Autumn of the Moguls

by Michael Wolff

  “Can we interest you? Who would you like to do? If you did a one-on-one, an interview on stage, who would you like to do?”

  It was a time to grab a big enchilada. It was certainly no time to be modest. There weren’t that many enchiladas.

  It was Diller or Murdoch.

  Because more mystery attended them, more cult of personality, more secret of success, more mogul history, the interviews with Murdoch and Diller would be the big draws of the conference. What’s more, if you could do it right, cannily and subtly, and have them reveal themselves—that would be a score.

  Their existence, it seemed to me, had never been adequately explained. Murdoch certainly had held more power longer than anyone else—from his arrival in the U.S. in 1976 to now, he had just kept growing, just kept becoming more and more significant. As for Diller, he may just have defied more conventions of power than anyone else. And it often struck me he was doing this with a certain humor or irony, which might be the ultimate defiance of the power convention.

  “If I could face either Diller or Murdoch I would certainly be interested—definitely count me in.”

  4

  THE POWERS

  THAT BE

  Possibly, I’ve thought, I’m something like an old-time Washington columnist—Drew Pearson, James Reston, even Walter Lippmann—in this new kind of ultimate power scene.

  They dealt with matters of state and with the egos and idiosyncrasies of statesmen. I deal with the consolidation of the global media’s power and with the strange and compelling men who control much of the world’s information supply. Lippmann’s interest in Bernard Baruch might be, with a little critical interpretation, not all that different from my interest in Barry Diller.

  After all, the media has replaced politics. The media is the root of consensus; it’s the organizational motor of society, now that media demographics define us; it’s the place you go if you have a cause, or a gripe, or desire for reform. It’s a great patronage machine too; loyalists and courtiers and suck-ups are rewarded with immensely valuable publicity. The media, surely, is a more influential force in our lives and in the world’s changing beliefs than politics or government ever was. Certainly, more people participate in the media than ever participated in democratic politics or government. Media is the currency of our time—the less access you have, the poorer and less successful you are. Likewise, the highest order of power and prestige is to be in the media yourself, or to control people’s access to it; people may say they hate the media, but just let their mothers see them on television. Hence, moguls became the political barons of the age. And we, the mogul underlings, became the officials and ward heelers and apparatchiks and bureaucrats of the new communications-technology complex that runs the nation.

  Media has become not just the political system but the biggest industry too (a convergence which, like fascism before it, has been most comically demonstrated in Italy, where the head of state is also the head of the country’s media monopoly).

  It is almost impossible to find a business that does not see itself as in some part a media business. In a transformation of vast and meretricious proportions, everybody plunged into the media game. Recognition, connection, meaning, transcendence, was something sought by even the dullest men.

  Westinghouse became CBS; France’s biggest water company got reborn as a media megalopolis; GM enjoyed a period as the nation’s major television satellite company; Microsoft again and again lost billions trying to develop media savvy. And GE’s flagship business moved from lightbulbs to NBC.

  You even had media companies creating other media companies to promote their core media company. The more media you owned, the more you could promote the media you owned. (Disastrously, Disney and Miramax created Talk magazine, for a time rationalizing their investment as a marketing instrument for the companies’ movies and executives.) Indeed, the modern notion of brand is really about access to media rather than the older notion of brand, which was about habit and dependability.

  Every American knows the secret of success: more media. The more media, the more recognition, the more value, the more power, the more influence—the greater claim on, well, the media.

  I don’t believe any greater power has ever existed.

  So I began to think it could be for me just like it was for Lippmann in Washington during the thirties and forties, observing the transformation of the U.S. into the world’s great consolidated megapower.

  Of course, I was no Lippmann. And I wasn’t the only one in the media business who had a clearly nagging sense of disappointment, of being less than the circumstances ought to have made us.

  As big as the media got, as central as it had become to everyone’s dreams, almost nobody took it very seriously. In fact, the bigger it got, the less seriously it was taken—even though one of the reasons it got big was precisely so that it would be taken seriously.

  Jerry Levin may have thought that the creation of the AOL Time Warner monolith would see him became a great man, a creator of worlds. But, as was apparent to all but the people closest to it, Time Inc., a company which used to be reasonably well thought of, became sillier and sillier as it grew larger and larger in its successive incarnations.

  No matter how big media companies became, they just could not transform themselves into stately, or even manly, enterprises.

  Politics and government, even though they are explicitly about power, have, or at least used to have, a carefully developed rationale for the need for power—they are, in a sense, about that rationale.

  The media isn’t so remote—isn’t so Waspy. In the media business, everybody’s motivations are clear. Every aspect of the enterprise—from the back office side to the talent side to the news side—is about achieving notoriety. The media is, in fact, in the business of being noticed by the media.

  The more insecure and narcissistic you are, the better equipped you are to rise in the hierarchy. And because there is no limit to insecurity and narcissism, the hierarchies are always being remade.

  Let’s say it: The media business at its most exalted level attracts emotionally needy, attention-demanding, nerdy guys. And worse, unlike a former generation of media people, who reveled in their personal excesses, the present generation is uptight about its desperate desires.

  But, in fact, they’re here because they’re dissatisfied with being just business guys. They aren’t, or don’t feel they are, temperamentally suited to just counting stuff. In fact, the media suits who are always derided as just being bean counters, don’t, in fact, count beans so well. They have quixotically higher ambitions for themselves.

  But they’re not good-looking or funny enough or imaginative enough to be the talent either. They’re stuck in the middle ground: They’re not the talent, but they can’t stand to be so far from the talent that there is no chance for the spotlight to ever hit them.

  So they puff up their businessman mission.

  Media business talk is among the most serious business talk there is. It’s all about being a serious person—a visionary businessman.

  No sane person (at least no sane person not on a mogul’s payroll) who has ever sat down with one or another of the halfwit overlords of the feudal media states and listened to the rationalizations for the twenty-year rise of the media cartel system has ever had any idea what these people are talking about. The patter—about content and distribution and scale and outlets and platforms—masks wild personal needs.

  I can’t do justice to the true asynchronous pitch of halfwit-overlord talk. But I think I can say what they are actually trying to say—which, even if they could say it properly, would still be ridiculous. Also, I think I can analyze why they have so much trouble saying it clearly.

  At the root of the blather are some basic case-study-type business principles. Great industries are built on the concept of commoditization. You take something expensive and by making lots of the same thing you make it cheaper, and, through a larger distribution system, you make it more
widely available. Cars, for instance—like the Model T.

  Now, part of the premise here is that the thing you’re selling, because of the more efficient standardized process you’re using to create it, becomes more and more like the thing everyone else is selling, a mass-produced, unspecialized product. And therefore, you as the business guy—the person who knows how to do things more efficiently than the next guy—become all the more valuable to the process.

  The media, like all other advanced industries, was going to begin trafficking in commodities. Content was going to become commodified. Therefore, gaining the business advantage was going to be about how the organization could most efficiently create the product and bring it to market. It was going to be about management.

  Plus, it was going to be about value. Or value added. When you commodify something you devalue it, but if you manage to convince people (using, of course, the media) that your cheap-shit commodity is the better cheap-shit commodity, then you’ve won their hearts and minds. In a world where everything is the same because everything has been commodified, the only way to distinguish what you sell from what everyone else sells is to create certain neural stimulators that make buyers think it’s different. This is called brand.

  There’s a precious irony here. The value of the media used to be that it could create that illusion of difference, that value distinction, for a whole range of products—from soap to cars to nail polish. But now media people were saying, Why don’t we use the power of the media to create the illusion of difference for mass-produced media! Why should we give somebody else the advantage that we own? Damn! Accordingly, as the media commoditized and devalued itself, and then turned around and overhyped itself, this made it increasingly difficult to create illusion and distinction for the products and producers (the soap and cars and nail polish) that were paying the bills.

  Naturally and logically, the consolidation that happened to all other great-industries-which-shaped-history would happen to media too. (Anybody who went to business school, or, for that matter, has ever read a business magazine, will tell you that there were once hundreds of automobile manufacturers, which became three.) Of course you would go from a large number of disorganized, independent, mom-and-pop media companies to a few professionally organized supercompanies. You would cons olidate. (This really is among the sexiest business words—it is, after all, in the process of consolidation, the making of deals and trading of assets and the cost of recombination, that the vast and immensely profitable financial services industry makes most of its money.) You would combine many businesses doing the same things inefficiently to realize one business doing the same thing efficiently, hence creating a more-widely-available-less-expensive product that would be adopted by billions of people everywhere, changing human behavior and the course of history!

  Making you, the person who did the organizing, a historically significant person.

  One obvious problem here, however, is that the media business is nothing like a business. No mutuality. No common function. No similar objectives.

  It’s a made-up concept, media. In all the huffing and puffing about the media, we forgot that media doesn’t mean anything. The entire industry is a fluke of semiotics.

  In the fifties or so, ad agencies gave media its first use as a singular construction. “What’s the media?” “What media are we using?” Meaning the literal paper or film or tape or billboard.

  From there, it became a salesman’s word. I sell media.

  My dad ran an ad agency during the fifties and sixties in Paterson, New Jersey. One of the guys who used to hang out there was a young radio salesman named Mel Karmazin, who, when he grew up, would buy radio companies, then television, and eventually joust for power at the Viacom cartel. At any rate, in those days, Mel, as a callow youth, was called a media sales guy. He was selling space, and the space was called media. Media was the thing that the advertisers bought. It was the space between what you listened to the radio to hear or turned on the television to see.

  There was too, during this time, the growth of media as an arcane academic word. Media was about the abstract function of communication. Mass media. It was sociological. Large numbers of people were getting the same information in the same way—this must mean something; this must be having a societal effect. There was too this other element of academic self-consciousness, of the media being the mediated thing. This was McLuhan. The media was the go-between, the intermediary. This was, obviously, a point of philosophy rather than business. There was much talk about the media as a distortion field. There was real reality, and then media reality.

  Then there was a thing called multimedia—a sixties thing related to drugs, mostly. The Joshua Light Show at the Fillmore East was multimedia. (In some sense, the concept of multimedia would have its finest expression as PowerPoint.)

  And then, suddenly, emerging in the 1970s, you had something called media companies. This was just inflation. A useful bastardization of an already obtuse word. It was a Wall Street thing. We’re more important than we were yesterday because we’re no longer a broadcast (notice how old-fashioned that word sounds) company, we’re a fucking media company.

  But at no point in the development of the word and of the concept of media was there an assumption that the television business and the magazine business and the radio business and the billboard business and the music business and the movie business were the same business—that they should be run by the same person, that they required the same talents, or would, even, logically have the same investors or the same stars or the same audience.

  Indeed, for a while, there was even a kind of formal resistance to the word—and to the notion. One day, shortly after I went to work as a copyboy at the New York Times in the early seventies, a memo appeared on the copydesk bulletin board, advising reporters and editors that, in fact, there was no such thing as the media per se. There were newspapers and magazines and television and radio and movies, and to group them under one very vague umbrella was, at best, a lazy usage.

  It’s as ridiculous as if someone had come along and invented the “transportation” business and, within the same company and under the same management, because they were all somehow related to the same word, put car companies and train companies and ship companies and airlines together.

  You get the exact opposite impression of the media business from The Powers That Be, David Halberstam’s epic 1979 book about the media industry. Instead of assholes run amok, in Halberstam’s version the media is a rational, smart, competent, inspired enterprise: the pivotal force in the rise of the civil-rights movement, the opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the investigation of Watergate and the end of Richard Nixon.

  Halberstam’s media people not only have vast social and political clout, but they have businesses that throw off great amounts of cash and which have increased in value as significantly as any businesses ever have.

  It’s a golden age chronicle: The media from 1925 to the late seventies (just as Murdoch is coming to America).

  For a few years our kids went to school together. Halberstam was a lugubrious presence at the school, trotted out for benefits and lectures.

  On the one occasion we had lunch together, I found myself thinking of him as a missing link. He’s a certain, stuffed-shirt, media establishment type—which really doesn’t exist anymore, except in some kind of martyred form.

  He believes in the worthiness and primacy of civic institutions—the nineties idea that politics may have been replaced by the market, and politicians by entrepreneurs, is sacrilegious for him. He believes in owners—proprietors—over managers and opportunistic entrepreneurs.

  He believes in lots of prose (anathema in modern media) and discursiveness. He’s all long form—ceremonious even.

  Pop culture dismays him. Celebrities don’t interest him.

  He certainly does not accept the new financial-media-technology power structure—the American Establishment as it is, for instance, annually described b
y Vanity Fair. (“Do these people really influence society?” he asked, and answered, at lunch. “No, not at all. This is just a scorecard of who made the most money.”) He has a different idea of power, who should have it, how they should use it, and who might challenge them on its use. The quick and the glib are not at the center of his power grid.

  At a dinner shortly after Barry Diller formed USA Networks (his disparate collage of television stations and cable channels) in 1998, Halberstam stood up and, in his deep voice—with such an undifferentiated bass range that it’s often hard to understand him—asked Diller what USA Networks planned to do in the area of public affairs.

  That must have quieted the crowd: You can hear the rustle of embarrassment.

  The creation of media power is, in Halberstam’s telling, the creation of civic power. The Paleys and Meyers and Luces aren’t press barons (marginal, corrupt, eccentric figures). These are true American enterprise figures, as large in his telling as the Rockefellers and Henry Ford and the Kennedys. (Indeed, the Kennedys would not have been the Kennedys without the aid of many of the people in Halberstam’s book.)

  Before the advent of these people and their organizations, the media was vaudevillian. Here, midcentury, the media, with its ever-expanding reach, becomes both a vastly powerful voice and amazingly lucrative business.

  This is, however, the news media.

  There is no entertainment in Halberstam’s media view. Movies, rock and roll, prime-time, celebrities, as late as 1979, when Halberstam’s book is published, have no place in a serious discussion of the media landscape. Even Paley’s great sitcom-and-variety-show empire is overshadowed by the position and power he acquires through his news division. The focus in the book is the American commonweal, rather than the media commonweal, political culture rather than pop culture.

  Serious men engaged in serious matters.