Headless tabloid in bottomless pit.

Almost any time a Post writer goes to a dinner party in Manhattan, he will encounter at least one smug lawyer who says something like, "I read the New York Post only if someone leaves it behind in the toilet." Most others will be sympathetic about the paper's troubles but know little about them. Perhaps a third of the guests buy it occasionally or regularly (as a supplement to the New York Times) and know it as a stylish and gossipy read with a deep bench of columnists and the city's least politically correct  cartoonist. Most importantly, they will know that there is a soberly argued but highly ideological conservative editorial page tucked into the middle of the paper-- the only such page in the New York market, and one of the few in the country--and an op-ed page with regular columnists like Pat Buchanan, Evans & Novak, and Jeane Kirkpatrick.

The Post was rounded 192 years ago by Alexander Hamilton, a fact which is printed on the front page every day. It has had two modern incarnations. The first was as a Democratic-leaning paper owned by Dolly Schiff during the postwar years, when its readership was largely Jewish and liberal (but not particularly leftist). Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was an important Post columnist in the 1950s. Longtime editor James Wechsler was a paragon of liberal anti-Communism.

Rupert Murdoch brought the money-losing paper in 1977, introduced a racier tabloid style, moved it to the right, and boosted circulation to nearly a million. The rightward shift to some extent followed the evolution of the Post's core readership: white liberals who had gotten older and in one way or another been mugged by New York's jarring change into a more racially diverse and violent city. But the racy populist conservatism of Murdoch's Post was hated by the liberal establishment. In 1988, Teddy Kennedy (a Murdoch foe because of the rough treatment the senator received in the Murdoch-owned Boston Herald) engineered midnight legislation to deny Murdoch a waiver from an obsolete FCC law barring someone from owning a television station and a newspaper in the same market. Murdoch was forced to sell the Post, passing it on to Peter Kalikow, a developer whose financial status turned from megarich to bankrupt when the New York real-estate market collapsed.

The Post staff suffered through cutbacks and salary cuts. The brazen tabloid style continued, but somewhat diluted by a lingering desire for respectability. A rump minority of conservative writers stayed on, including state editor Frederic Dicker and columnist Ray Kerrison. Harvard Law graduate Eric Breindel, a young neoconservative hired by Murdoch in 1986, remained at the helm of the editorial page. The uncompromising son of Holocaust survivors, Breindel brought together a staff to craft a page that was both loved and hated but above all taken seriously in New York political circles. The Post supported Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani for mayor against David Dinkins (the only city paper to do so), fought on behalf of Korean grocers facing racially motivated boycotts and vandalism, stood up for the city's cops and for parents resisting plans to teach first-graders about "gay families." All of these stands distinguished the Post from its competitors in the tabloid market, the fatter, richer, and duller Daily News and New York Newsday.

Send in the Clowns

Still, as Kalikow's fortunes sagged, the paper, stripped to a threadbare staff, lost readers and advertisers. Finally, on a freezing Sunday in January, Kalikow abruptly passed the Post off to Steven Hoffenberg, a rogue financier not even half a step ahead of Securities and Exchange Commission investigators. By March, the Post had been wrested from Hoffenberg by aging parking-garage magnate Abe Hirschfeld, a vulgar loon with an unquenchable thirst for publicity. Hirschfeld's first act was to fire editor-in-chief Pete Hamill and then, two days later, to announce 75 more firings and the installation of Amsterdam News publisher Wilbert Tatum at the paper's helm.

Hamill's firing brought despair to the news staff. Though Hamill had been editor for only three weeks, there was immense loyalty to him. The talented columnist, magazine writer, and novelist had been part of the New York literary scene for nearly thirty years. He had never edited a major paper, and conferring that kind of responsibility on him was a risk only a publisher in Hoffenberg's circumstances might have entertained. But in a brief time, Hamill had provided a shell-shocked reporting staff with the sense that there was leadership in the newsroom.

Hamill has more substantive political beliefs than other recent Post editors. He is one of the last representatives of blue-collar liberalism. But in recent years, it has never been hard to find strains of social conservatism running through his columns, however much he considered it a writer's duty to lambaste the rich and powerful. Certainly one could satirize the cult of personality that grew up around Hamill during the week of rebellion that followed his firing. (When the temporarily deposed editor made his second triumphant "return to the newsroom" in three days, one sportswriter called out; "Pete, are we going to have to stop work and give you a standing ovation every time you walk back to your office?") Still it was undeniable that it was the staffs respect for Hamill that made a cohesive revolt against Hirschfeld possible.

The final spark was Hirschfeld's announcement of the appointment of Tatum, sealing what one editor called the "Hitler-Stalin pact." Tatum's Amsterdam News is a shoddily produced, often race-baiting weekly: for years Tatum has used it to inflate the reputations of the city's black anti-Semites and radicals. There is not a single racially divisive event in New York over the last half-dozen years--from the Tawana Brawley case to the Central Park jogger case (the Amsterdam News supported the black teenage rapists) to the anti-Jewish riots in Crown Heights--in which the Amsterdam News has not played a reprehensible role. When he is downtown, among gullible and inattentive whites, Tatum unctuously plays the role of racial healer. His paper, meanwhile, keeps picking at the city's wounds.

Virtually everyone at the Post-- from the neoconservative editorial page to the hipsters who cover the rock 'n' roll scene-understood viscerally that the Hirschfeld-Tatum duo would destroy their paper. So what followed was a week of spontaneous and glorious and inconclusive rebellion. Day One: mysterious computer problems make it "impossible" to print a Monday paper. Day Two: Post staff puts out the famous Alexander Hamilton mutiny edition, a paper devoted almost entirely to attacks on Hirschfeld and Tatum. Day Three: Pete Hamill's (first) triumphant return. Day Four: a rally outside the Post with speeches from Danny Aiello, Norman Mailer, Rudy Giuliani, and David Dinklns, among others. (The Dinkins presence was more than a bit pro forma; the Post has been a constant thorn in the mayor's side, and few think he loses sleep over its troubles. Moreover, Dinkins is very friendly with Tatum.) Day Five: Bankrupty judge awards the paper to Hirschfeld after an agreement bringing Hamill back for a two-week interim, pending another hearing.

Was It Victory?

Fun, but was it victory? In Tatum's brief interlude as co-publisher he carried out a rash of firings--mostly of Jews, including Eric Breindel, City Hall bureau chief David Seifman, Jack Newfield, and Albany editor Frederic Dicker. He chortled about them on black ratio station WLIB. Those fired have not been reinstated.

Meanwhile, the erratic Hirschfeld is scheduled to get full control of the paper by April 2. Other potential buyers and investors circle about, raising hopes inside the building. But no one is adept at distinguishing rich people who like to get their names mentioned in the Times from genuine prospects. For a while, at least, a potential franchise remains: small-size daily in the nation's biggest media market, an ideologically diverse staff of writers who generally like one another, and a virtual monopoly position over the domain of right-of-center opinion in the New York print media. All these factors are changing rapidly under extremely volatile conditions. Paper also runs occasional headlines like "Headless Body in Topless Bar."

If the Post does perish, that will deprive New York of the last outpost of Front Page journalism, a lively, unrespectable, conservative tabloid, and cede a monopoly to papers that hew to the dull pieties of politically correct liberalism, written not for cops, plumbers, truck drivers, and stockbrokers, but for professors at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Mr. McConnell is a Post columnist and member of the paper's editorial board.