Media critic Michael Wolff claims he stopped a flurry of negative New York Post articles targeting him by threatening Rupert Murdoch with the release of audiotapes he made with the media mogul.
Writing in
Britain's GQ, Wolff says that after penning a scathing biography of Murdoch, he became the target of the Post's gossip pages when the paper "found out that I was involved with a woman not my wife," Wolff writes.
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Soon, he says, the paper's "pounding began."
Wolff writes that he threatened to release his interview tapes with Murdoch publicly if the bad press didn't stop.
To quote Wolff, "Sixty hours of a man who could hardly string two sentences together without wandering off. My threat of wide distribution of the tapes killed the Post story at once."
Wolff gloated over the move, describing it as a "a clean, simple, quid pro quo world."
The liberal writer also reveals the New York Post will soon shut down. But he admits he predicted the same in 2002, only to be proven wrong.
Still, he says the paper has lost anywhere from $5 billion to $7 billion in real dollars under Murdoch's stewardship. Wolff acknowledges that the Post, next to the New York Times,
had become the most influential paper in the nation.
But with Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in full bloom and owned by Murdoch, Wolff thinks the billionaire doesn't need the feisty tabloid any more.
"And while the Post offices at News Corp. on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan used to be Murdoch's refuge, now he's much more often found at the Wall Street Journal, relocated to Murdoch HQ, which has replaced the Post in his ambitions and affections," he concludes.
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