a lot of harm for the person just to serve the other party.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: OK.</s>MUSTAFA: While in Europe, they cannot do that. There is a huge liability, and the case in point what just happened in England. That's my point.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: OK. Mustafa's point, at least in part, Howard Kurtz, is the libels laws in Britain are very different from those here.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: They are much stricter and they cause the papers there or any media property there to be much more cautious about what they say, particularly about public figures. Whereas, it's much more difficult to bring a successful libel suit even if the facts are wrong against a public figure in the Untied States of America. And yet, despite that, you know, the London tabloids seem to play much more fast and loose and be racier in terms of what they publish. But they are careful when it comes to the famous people because of those very strict libel laws.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: Howard Kurtz, thanks very much for your time today.</s>HOWARD KURTZ: Good to talk to you.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: Howard Kurtz is Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. You can find a link to his opinion piece on our website. Go to npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION.</s>NEAL CONAN, host: Tomorrow, when gay marriage passed in New York state, supporters called that just the beginning. Opponents say that when states put it on the ballot, voters reject gay marriage every single time. We'll talk about the tactics of gay marriage state-by-state next TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, NPR News in Washington.