# New York Post Founded in **1801 by Alexander Hamilton** as the *New-York Evening Post*, a Federalist organ; now the tabloid engine of [[Rupert Murdoch]]'s American operation and the third-largest U.S. daily by print circulation. Its history runs through three distinct papers. Hamilton's Federalist broadsheet. Then Dorothy Schiff's, from 1939 to 1976 — she converted it to tabloid format in 1942 and ran what Pew has called "arguably the most liberal newspaper in the country," the last surviving liberal daily of New York's broadsheet era. Then Murdoch's. ## The three transactions - **November 1976:** Murdoch buys the paper from Schiff for about $30 million. - **1988:** **Forced sale** for $37.6 million to developer Peter Kalikow. The reason is regulatory and worth keeping straight: FCC newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rules barred owning the Post and a New York television station at once. Murdoch had acquired WNEW-TV (renamed WNYW in 1986) in the Metromedia deal and held a temporary waiver; Congress moved to block its extension, forcing divestiture. - **1993:** Murdoch **reacquires** it through News Corporation after Kalikow's bankruptcy, reportedly for $25 million, having obtained an FCC waiver with support from New York politicians including Governor Mario Cuomo. ## The money The Post's finances are genuinely obscure, and the standard claim that it "lost money for decades" is supported by press estimates rather than filings. It is reported inside [[News Corporation]]'s News Media segment with News UK and News Corp Australia, and **has never been broken out separately**, so no audited standalone profit-and-loss exists. What is documented: a 2005 *BusinessWeek* estimate of **$15–30 million in annual losses**, and later reporting citing losses "up to $70 million a year" around 2012. Its turn to profit is also contested — News Corp's chief executive described a profit for the quarter ended December 2020 as "the first profit in modern times," while other accounts date the first profitable quarter to September 2022. Treat all of these as reported claims, not results. ⭐ **The obscurity is the point.** A paper that loses tens of millions a year for decades inside a profitable conglomerate is not a failing business; it is a **subsidized instrument**, and the subsidy is the evidence of what it is for. Nothing about the Post makes sense read as a standalone enterprise. Print circulation was **117,037** daily on average as of September 2025, down 4.2% year over year. Digital reach fell sharply — roughly 85 million U.S. monthly uniques in March 2025 against 125 million a year earlier, attributed to search algorithm changes and AI summaries. In January 2026 the operation extended west with the launch of the **California Post**, roughly eighty staff based at the Fox lot in Century City. ## What it does inside the empire The division of labor across Murdoch's American properties is legible and stable. The [[Wall Street Journal]] supplies business-elite legitimacy and an editorial page aimed at donors and policymakers. [[Fox News]] supplies broadcast reach and the primary electorate. The Post supplies **story origination**. Its function is not audience size — 117,000 print copies is not a mass medium — but **elite-media penetration in the city that houses the national press**. A Post front page ("the wood") is a single image with a single phrase, engineered to be screenshotted and to enter the New York and Washington news cycle, where it can be amplified upward into Fox segments and *Journal* opinion. The paper is cheap to run relative to what it can put into circulation, which is the economic logic of the subsidy. ## Episodes **"Headless Body in Topless Bar"** — **15 April 1983**, written by Vincent Musetto. Frequently misdated to the 1990s. The best single artifact of the house style: it is funny, it is accurate, and it is about a murder. **The Central Park Five, 1989.** The Post's coverage was part of the tabloid "wilding" and "wolf pack" framing of the case. Donald Trump's full-page "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY" advertisement ran on **1 May 1989** in all four major New York dailies including the Post, at a reported cost of about $85,000. The convictions were vacated in December 2002; the city settled for roughly $40 million in 2014. **The Hunter Biden laptop story, 14 October 2020.** Published over the objections of Post journalists: the lead reporter declined to have his name on it over credibility concerns, and one of the two credited reporters had little involvement. Twitter blocked links under its hacked-materials policy and locked the Post's account for roughly two weeks; Facebook reduced distribution pending fact-checking. The [[Twitter Files]] releases from December 2022 are the reason this episode is more complicated than either side's version. They showed real internal disagreement, that Jack Dorsey was unaware of the suppression decision and later called it a mistake, and that Twitter's head of trust and safety had opposed it. They also showed **no evidence of government direction** — only a general FBI warning about foreign hack-and-leak operations. The suppression was a platform's own bad judgment, which is both less than the censorship claim built on it and more than the "nothing happened" reply. **Defamation.** The clearest documented case is the "Bag Men" cover of 18 April 2013, which misidentified two innocent men after the Boston Marathon bombing; the suit survived a motion to dismiss and settled on undisclosed terms in October 2014. ## See Also - [[News Corporation]] · [[Rupert Murdoch]] · [[Lachlan Murdoch]] - [[Fox News]] · [[Wall Street Journal]] — the other two positions in the division of labor - [[Twitter Files]] — what the 2020 suppression actually turned out to be - [[Media Company Timelines Hub]] · [[News Corp Timeline]]