I don’t remember the year, but it was sometime in the mid-’80s. I don’t remember which tabloid it was, but it was one of the big London tabs, which, to an outsider, seem indistinguishable. I do remember the go-to-war-type headline, though.
It read: “Fat Fergie.”
This was back during my sportswriting youth when I used to cover the tennis at Wimbledon. And on the long train ride from town, I’d read the serious London papers, but only after a quick, guilty look at the tabs. For a morning jolt, they sure beat the British coffee.
I remember the year that Germany’s Boris Becker won his first Wimbledon. One of the tabloids ran a circa-1940 photo of Wimbledon courts after they’d been bombed during the blitz, with a headline that went something like: “Germany Didn’t Care About Wimbledon Then.”
The “Fat Fergie” headline ran above a photo of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, popularly known as Fergie, with an image of a tape measure superimposed around her waist for full impact.
Fergie, it seems, had been shopping for a dress, and a “reporter” got the tip on her waist size. It was harmless stuff. Fergie herself would one day become a spokesperson for Weight Watchers. It was less harmful than the topless photo of her sunbathing that would run years later.
And it was far less harmful than the story last year when the News of the World — the paper at the center of the hacking scandal that now threatens Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — sent a fake sheik, with a hidden camera, to offer Fergie hundreds of thousands of pounds for access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew.
That was a particularly ugly moment if you care about journalism. It was an ugly moment even if you don’t care about journalism. But the paper, which Murdoch just closed after a 168-year run as he tries to stem the hacking scandal, had a circulation of around 2.7 million, so not everyone was offended.
The recent scandal, of course, had nothing to do with chasing down royals or movie stars or politicians or athletes. If people were put off by that kind of thing, it would have all ended when Princess Di died on that fatal chase through a Paris tunnel.
This scandal was about the News of the World using private detectives to hack into the cellphone messages of a 13-year-old murder victim, of victims in the 7/7 bombings, of British soldiers who died in Afghanistan.
The harassment had moved from royals to regulars, from celebrities to the uncelebrated world where real people, who don’t have their own press offices, live.
No one should have been shocked by this. If you read the tabloids, you had to know more or less what was going on. But it took this revelation for people to be disgusted by it.
People and even politicians — many of whom fear Murdoch’s long reach — were sufficiently disgusted that Murdoch withdrew his $12 billion bid to take over Britain’s main satellite TV network.
But as media critic Howard Kurtz pointed out in a Washington Post op-ed, Americans have no right to feel superior to the tabloid-addicted Brits. He wrote of how ABC, in 2008, paid Casey Anthony $200,000 for photos and videos of her then-missing daughter Caylee. Mainstream American media don’t pay for stories, but in the world of TV, that seems to be changing, where some networks get around this little piece of media ethics by paying for, say, photos.
You shouldn’t be surprised by this, either. The scandal sheets are presumably as old as papyrus, and the recent rise of celebrity websites, like TMZ, may change the means, but not necessarily the stakes.
What makes this different is Murdoch, the man who wields power from continent to continent, who owns not just tabloids, but also the Times of London and The Wall Street Journal and, of course, Fox News, which has put its very large stamp on politics in America.
The scandal in Britain reached 10 Downing Street, where Prime Minister David Cameron had hired former News of the World editor Andy Coulson to be his chief spokesman. Coulson would be arrested in the hacking scandal.
The scandal could move to America. Some Democratic senators are asking for hearings into a report in the Daily Mirror newspaper that News of the World reporters had approached a New York private investigator and tried to buy what was called “secure phone data” that were related to 9/11 victims.
Murdoch is presumably not involved in any of this. But these are his products.
In The New York Times, David Carr makes the point that scandal-free Fox News puts prominent Republicans like Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich on the payroll. He wonders how different that is from Murdoch’s British newspaper chain hiring away the head of Scotland Yard’s hacking investigation to be a columnist.
And so the scandal spreads, which is probably fitting, after all, for a scandal monger.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
