Word: zuckerman
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This prompted the Post, which doesn't have a dime to buy a banana from a pushcart, to lodge a lawsuit against the News. Hoffenberg charged that Zuckerman is a "vulture" and "body snatcher" who is trying to destroy the Post with his "crazy Kamikaze attack." The pages of both papers, meanwhile, barked daily accusations of impropriety and nasty innuendos about each other -- behaving, in other words, like tabloids. IT'S WAR! shrieked a Post banner. DAILY NEWS RAIDS THE POST...
...actually began in January, shortly after Zuckerman bought the News for $36.3 million. Once the top tabloid in the U.S., with a circulation of 3 million (now 777,000), the paper had been crippled by a strike and a hemorrhaging of advertising revenues wrought largely by the recession. Zuckerman could not hope to go head to head against the steady New York Times, but he had to be concerned about two other dailies. One was the genteel, struggling New York Newsday, once described by a News editor as "a tabloid in a tutu." The other, to be sure...
Preparing for battle, Zuckerman swiftly chopped down the News' fatted staff, firing 185 newsroom and business employees (out of a total of 540) and at the same time demoralizing even those who were lucky enough to keep their job. Not the least infuriated by this treatment was the Post's star columnist Mike McAlary, who wrote a scorching piece about the "massacre," labeling Zuckerman "a filthy little dictator . . . a tyrant on the political make" who "borrows freely from the fascist handbook" and, furthermore, "knows less than nothing about writing ((and)) even less about newspapers...
McAlary's own paper was in even worse financial shape than the News. Press tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Post in 1976, lost about $150 million in a dozen years before caving in. The latest would-be savior was Peter Kalikow, like Zuckerman a real estate lord, who ran down the circulation (from 550,000 to about 438,000), threw his real estate holdings into bankruptcy and exacted a 20% pay cut from his staff before finally putting the paper up for sale. Answering the call was Hoffenberg, whose millions come from "financial services," in this case buying other...
...Zuckerman was not about to take this interloper -- and the threat of heightened competition -- standing up. His newshawks were soon reporting that Hoffenberg once employed a "Mafia leg buster," a commodities swindler and even the discredited former billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. Not only that, Hoffenberg had been involved in questionable business dealings that aroused the interest of federal and state securities regulators...