A Reporter’s Murder Exposes a Media Empire’s Dark Side

The Mogul by R.G. Belsky

A newspaper editor knows that the facts may be accurate, but how you arrange them can determine what readers believe. Give one fact a headline, tuck another into the final paragraph, leave something out altogether. Nick Marston has spent decades practicing these skills. Now he’s telling us his own story. We might want to pay attention to what ledes he buries.

In R.G. Belsky’s The Mogul, the editor-in-chief of the fictional New York Sentinel looks back on a career spent serving media tycoon William “Billy” Blaine. Nick has helped Billy build a powerful newspaper, and he can point to people they’ve helped along the way. There are other consequences, though, he would rather explain than answer for.

A Murder Inside the Newsroom Family

Twenty-three-year-old Carrie Anne Cody is found beaten to death after the newspaper’s Christmas party. Her missing cell phone and a late-night call to the Sentinel suggest that someone at the paper may know more than they’re saying. Nick promises readers an inside account of the investigation, with nothing held back. An admirable editorial position. Potentially an inconvenient one, too.

Billy recognizes the commercial possibilities immediately. He can arrange a lavish farewell for Carrie Anne while calculating how many newspapers her death will sell. His generosity is real enough; so is his appetite for exploiting tragedy. As suspicion circulates through the newsroom, the paper’s obligation to report the news collides with its owner’s determination to control it.

Belsky, himself a veteran newspaper and television news editor, has considerable fun with this world. Editors trade barbs in news meetings and relegate a city-budget story to the business section while hunting for the next sensational headline. Selling papers takes priority, even when the victim is a colleague. Nick’s capable news editor, Sally Easton, keeps asking questions that others would prefer to gloss over. Meanwhile, Billy’s longtime associate Curly Carmody has his own ideas about whose interests the coverage should serve.

An Editor’s Selective Memory

Call it newspaper noir. Nick knows how media corruption works because he’s spent years accommodating it. He knows what journalistic integrity requires, too, even when he chooses expediency. A headline’s power to move copies can outweigh almost any objection to the story beneath it. Nick is an engaging guide, funny and professionally shrewd, with a newspaperman’s ear for a good anecdote. He’s also selecting the anecdotes.

The narrative moves between the 2003 murder investigation and earlier episodes in Nick’s life, including his service in Vietnam and the family losses he struggles to understand. Short chapters often end with a revelation that changes the meaning of what came before. We begin listening for qualifications in Nick’s assurances and wondering why a particular fact has arrived so late.

His unreliability extends beyond what he withholds from us. Nick keeps trying to locate the moment when Billy went wrong, as though finding it might explain his own choices. He remembers his youthful ambitions to practice useful, honest journalism. He remembers the good they accomplished together. Surely that has to count for something?

The Cost of Looking Away

After all, the Sentinel has helped tenants fight eviction and rallied support for a child who needs an operation to restore his sight. Yet its sensational coverage also destroys lives. In one devastating episode, a teenage suspect is publicly condemned before the evidence collapses; clearing his name cannot restore what the coverage has taken from him.

Billy tends to judge a decision by whether it gets him what he wants. Nick is more troubled by the means and the consequences — though he often finds a way to justify going along. What responsibility does a newspaper bear for the damage its bestselling headlines cause? How much does it mean to be regarded as Billy’s conscience while supplying the expertise that makes his methods work? The same difficult questions enter the characters’ private lives, where protecting someone you love can mean allowing someone else to suffer.

Belsky’s plainspoken prose keeps us close to Nick through all his digressions. The twists keep coming, and the short chapters make it tempting to follow him into just one more. We get the pleasures of a tangled murder mystery alongside the discomfort of recognizing how reasonable a bad decision can sound. The surprise is often how readily we’ve accepted an explanation that no longer holds up.

The truth becomes a slippery thing when telling it threatens everything you have a stake in protecting. This makes The Mogul a gripping study of complicity and the stories people tell themselves to make it bearable.