The Guardian runs an excerpt from Nick Davies’ forthcoming book “Hack Attack,” in which he discusses the practice of “monstering” among media properties owned by Ruper Murdoch: “a savage and prolonged public attack on a target’s life.”
The punishment was equally harsh for the American writer Michael Wolff. In March 2009 he found himself on the receiving end of a thorough monstering by the New York Post when he was working on a biography of Murdoch. By some unexplained means, the mogul’s people had laid hands on an unpublished typescript and started to send clear warnings that the boss was not happy with some its contents. Wolff recalls a senior executive calling to ask him to make changes before the book was published.
“What will you do if I don’t?” Wolff asked.
“Then we will not support the book.”
“How bad is that?”
“It could be bad.”
And it was bad. The New York Post discovered that Wolff had been having an affair, and ran stories on 2, 3, 6, 25 and 30 March, and 3 and 9 April, publishing along the way a secondary story that accused Wolff of evicting his mother-in-law from her apartment, as well as a cartoon of Wolff in bed with his lover, portraying the Jewish writer in a style which might reasonably be described as antisemitic.
