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

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.

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.

It would never have occurred to Halberstam or anyone else he profiles and mythologizes in his book that the media industry would, over the next generation, become the nation’s largest industry because, in part, it would provide escape from this boring civic world. (People magazine, launched in 1974 by Henry Luce’s company—after Luce died—and which becomes the most successful magazine of all time, surely helps invent the new, alternative, celebritified, noncivic power structure.)

And yet while Halberstam misses the soon to be inescapable and elemental point about the media business, he nails another fundamental point: The media has suddenly become a really great business. He gets the hunger for media. People are eating this stuff up. It’s totally hot.

You can’t read The Powers That Be and not start to think, That’s where it’s happening.

It’s like the West: free land.

The romance of Halberstam’s world is not only in its cleverness and toughness and even nobility, but also that it’s so easy. Anybody could do this. Anybody could be this kind of success.

It’s the first structural analysis—who knew this person and who knew that person and how the web of connections and being in the right place at the right time intersected with the nation’s changing education levels, its advancing aspirations and the laws of supply and demand—of a media career. And it’s the first time that the media business is considered as not just the story of newspapers or magazines or television, but in the aggregate, cross-platform sense which makes it all so much, well, bigger.

Everybody I know of a certain generation in the media business read The Powers That Be and took it ever so seriously. Many of us, I’ll wager, came into the media business, rather than, say, government or academia, because of The Powers That Be.

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THE PARTNER (#ulink_0278731f-a676-5442-be40-56b5cca2f162)

Heilemann and Battelle had gone into partnership with one of the really deft and canny hotdogs of the post-Halberstam media age.

He was the senior figure at the Quadrangle investment firm. Before that, he was one among a handful of bankers at the center of the mergers and acquisitions that had remade the media industry.

But before that, he was a journalist too—which made everything about him all the more surprising and confusing.

Let me defer to Steven Wolff, my then eight-year-old son, just arriving home from a play date—his first at his new friend Izzy’s house.

Where I work in our apartment is close enough to the front door to hear my son’s comings and goings. By the end of the day there’s a reluctance and crankiness and heaviness—the backpack thumping, shoes dropping, coat dragging. The nanny cajoling… Just one more step… Just hang your coat up.… Just… Only the most dogged parent would inquire, at this moment, about the day or the play date or the state of the second grade. The kid needs a cocktail before he’s going to be civil. And indeed, Steven almost always heads to the other end of our apartment—to avoid disturbing a father theoretically at work, or, more threatening, a father who might want a sociable chat.

But something different was going on in the foyer. It was an audible change in the energy level—there was a frantic excitement, everything quicker, louder: the backpack not thumping, but being flung; shoes being kicked. The nanny’s voice rising, control being lost. The chatter level going off the scale, “Izzy this… Izzy that…”

I almost went out.

But I know Manhattan play date etiquette. It’s not all right to recruit your children as spies.

What’s more, children—and Steven has two older sisters who have had countless play dates before him—are not very reliable reporters. They don’t readily perceive real estate or class differences (although this changes with adolescence when they become canny appraisers and breathy gossip columnists). This may be because an eight-year-old, as yet, lacks envy’s power of observation, and it may be too because the differences between upper-middle-class real estate and upper-class real estate is not, in Manhattan, all that great. Most truly grand apartments in Manhattan are four or five thousand square feet, an American professional’s right anywhere else. An overdecorated billionaire’s apartment on the Upper East Side is a doctor’s home in Scarsdale or Shaker Heights. In Manhattan, millions are in the nuances.

And so, as difficult as it is, and as disappointing as it is, I have learned not to ask too much of my children about other people’s lots in life.

The nanny was sharply calling Steven now. There was a clattering, and I heard an impermissible flying leap between the arms of two chairs, and then my son was flinging open the French doors which I look out of, over the laptop screen, as I work.

His eyes were large. His face lit. His shirt askew. It seemed like a vast sugar high, but more profound. Revelatory. It was one of those moments as a parent that you anticipate and dread—when some piece of information, some experience gained on a play date (i.e., the street) takes your child from you. I held my breath for his epiphany.

“IZZY,” he said, momentously, his voice soaring and eerily distorting, his eyes becoming ever more saucerlike, “IS RICH!”

I inquired closely and guiltily.

In the telling, Izzy occupied a Harry Potter apartment. Some fantastic and fabulous interior world.