Autumn of the Moguls

by Michael Wolff

  She was a blonde, thin, attractive, uninteresting woman who Alter seemed to know well and whose intercession gave me the opportunity to jump from Alter into the main crowd.

  I traded up from Alter to CNN’s Walter Isaacson.

  Now Walter, who was Steve Weisman’s neighbor in Bronxville (Andy Lack, the head of NBC News, and David Westin, the head of ABC News, were also Bronxville neighbors and also in the room), was possibly the most important journalist of the age. Or the most emblematic. Or the most symptomatic.

  So many of us in a certain media generation (Walter is 50) have a Walter thing. I know a dozen people who will spend their nursing-home years dissecting Walter’s career, that unique confection of classicism and opportunism, remarkable diligence and rank ambition.

  Walter is our fantasy life: a media-business action figure. A perfect combination of vast intelligence, adroit political talents, impeccable connections, publicity savvy, deep reserves of corporate sucking-up abilities, and an equal facility with both high-and middlebrow sensibilities. And on top of that, he’s a good writer (his Kissinger biography—which he wrote when? at what hour of the day?—is a brilliant thing; his Ben Franklin biography is also an estimable achievement). What’s more, he can go to an endless number of parties without apparent fatigue.

  He has—or always seems to have—accomplished that thing that is so elusive to and so sought after by the rest of us: a perfect career. As able an organization man as he was a journalist, he just never made a mistake. Never got caught out. Or at least never failed to recover beautifully when he had to recover.

  A decade ago, Time Warner’s Jerry Levin, searching for someone to help him with his inexpert technological hankerings, vaulted the also inexpert Walter out of the ranks of Time’s many senior editors and brought him to the hallowed thirty-fourth floor and a big office suite and into the new role of editor of new media. Walter led the effort to create Pathfinder—history’s first razzle-dazzle Website—and, not insignificantly, was most responsible for the Internet’s becoming, with Time’s imprimatur, an advertising-driven medium. Then, just before Pathfinder flopped, Walter was whisked back to Time, where he was made managing editor and where, arguably, he saved the idea of the newsmagazine—by exchanging worldly hard news for domesticated soft news (a famous Walter cover headline: “TOO MUCH HOMEWORK!”). Right before the great nineties ad boom expired, Walter was promoted to Time Inc. editorial director—one step from the Henry Grunwald Time Inc. editor-in-chief job that, nobody doubted, he was born to have.

  At which point the AOL deal happened. Walter aligned himself squarely with Levin and with AOL’s Pittman (when Levin and Pittman were still in alignment). Early on, he tried to become the editorial director of the combined new-media—old-media operation. When that didn’t work out, he took the possibly even grander job of CNN chairman.

  Walter is’a yuppie Platonic ideal. (Walter, in fact, may be what we men of a certain middle-aged media generation talk about instead of talking about girls.)

  It is certainly of no small significance to the Walter myth that he accomplished what he accomplished at Time Inc., and then Time Warner, and then AOL Time Warner—that he stayed within this fold right up until now. For one thing, these are arguably the most vicious and fraught companies that have ever existed—so to have risen through them for nearly 25 years almost without setback is the feat of a remarkable career athlete; there aren’t a handful of others who have done it. For another, these companies, Time Inc. and its successors, represent, in their transformations and grandiosity and shamelessness, all of our media lives. AOL Time Warner is, for better or worse, our company (as New York is our city). And Walter, for many of us, has been the manifestation of the most extreme demands, the most difficult contortions, of this company and this life.

  Walter became not so much journalist as mediaist.

  Not everyone who shares the Walter obsession feels a sense of admiration. Indeed, how you regard Walter—as perfect example or bad example—in some sense defines your bias in our media generation: Do you accept the career itself as the art—and therefore see Walter as representing a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress figure? Or do you see careerists, of which Walter would be the highest expression, not so much Machiavelli as Eddie Haskell, as the real agents of the whole mess we’re in? (These anticareerists refer to Walter as “Wally,” in an effort to deprive him of his very Walterness.)

  At any rate, he looked terrible.

  He was sallow, with dark-rimmed eyes.

  As logical as the CNN job was—or, as necessary as it was to pushing his career ever onward (he would not have wanted forever to be a subaltern running Time magazine)—it was, certainly, an exhausting, thankless job.

  I’m sure he understood that the reason he got the job was that everybody else knew there was almost no chance of success. That the job fell to him because the geniuses at AOL Time Warner had gotten rid of everyone at CNN who had theretofore made it a success.

  That left Walter reporting to WB auteur Jamie Kellner (surely not Walter’s idea of a genius), working in Atlanta (even though there is no more Manhattan creature than New Orleans—born Walter), competing with Fox News (as unseemly a competition as he has ever been in), and hiring Connie Chung (who Walter can’t have thought was anything other than ridiculous).

  Still. If you understand, as Walter does, that the world—our world—has changed irrevocably, that journalism is a sidelined occupation, and that, if you want to be a contender you have to break through to the other side of the diversified media-and-entertainment business, you do what Walter did.

  But he looked terrible.

  I was always too aware of Walter as media subject, rather than as media participant. The room was filled with politicians—former governor Mario Cuomo, former mayor Ed Koch, former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke—but to me Walter was the politician in the room.

  Like a politician, he thanked me for something I had recently written about him and his wife chimed in too. She also seemed sincerely grateful.

  What I’d written, however, had been not a compliment, but a dig. I knew this to be a sign of an advanced media man, to be able to throw off personal sensitivity and to embrace all notice as good notice. (This was not just self-centered blindness, but a necessary survival tactic—you have to be armored against slings and arrows; what’s more, you don’t ever want to show public hurt.)

  “I always love writing about Walter,” I said, stupidly, to his wife. “I love Walter,” I added, wildly, hoping as soon as I said it that it had been lost or at least muted in the party noise.

  “You’re speaking at the conference?” I hurriedly said to Walter.

  “I guess I am,” Walter said, “but about what I’m not sure. I’m not sure if I have anything to tell anyone.”

  This was modesty in the form of gloom—or gloom in the form of modesty.

  “You’re doing Rupert—will you go after him?” Walter asked.

  It was odd and confusing to hear Walter implicitly cast Murdoch as the enemy. Walter was CNN and Rupert was Fox and they were competitors, but the idea that Walter and Rupert were somehow not in the same business—that there was a moral gulf—seemed old-fashioned. I thought, perhaps, I had misheard Walter. Or that it didn’t mean anything, that Walter was just trying to say what he thought I wanted to hear, and I was listening to hear what Walter was not really saying.

  In the end, I always found it awkward to be with Walter.

  I couldn’t rise to colleaguehood with him.

  He was too much for me like a much-vaunted girl in high school: hair, breasts, legs.

  It was all too much, too intense, too fraught, and, oddly, at the same time, in fact, too uninteresting. Walter was more interesting from afar than up close.

  Then Steve Shepard, the editor of BusinessWeek, interrupted, pointedly.

  “You’re entirely wrong,” he said, grabbing my arm. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.” He peered into my blank face: “About the J-school.” The
Columbia School of Journalism, which, theoretically, fed the ranks of the media business, had suddenly become the subject of earnest debate—what was its purpose?—and I had recently expressed an opinion on the matter (although, at that moment, I had to struggle to remember just exactly what my opinion was).

  Here were two glaring style contrasts:

  There was Walter who was smooth and withholding (he waited for you to come to him), and Steve Shepard, an old-fashioned buttonholer.

  Where Walter was engaged in a high level of media politics, Steve had an issue. Where Walter occupied a highly abstracted world, Steve was a literalist.

  I grasped at the prospect of literal discussion hungrily—even about, of all things, journalism school.

  Steve, tall and bald with a big nose and self-effacing grimaces, was nearly a generation older than Walter. He had grown up in the newsmagazines, at Newsweek for the first half of his career; stymied there, he had taken a brief and ill-fated turn during the last gasp of the Saturday Review (a publication as forgotten as a publication can be) and then taken a consolation post at the resolutely second-tier BusinessWeek, which covered the slow pace, minor digressions, and faceless cast of industrial America.

  At the time, there was nothing more second-tier than business journalism.

  But in a radical upheaval, during Steve’s almost twenty years at BusinessWeek, the fundamental interests of journalism effectively reversed themselves. The broad, worldly, political interests of the newsmagazines—the journalism practiced by Alter, and by Isaacson earlier in his career—became specialty interests, and business journalism became protean, dramatic, addictive even, and certainly the in-the-money subject. Shepard’s BusinessWeek may have been, for a good part of the nineties, the most profitable magazine in the country. (Shepard himself resisted becoming the kind of media star BusinessWeek’s great success might have allowed him to be.)

  Alas.

  With the collapse of the NASDAQ, and the technology business, BusinessWeek was now an ailing vessel. Shepard had become one of the names often mentioned as the next dean of the Columbia School of Journalism—a respectable retirement.

  Which is what he was challenging me about now:

  The journalism school, and the search for a new dean, had suddenly, bitterly crystallized the sub-rosa debate about journalism itself—and why anyone would want to engage in it, much less spend tens of thousands of dollars in graduate-school tuition to get the chance.

  It was weird, certainly, to be plunging into this discussion in Steve Rattner’s house, because if anyone, Rattner represented the ultimate transcendence over or escape from this profession of ours.

  And it was doubly weird to be pulled away from Walter Isaacson to have this discussion. What I had written about the journalism school had begun by noting that one of the issues in the self-criticism of the school was precisely an eagerness to be the kind of school, as a faculty member had told me, “where the next generations of Walter Isaacsons” would go. (Walter himself, after Harvard, had gone to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.)

  That, it seemed to me, was the identity crisis (not just for the journalism school but for all of us):

  Did you take Walter, and even in some sense Steve Rattner, as the ultimate and highest evolution of the journalist, or did you accept journalism as a function and skill-set apart from the journalist himself being celebrated and powerful (and cool)?

  Shepard was making the literal argument: Journalism was important; the Columbia School of Journalism offered something of importance. (I believe he had some other, subtler points, which I’ve forgotten, but in essence, he was pushing the right-stuff argument.)

  I was touched by the old-fashionedness of Shepard’s notion: that it was important to train journalists.

  He entirely eschewed the larger absurdist and existential points:

  Important schools exist, not least of all, to produce important people. And although the J-school is incontrovertibly the best in its field, hardly anyone who goes there rises to the top of his or her profession.

  Columbia J-school—which is not-too-ironically called the Harvard of journalism schools—represents the world of noncoms, while Walter and friends are West Point.

  The failure to groom movers and shakers may be partly due to the nature of the training itself: The basics of journalism, of fact-finding and of interviewing (and occasionally writing), are substantially lower on the food chain than the industry-shaping issues of distribution and supply and demographics and technology and the creation of hit formats. But it is also due to the outlook of the school. The J-school sees itself as different from the officer class of the media world, even opposed to officers (or at least assumes that the world runs at best in spite of them). While the Walters of the business are rising in their consolidated corporate media regimes, making whatever Faustian infotainment bargains they need to make, somebody has to be finding and preparing the news (and protecting old-fashioned news values).

  And that’s the rub: Do you want to be training people for lower rather than higher economic activity?

  There is even a feeling out in the larger, more cynical journalism world that having gone to journalism school, having had that specific training, is a liability, that the first $45,000 of an employer’s investment in you is spent having you unlearn what your parents paid $45,000 (or what you yourself borrowed) to have the journalism school teach you. Journalism students, especially Columbia J-school students, may well learn their skills too well. They come to the real world with a certain level of literalness and inflexibility and even stridency that is out of place in an increasingly, to say the least, plastic and accommodating media business. Indeed, at just the point in time when all other professional schools are being urged to put a greater emphasis on professional values and ethics and canons of behavior, the Columbia J-school is in some sense being faulted for putting way too much emphasis on such things as it prepares its students for what is more and more a quisling enterprise.

  And then there’s the issue of newspapers. No matter how much electronic equipment has been installed, or how many courses are devoted to long-form magazine writing (in itself odd, because there are few long-form magazines), or how eager everybody briefly was to be a dot-com cub reporter, this is still a newspaper school. And newspapers, as everybody kinda knows, are not long for this world.

  Complicating the situation and the value proposition, many of the purists in the J-school consider themselves, in effect, the media working class, and—complicating campus allegiances—claim a higher sort of left-wing credential for themselves. They continue to do the honest work. Media is the corruption, and theirs is the truer calling. They recognize, proudly, even militantly, that to have an interest in news is to be regarded as a dinosaur. “If you’re chasing police stories, you’re in career eclipse; if you’re covering lifestyle, you’re ascendant,” says a J-school graduate I know who is in eclipse. They are labor-movement people.

  Shepard seemed to be stubbornly resistant to the ironies here.

  He was a journalist. He had risen practicing journalism. And he was about to go into retirement proud of his life’s experience and accomplishments.

  To me the point had to do with, as everything else in the media business had to do with, return on investment. Universities, as much as anyone, loved a big return, and understood, too, if you didn’t keep up with the accepted level of returns, you would be, naturally, superseded and finally put out of business.

  But if the university can create a larger career model, larger economic horizons—not journalists but media managers—it might, for one thing, be able to sell more school (which is of course the central thing). A school for moguls is, in some hopeful mission statement, undoubtedly what someone had in mind—a school that produces the people who run the massively consolidated media combines. (Universities are often a little behind in realizing what’s happening in the actual world—it may not yet be aware that the media world is collapsing.)

  Since it may be
that only God can create a mogul, the fallback is to make a school for mediaists—that is, for the future Isaacsons and Rattners. A new class of students who can see beyond the limitations of journalism and to the complex supply, production, distribution, and technological demands of information.

  Sure.

  While I was pleased to be having the conversation with Shepard—he too, it seemed, preferred going back and forth with me to having to observe the decorum and social blah blah—it would have been more revealing to have had this conversation with Walter (who had peeled away).

  In short order, Rattner’s wife, Maureen White, conspicuously cleared her throat. In an interesting power-sharing arrangement, she was apparently to give the evening’s peroration.

  She was, in many ways, much more imposing than her husband. A former Wall Streeter herself, she now sat on boards (she was on the board of the school our children went to) and convened tables at luncheons for various political figures and causes. She had something more like a Beverly Hills than Manhattan coif and whitish makeup (her lips were exceptionally shiny and pale). There was no expense spared here, no detail untended, no consideration unthought of—but nevertheless (and unlike Beverly Hills) she presented herself with a certain austerity and sexless-ness.

  Was she a creature of her husband’s aspirations, or he of hers? was the unavoidable question (friends of theirs openly debated and analyzed this question).

  She proceeded to deliver an oddly long speech—or really an elaborately prepared impromptu talk—part of the effect of which was to recast the light, if it had drifted, back on the hostess and host. She gave the sense of not just offering the space to have a party, not just of being the host, but of being, too, the honoring benefactor, with the author, bashfully and modestly and awkwardly, by her side. She went on at great and fulsome length. The accolade and implied honor she extended was, like the party, itself out of proportion. (Book parties tend to be filled with other people who have written books, like bar mitzvahs are filled with other 13-year-old boys who have had bar mitzvahs, so the pretense of specialness is a hard one to maintain.)