Media

“You Can’t Just Be All Fox News”: An Old Murdoch Lieutenant Is Back to Help Figure Out the Post’s Trump Coverage

Can Col Allan, the swashbuckling and bibulous tabloid star of the aughts, help the New York Post decode its most important reader? Well, he’s trying. “On the one hand,” a source said, “he’s a Trumper. But on the other hand, he understands that, look, if you’re talking to a New York audience, you can’t go full MAGA.”
Rupert Murdochs Hired Gun Is Trying to Figure Out Trumps White House
Rupert Murdoch in Sun Valley.By Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

In the media landscape of the Donald Trump era, the New York Post occupies a sui-generis position. It has the longest history with the current occupant of the White House of any publication—Trump first emerged as a larger-than-life character in the Post’s pages some 30 years ago. The Post is reportedly still Trump’s favorite and first-read paper, and Trump has a close rapport with its owner, Rupert Murdoch, who reportedly talks to the president on a regular basis. In its modern history, the Post has always been seen as a conservative title, with red-meat opinion pages and a special delight in skewering liberal politicians, but it is also very much a New York paper, with a strong constituency of power players in politics, business, and media who lean to the left. “When you go to a hotel or to Michaels,” said one veteran political operative, “the New York Post is almost always an equal with the Times and the Journal,” which Murdoch also owns. “It’s a widely read and deeply influential newspaper.”

Perhaps more than any other of his American journalistic assets, Murdoch has used the Post to get involved in the political game, put his chips down, and signal his pleasure or displeasure. And just as Murdoch has been confused about Trump, so has the Post. Unlike the overall vibe of the primetime lineup at Murdoch’s Fox News, the tabloid hasn’t been shy about taking shots at Trump when it thinks he deserves it. But the overall effect has been muddy, which, for a tab like the Post, is a problem.

To help think through how to cover Trump, Murdoch has brought one of his old lieutenants back into the fold. For the past three weeks, former New York Post editor-in-chief Col Allan has been drawing a paycheck as a consultant for News Corp., the newspaper-focused arm of the Murdoch media empire. “Don’t mind me,” he quipped in his Australian brogue on his first day back at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, as the bespectacled Allan sunk his portly frame into an office chair beside current Post editor Stephen Lynch during the daily news meeting. For the rest of the week, according to Post sources, Allan worked out of a 10th-floor conference room next to the Post’s business desk, where he could be seen poring over newspapers, with his TV tuned to Fox News or the Golf Channel. Last week, Allan traveled to the company’s London Bridge offices next to mega-tower the Shard for a swing through News UK, which includes The Sun and The Times of London. This week, Allan has been back in New York, where he piped up briefly during a news meeting when the discussion turned to the Post’s coverage of the Jeff Bezos-A.M.I. imbroglio, one of my sources told me. The rank and file doesn’t seem to know exactly what he’s doing, but there’s immense curiosity—and a dash of fear. Newer Post staffers who never got a taste of Allan’s jocular-meets-tyrannical management style quickly started Googling old news stories about him. “There’s more of a chill with his return,” another insider said. “Nobody knows what it all means.”

Allan is a documented Trump supporter who was photographed in a MAGA baseball cap during the 2016 campaigns, which led many to believe that Murdoch must have brought him back to “Foxify” the Post, to borrow a term used by two sources close to the paper.

The situation seems to be a bit more nuanced than that. In conversations he’s had with people at the Post, one insider told me, Allan has talked about how the tabloid needs to carve out its position on Trump, while also acknowledging that it has a large audience in deep blue New York City. “On the one hand,” this person said, “he’s a Trumper. But on the other hand, he understands that, look, if you’re talking to a New York audience, you can’t go full MAGA. You have to be strategic about how you do this. You can’t just be all Fox News.” Representatives for News Corp., the Post, and Murdoch didn’t comment.

There was a time, not even all that long ago, when the top brass of New York’s tabloids were seen as being as consequential and worthy of scrutiny as any of the city’s big shots. That was especially true of Allan, the fearsome, pugilistic, bibulous Aussie newspaper legend who ran the Post’s newsroom for 15 years starting in 2001. For much of that time, Allan loomed large in the New York media fishbowl, whether it was a drunken lap-dancing debacle with a future Australian prime minister; a wildly controversial tabloid wood; or an expletive-laden blowup with one of his editors. “I’ll get fired not because Rupert doesn’t like the stories I put in the paper. I’ll get fired because we don’t sell newspapers,” Allan told Lloyd Grove in a memorable 2007 New York magazine profile. “And that judgment is made not by Rupert, but by the market, and by the audience. And I think that’s pretty democratic. I like that deal.”

By the time Allan did, in fact, leave the Post, in 2016, the tabloids were no longer the towering institutions they once were, and Allan’s retirement at the age of 62, though it generated some news coverage, was hardly an earth-shattering event. Allan’s handpicked successor, Lynch, assumed the top masthead role, while Jesse Angelo, a former Allan deputy and fellow longtime Murdoch consigliere who’d become the Post’s publisher and C.E.O., forged ahead with his ambitious digital turnaround strategy to help stem the publication’s famously prodigious losses. For the most part, the status quo carried on, business as usual.

That all changed on January 17, with the abrupt and surprising announcement that Angelo was leaving the Post and News Corp. after 20 years. Angelo, it turned out, had learned about News Corp.’s decision to appoint a digital editor-in-chief for the Post, and also that the company was going to bring Allan back in an advisory role. As people familiar with Angelo’s thinking told me at the time, he wasn’t on board, and he exited the company amid concerns regarding the direction in which he believed the Post was heading both digitally and politically. (Angelo’s main digital deputies, Remy Stern and Neil Nagraj, have also departed.) Newsroom managers have since communicated to staff that Murdoch wants to ditch the type of catchall generic viral content that helped significantly juice nypost.com’s Web traffic, and to refocus more on stories that are “on brand” with the Post, as someone familiar with the conversations put it.

Allan, for his part, is apparently no longer the baddest beast in the tabloid jungle. He’s been “friendly and nice,” one of my sources said. “He’s not the boss anymore, so he doesn’t need to be scary.”