“Trafficking in Tycoonophilia” Say what?

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post “has stolen from the Daily News the mantle of New York’s populist paper, and yet it also fetes the city’s rich and powerful, trafficking in a kind of tycoonophilia,” writes Jonathan Mahler.

“The very same power-hungry plutocrats whom the old Post loved to torment are given the royal treatment by Murdoch’s Post — until they fall, that is, and then the Post gleefully piles on.”

NOTED: “When New York Times editor Howell Raines talked of ‘flooding the zone’ in terms of how the paper covered critical events, he probably did not realize the debt he owed to its early practitioners at the New York Post.”

The Murdoch-ization of America has never felt so irreversible. At any given moment, according to Business Week, one in every five households is tuned into a show produced or delivered by News Corp.; meanwhile, Fox News is crushing CNN, the Weekly Standard is running the Bush administration, and three of the top six books now on the New York Times’ best-seller list were published by Regan Books. And in perhaps the most unmistakable sign yet that New York’s preeminent right-wing robber baron has become an entrenched member of the city’s Establishment, Rupert Murdoch recently purchased the late Laurance Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue triplex for $44 million. In cash.

New York existed before Murdoch. But unlike the staggered, crisis-plagued ascent of fellow tycoon Donald Trump, his rise has been so steady that it has come to appear almost inevitable. It’s easy to forget that his entry into American consciousness was a reckless bet on the future of New York. …