Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Michael Wolff

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      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 by 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.

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