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teams, and the like. This brutal treatment marked the unspoken other half of the bargain.
    McMullan was one of the few who surfaced to acknowledge what life looked like on the news manufacturing production floor. Yet he did not operate that way in isolation. Former reporters for the News of the World said editors screamed at them, or worse, sacked them, if they failed to deliver three promising leads at each Tuesday’s story meetings. One young reporter fainted under the pressure, according to the former News of the World reporter Graham Johnson. Johnson’s account of his own time at the paper involved fabricating stories and sources, staging photographs, and manufacturing stings, not to mention major bouts of drug abuse and faked expenses.
    Much of the time, reporters manipulated the subjects—targets—of their stories into talking.Johnson later claimed that he had “blackmailed” a soccer star, Steve McManaman, into admitting his mother’s incurable cancer. Editors at News of the World frequently horse-traded with the PR handlers for the celebrities they intended to expose. If your soccer star admits he was sleeping with a stripper, we’ll omit the part about cocaine that would kill his endorsement deals.
    â€œWhen a story breaks,the editors start shouting,” McMullan recalled. One editor at News of the World “used to ring up my phone and say, ‘You fucking fuck, what the fuck are you doing?’”
    â€œThe tone was buccaneering, get the story, be rewarded for getting a headline that sounds good,” whether or not it’s true, said David Gordon, the chief executive of the Economist and the television news service ITN during the 1980s and 1990s.
    One man set that tone.Murdoch’s cadre of Australians imported what’s called “mate culture”—or “mateship”—into his newsrooms in London and New York. The culture flourished at the tabloids but alsomade its presence felt at the prestige titles. The Australian novelist and historian Thomas Keneallytraces the origins of mateship back to nineteenth-century bush life, particularly the life and legend of the bush ranger Ned Kelly, an Australian born of Irish parents in the mid-1850s. His petty crimes yielded to cattle rustling, bank robberies, and increasingly elaborate plots involving family and friends (the “Kelly Gang”) against corrupt and brutal territorial police. His gang was loyal and fearless, if lawless, bound together against an outside authority considered unjust.
    Mateship, Keneally said, continued inthe carnage of Gallipoli during World War I, where Australian soldiers felt they had been subject to particularly hazardous duties by their British commanding officers. The ill-fated invasion was later depicted in the 1981 Peter Weir film, Gallipoli , starring Mel Gibson. It was financed byAssociated R & R Films Pty Ltd, Murdoch’s newly formed production company.
    The defining element of the mate culture was a kinship infused with a sense of grievance that led Australian men to risk their careers, security, or lives for their brothers, as soldiers did defying officers’ orders or helping one another survive prison camps during World War II. Mateship. “When most Australian men say, ‘He’s my mate,’ they’re speaking of a genuine fraternal solidarity,” Keneally said. But mateship also serves as a double-edged sword: “It is an inclusive, fraternal virtue, and an excluding device.”
    Under Murdoch, those excluded from the circle of mates usually encompassed women, liberals, people of color, academics, environmentalists, union members, and government employees. Andrew Jaspan provided a translation of how mateship played out in Murdoch’s newsrooms.
    M ATESHIP CAN TAKE THE FORM OF A FAVOR : “Mate, would you like a job?”
    A N ADMONITION : “Mate, we don’t do that.”
    A REQUEST : “Mate, give us a