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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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