I was not the only one embarrassed here.
Still, such embarrassments are ultimately taken in stride and what is remembered is the intention. And, in many ways, that intention, to be the presenters, the benefit chairs, the larger-than-life friends, the pillars and underwriters of the journalistic community, would be remembered much longer than the book.
It was interesting, and unusual, to see the gears grind like this, openly and theatrically.
Then, turning, and suddenly filled with the sense that having gotten this far without panic or self-loathing, I should now get out, I ran into Rattner.
His coolness, or preciseness, or remoteness, was palpable. You wanted to grab and hold him.
He didn’t come to you. You had to get to him.
He was one of those people who speaks in a voice purposefully too low, too modulated, compelling everyone to bend toward him.
I only vaguely, and after some delay, made out that he was talking about the conference. The words were hazy …joining us…. I understand … interesting … ought to be….
In fact, he seemed not to be sure that I was joining him. Or, at least, he seemed to make me doubt I was joining him.
I rushed to say, to confirm, “I’m doing Murdoch!”
Had I blurted that?
“Yes,” he said, simply.
“It should be really great. It’s a great program. You’ve done an incredible job.” My head was nodding like a dashboard dog.
The more I sensed his elusiveness, the more frantically I tried to make a connection.
Why did I want to?
Why do we need the approval or the affirmation or the acknowledgment of the rich? Almost everyone here at this party needed that approval and affirmation.
And if I was aware of everyone’s need more than they were aware of it, which of course is what I felt, did that reflect on the further tenuousness of my relationship here?
Rattner continued to seem remote, placid, delphic, as I made my excuses.
2
AILES AND
TRUMAN
I had to give a Speech a few days before the conference began.
The International Center of Photography, an organization that straddles the ever-widening no-man’s-land between media and art, was having some sort of goodwill or donors or potential donors breakfast, and—arranged so long ago that I was here, it seemed, much more by fate than by choice—I was the speaker.
People in the media business are always giving speeches because other people in the media business, as in politics, have given speeches before them. There is an endless desire to get in the last word, and an equal desire to have your own voice elevated by the voices that have come before you. One gasbag is inflated by another.
In this case, I had agreed to speak because at the last such meeting of the ICP Roger Ailes had spoken.
Ailes, the former Nixon and Reagan political operative (and before that, an early television whiz kid) who ran Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, had, perhaps, a greater claim at this moment in time on what the media was—on its true sensibility, its clearest voice, its most basic character—than any other executive in the business.
You could argue, without too much difficulty, that Fox, with its anti-Democrat, anti-Clinton, antiyuppie, antiwonk, anti-Washington, anti—New York POV, had produced the only new, lively, thriving media of the age. Likewise, you could argue that it had, as much as the media ever has, upended U.S. politics. Indeed, if modern politics is about message, about media opportunities, about controlling the news cycle, then what’s the effect, for the Republicans, of having the fastest-growing news organization in the nation on their side?
Fox and George Bush were in an interesting symbiotic relationship in which it was unclear whose body was the host.
Ailes is one of the great creepy figures of the age—and doesn’t try to disguise it. He looks the way you imagine the man behind the curtain looking: That is, he doesn’t care about how he looks (which is, as it happens, gray and corpulent). The ultimate operator, he’s not distracted by show business. He understands it’s all manipulation, so why pretend otherwise?
When he got found out giving the President ex parte advice on handling the Iraq war, he didn’t for a second whinge or show remorse. (Any other network executive would have had to commit ritual self-flagellation or even suicide.) Let others pretend—he’s too old and too good at his job to start making believe the world works any other way than the way it works: Network execs are always in tight with somebody.
Of course, the rap on Ailes is that he’s a hopeless partisan, a true believer, a Republican agent. But that deeply misses the point. Ailes is a television guy. He’s been doing television practically as long as anyone. His digressions into politics have always been more about television craft than about Republican craft. His is the singular obsession of any television guy: to stay on the air.
Fox really isn’t in the service of the Republicans. Ailes can say this baldly and confidently. (The Republicans, more and more, follow the Fox line.) Fox isn’t in any conventional sense ideological media. It’s just that being anti-Democrat, anti-Clinton, antiyuppie, antiwonk turns out to be great television. Great ratings make for convenient ideology.
Indeed, professional political people, while surely corrupt and cynical, are also sentimentalists: They believe everybody else is as interested in politics as they are. A good television guy, who has to command the attention of the public, would never make that mistake.
Fox is not (not really) about politics. (CNN, with its antiseptic beltway POV, is arguably more about politics than Fox.) It certainly isn’t arguing a consistent right-wing case. Rather, it’s about having a chip on your shoulder; it’s about us versus them, outsiders versus insiders, nonphonies versus phonies, and, in a clever piece of postmodernism, insurgent media against established media.
And, perhaps most interesting, it’s about language, or expressiveness—which politics has not been about in a long time (modern politics is the opposite of expressiveness). Fox has cultivated a fast-talking garrulousness. Traditional news is rendered slowly, at a deadly, fatherly pace. Fox gunned the engine. Automatic-fire patois. Cable talk.
Fox, too, is about arguing—rather than the argument. It’s a Jesuit thing. Thesis. Antithesis.
In the conventional-wisdom swamp of television, this passes for serious counterprogramming.
It’s the tweak.
This is really the Fox narrative device.
The entire presentation is about tweaking Democrats and boomer culture.
The Fox message is not about proving its own virtue, or the virtue of aging Republicans (except, of course, for Ronald Reagan), or even of the Bushes, but about ridiculing the virtues of Democrats and their yuppie partisans.
Pull their strings.
Push their buttons.
Build the straw man, knock it down. Night after night.
Here’s the way not to get labeled a phony: Accuse the other guy of being one.
Always attack, never defend.
And have fun doing it.
A media nation demands great media showmanship. What’s more, in a media nation, it’s logical to make the media the main issue. The most audacious part of the Fox story line, the point that drives liberals the craziest, is that Fox is the antidote to massive media bias—and that the Fox people resolutely stick to this story. (The wink is very important in television.)
Which brings us to what may be the central political conundrum of the era: Why do conservatives make better media than liberals? Fox is, after all, just the further incarnation of a successful generation of conservative radio provocateurs.
There aren’t really even any liberal contenders except for Paul Krugman, on the Times op-ed page, and the peripatetic Michael Moore. And Krugman’s is a victim’s voice. It assumes a kind of emasculation—conservatives are doing things to him and he’s helpless. As for Moore, it’s comedy and pretty scary narcissism—he’s satisfied being just an entertainer.
No, nobody who’s seriously interested in ratings and buzz wants liberals on television or even near an op-ed page.
Part of the explanation of the conservative-media success is that in a liberal nation, conservatives have had to develop a more compelling and subversive story line. They’ve fully capitalized on the outsider, tough-talking, Cassandra thing. Accordingly, while the country remains more than not unenthusiastic about Republican policies, Republicans get positive ratings (go figure).
And a part of this is the dancing-dog advantage. Conservatives have been hired by the heretofore liberal media to be, precisely, conservatives—hyperconservatives, even; eager exaggerations (wink). Whereas, when liberalish people are hired by liberalish media organizations, the issue is to be neutral, unliberal.
But most of all, it’s an understanding-the-media point, which if you’re building a media career—exactly what all the conservatives tend to be doing—you get. But which if, like many liberals, you see yourself as having a higher calling than just a media career, you may not get.
We can talk about politics as a metaphor for something else, as Fox does (and NBC’s drama The West Wing has done—politics as a metaphor for working too hard, living in your office, being too involved with your coworkers—until it stopped doing it, and became syrupy and earnest. Likewise, there’s the right-wing commentator and jihadist Ann Coulter, who really uses politics to talk about some S&M thing).
But what we can’t do is talk about politics for its own sake. It’s way too boring. It’s too disconnected—it’s too Al Gore. And you can’t say, as almost all liberals do, “It’s boring, but it’s important.” That would be bad writing. (It’s why George Bush’s patent deficiency in talking about policy has not been so great a liability.) As opposed to the Fox writing style, which is to thrust and parry and dump on Clinton and thump a liberal snob or egghead when things get dull.
So, as I arrived for my speech, I was thinking of my relationship to the absent but always present Ailes. He was the greatest, but the Antichrist too.
There was the great land of no message—of media without meaning, or interest, or sensibility, or purpose (beyond being media)—and then there was Fox, crafty, audacious, insulting, agitpropping, bold.
On some level you just had to embrace Ailes—if, on another level, you would be obliged, if you met him in a dark alley, to send him to hell.
It was a pleasant, older, interested crowd of media burghers at the ICP building on 43rd Street and Sixth Avenue, getting Danish and juice.
This was a reliably liberal group—a do-gooderish group—and, in a sense, it was mystifying why they would have been hospitable to Ailes. A similar group of conservative burghers would not be so receptive to Ailes’s liberal counterpart, if such a counterpart could be found. This is probably an argument for the existence of the liberal media. Liberals think they own the media and so they were just hosting Ailes—he was in their house. The media itself, I think they felt, derived from a set of liberal virtues. To share information, to be sophisticated, to cultivate a sense of community and style. Media came from books, newspapers (the Times, of course), magazines, movies—it’s a Jewish thing. And a New York thing. Our thing. And even to the extent that certainly everybody here had to recognize that the media was under all kinds of assault and radical transformation, we still had some kind of important ownership position.
I was being shepherded by Alan Siegel, who ran Siegelgale, one of the eminent logo-design businesses—the unconscious, or background media that creates much of the look and feel of the age (not unlike photography itself). This was an insular group here—media apparatchiks; members of the Media Party. We all lived in a neighborhood where the party honchos lived. We all went to the same media schools and media parties.
Anyway, I was told by everybody how much they enjoyed Ailes’s speech—and how much they hoped I would be as provocative and entertaining as he had been. (Although, when I inquired, no one seemed to remember at all what he said.) And all of these immensely affluent New Yorkers, in important media industry jobs, looked up expectantly when I was given the floor (after an appropriately florid introduction).
I always feel, with the microphone in my hand (there was no podium, so it had a slightly Vegas aura, or that of a pitchman to a kaffeeklatsch of potential buyers of desert development homes), an overwhelming urge to deliver bad news, to present my audiences with a neatly wrapped package of doom. Good news always seems so much less interesting and funny.
The sky is falling and, because of the microphone, it is my responsibility to spare no one this message.
Most speakers, in the PowerPoint, sales-conference-corporate-meeting age, are execrable. They suffer, as almost everyone suffers, from a vast epidemic of cheerfulness and optimism, which is among the dreariest forms of self-censorship.
The point, for most speakers, is that they have a job. And everyone’s real job is to protect their job.
Everybody’s muzzled.
Everybody pre-processes what they say (indeed, the joy of Fox is that is seems unprocessed).
And you can extend this further: Everything businesspeople say is a lie.
Or at least a conscious departure from reality: a modification, a couching, a hedging, a smoothing, a refurbishing.
Plus many who have an opportunity to speak in public have been rehearsed by PR people. The goal of a corporate speech is the generation of some modest good feeling—it’s a buttering-up job. Somebody is trying to sell you something.
This invariably makes for a very boring speaker.
Whereas I have a helpless, and undoubtedly infantile, desire to get a reaction from the audience. (Ailes must have this too.) If they throw rolls (I have had this happen once), or do the vigorous nod, or, best yet, break up laughing, I’m happy. What’s more, I’m never all that prepared. So there’s always a certain kind of desperation, and overreaching, and wild generalizations, and a sudden, panicky urge to go for broke.
I was thinking about Ailes as I began—and about showmanship.
Ailes, it seemed to me, was the most effective and the most dangerous media executive (not unlike his immediate boss, Murdoch himself) because he did not have the central flaw of almost every other media executive.
Every other media executive had the need to be part of the show—the need not just for attention but for approval. The modern media executive sees himself as less a manipulator, or creator, or producer, than a performer.
The modern media executive, I started to explain to my audience, is one of the weirder business creations. In essence, he throws out all the traditional business virtues. He is much closer to a politician, to a strongman, to a despot, than he is to a traditional, conservative, and accountable businessman.
“A media executive is an executive who has something wrong with him,” I said. “He’s a psychologically flawed, emotionally needy businessman.”
This got a deep and appreciative laugh.
“The larger your insecurities are, the greater your need to be at the center of attention, to be the man in front of the curtain rather than behind the curtain, to have this endeavor, however sprawling and unfocused and complicated and senseless, be about you, the greater the chance that you’ll rise up to run a major media conglomerate.”
They really liked this. This was fun for them.
“What’s more, you have a model of the media executive, the ultimate mogul, who is a kind of pure beast. Just a reflection, an unconscious reflection of his own needs. A primitive creature. The noble media savage. This is your Murdochs and your Redstones. And then you have your would-be savages, who, in their self-consciousness about being savages, are really nothing more than neurotics—or worse.”
They really were into this. I wasn’t surprised. But still, it was odd. All of these people in the room had long careers wrapped up in the media business. You might have thought they’d have some small sense of wanting to defend their businesses—that they would resist such a broad slur.
&nb
sp; “You all work for needy, narcissistic sociopaths.”
Big, hearty laugh.
I said, “This need to call attention to themselves is coupled with an absolute bias against doing anything that would be exceptional or original. So, in effect, it’s the self-promotion of the bland. Of the banal. Of the invisible. The opposite of showman have become the showman.”
It was not even clear to me what I was saying here—except that it was obviously true that we had elevated completely uninteresting people to positions of great mythical and heroic status—but I was getting a fabulous response.
There are not too many industries in which upper-middle management would enjoy hearing upper-upper management being casually savaged. Usually upper-middle management more clearly identifies with upper-upper. But here, in the media business, upper-upper was, as I was saying, composed of people who, if you yourself had any personal restraint and humility, you were careful not to overly identify with.
In fact, the laughs were a product of a kind of reverse identification. The larger moguls and their upper-upper echelon retainers seemed to get, and the more massive and consolidated the industry as a whole became, the more most people had to accept their fundamental small-timeness. In some sense, the media business had jumped the bounds where it was anyone’s business—it was just too large, and sprawling, and ubiquitous, and amorphous, an abstraction finally, like the travel business, a category rather than an industry—therefore nobody took it personally.
In the end, everybody had had enough of the big media experience, and the ridiculousness, for the joke not to be evident. Executives in the media had become such demented self-promoters, such self-aggrandized assholes, such unreal self-creations, that you couldn’t help but score with the joke. The media was like the army after the Second World War. It was at the Sergeant Bilko stage, the Catch-22 stage. It was just plainly over-the-top. At some point, after the Second World War, to merely say the word “army” was to say something funny, like “high school” became funny—a shared experience of absurdity (shared even when you didn’t share it). “Media business” was close to that.
Autumn of the Moguls Page 12
