The cash flows.
You’re a predator.
Yours is a protection racket.
Everybody wants you inside pissing out.
It is all about you.
You really are free.
If, as Barry surely does, you see the world as a world of numbskulls and incompetents and servile morons, then it is an ideal place to have arrived at.
It’s an interesting order of corporate nihilism.
Yes, seeing Barry as the media nihilist makes sense. The last mogul. The angel-of-death mogul.
What you had to suspect is that he did not like the media business at all. That he saw, and was taking advantage of, not just its flaws, but its fatal flaws.
This is, of course, the perfect place to be: To know that death is coming before everyone else knows. It makes you God. Or the devil.
That’s what it had come to. Everybody was kind of thinking that Barry knew what was going to happen.
Because he didn’t have to justify one of these sucker companies—was the only practicing titan who didn’t—his was the only objective eye.
Hence, the Internet stuff.
His company, USA Networks, was a hodgepodge of things he had been able to acquire. It would be hard to say that there was a method here other than availability and affordability. But Barry had imbued it with enough Barryness that it had to be taken seriously, enabling him to get it to the point where he could credibly do his first killer deal with Edgar Bronfman Jr., and then his second killer deal with Jean-Marie Messier (killer in the sense that it killed both of those men). At which point, after selling off the theoretically good stuff he had bought, he was left with only the theoretically bad stuff (the Internet stuff), which he pronounced to be not just the real good stuff but the gold.
And because he had so ably screwed so many people in so many deals (and saved himself on so many occasions when people were trying to screw him), you couldn’t risk not believing him.
Indeed, he might know something.
Here was the Diller proposition: This stuff that he was left with—either because he had a grand strategic vision, or because this was the luck of the draw—was what media would become.
If advertising—old-time, big-budget, high-production value, impressionistic, image-creating, make-the-consumer-feel-good, make-the-advertiser-himself-feel-great advertising—was going away, then it was reasonable to believe that what it was going to be replaced by was some direct transaction thing.
Advertising itself would be disintermediated.
There would be no need for the advertisement.
The idea that you would be entertained and while you were entertained you would be further entertained in a way that would suggest to you that you might buy a product underwriting all this entertainment, which was only available through a whole series of disparate steps which most certainly meant traveling to a remote location, would, shortly, be looked at as some incredible piece of commercial inefficiency.
Entertainment and transaction would be united.
In fact, pursuing the malling-of-America and shop-until-you-drop paradigm, the transaction would become the entertainment.
Diller, he would have you believe, was the transaction guy.
With Match.com for dating, Expedia for travel, and Ticketmaster for access to entertainment itself, he had established this empire of buying stuff. As more and more of the world was reduced to digital lots or digital notions, or available by digital access, Barry would be the person to sell it.
While the media business would continue to struggle to create products based on an increasingly futile model of advertising support and unit sales—struggling painfully with ever-dwindling margins—Barry would be the King of the World, levying his transaction fees as everything digital passed through his hands.
Media was dead. Long live Barry.
Or, conversely, this was just the blah blah.
The point was not the reinvention of media.
The point was maintaining the illusion of Barry.
It was a classic three-card-monte, flimflam thing. You always wanted to keep people distracted. Keep their eye off the target. Keep them from seeing when the switch took place.
Barry didn’t want to be seen as just another media business hustler and wannabe.
What would that make him besides another version of Marvin Davis, the oilman who briefly owned Twentieth Century Fox (who Barry had worked for, briefly), who was, all of a sudden, vaingloriously, back in the game trying to buy Universal, or, even, another Edgar Bronfman Jr?
In the entertainment business, you never wanted to be thought to be looking for a second act. That would always cost you. That was a kind of desperation that would reliably jack the price.
Barry had solved that problem, and avoided that scent of neediness, by creating this alternative business life.
He wasn’t in the old media business anymore. That was just something that was trying to drag him back.
What’s more, this sense that he could go back into the real media business, that he could go back, hugely, as a conquerer, as hero, but that he didn’t want to, was prepared to forsake all that, for this, interactivity, made his interactive business seem so much more valuable.
So, he was not interested in the business in which he was making his big money (reluctant deals, if-you-insist deals, let’s-just-settle-up deals), but vastly interested in the business where, in fact, he wasn’t making any money at all.
Barry was a big flirt.
He was a true free agent.
He was the operator.
This was war. Somebody would always get rich. Somebody would always get dead.
He was terrifically, and appealingly, flirtatious with Charlie. You could see the tough guy, but it was the appealing side of his toughness. He was open enough. Showy enough. There was great, theatrical animation to his face (nearly Milton Berle—like at moments). He was talking to Charlie and having a perfectly intimate-seeming conversation with him, and, at the same time, having another, parallel, perfectly intimate conversation with the audience.
And enjoying himself, obviously.
Anyway, no, he wasn’t going to say what he was going to do about Universal. But this didn’t seem like avoidance, or that he was hiding anything, but more that you should not ask a woman of a certain style and status her age.
Nobody here really wanted to hold Barry accountable in any businesslike way.
We understood—and appreciated—that his whole business methodology was to tease.
Brains and charisma and a sense of humor and a killer instinct. That makes for a great stage presence.
No, no, he wouldn’t say, didn’t have any plans, wasn’t looking to do anything, just wanted to protect his company’s assets. That’s all. Not an issue.
It was still possible of course that he would leave this stage and begin a course that would deliver one of the world’s largest movie studios, some of the world’s choicest theme parks, the world’s largest music company, etc., into his hands; that, as he spoke, this was all in progress, and we were all being played for little fools; and too, that he would go from there to acquire a network and many of the pieces of the devolving companies that he had once coveted and become something like the last action mogul.
But unlikely.
He had achieved a greater thing: to be wholly in the game and yet entirely independent.
He had started the last decade with modest wealth, and now was sitting here one of the richest men in the business.
What’s more, he had slipped the bonds of true, mortal responsibility.
He wasn’t going to be blamed.
He was free and ready for the next thing.
Everybody sitting in their seats was, at the moment, in love with Barry.
24
WALTER
And then there was the Walter panel, the last panel: “The News Business—Profits and the Public Interest.” It was Walter, Karen House, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal
(who was awkwardly married to the president of Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company), Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Andy Lack, the president and COO of NBC (and before that, the head of NBC News). The panel was moderated by Michael Elliott from Time—Walter and Andy’s neighbor in Bronxville.
But it really was Walter’s panel.
Walter is, at heart, a panelist.
I have seen him, reassuringly, on many such panels. So much so that I’ve occasionally thought of him as a Bennett Cerf figure—a What’s My Line? type. An educated celebrity. Someone you thought could tell you something—someone who could explain it all.
And, of course, everybody wanted it explained.
Oddly, news was still at the heart of this—news was still the theoretical raison d’être of the media business. It was the thing that had to be rationalized, or at least bowed to.
There yet remained in so many striving media people an earnest, civics-minded boy or girl.
And a fundamental tension in the business, of course, was whether or not the moguls and suits and Hollywood smoothies had that interest—or how far their interests diverged from ours.
Or we still pretended that tension existed.
At least the snobbery still existed.
The process of reconciling our earnestness with a widespread lack of interest in our earnestness was also a part of the tension.
I’ve sometimes wondered if the AOL deal wasn’t born out of some desperate effort to force our earnest values into the great new technology.
Walter as the head of CNN was in some sense the final flowering of all those rationalizations.
I was thinking, at that moment, of Walter on another panel a few years ago—when he was still running Time magazine.
The panel was Walter and Time’s legendary presidential correspondent Hugh Sidey, with Henry Kissinger. The occasion was the opening of an exhibit of photographs celebrating the American presidency and Time’s relationship to it—one of various events that Walter was always staging when he was managing editor to herald the rebirth (under him) of Time.
The panel and exhibit were what a marketer might describe as a snapshot of the Time franchise: proximity to power, indelible images of great events, the best and the brightest journalists.
It would be hard to find a Watergate- or earlier-generation journalist who didn’t think that the pinnacle, even the essence, of the profession was to cover Washington and the presidency. But, in the exhibit, the opposite point was being made too: Looking at these photographs and listening to the indefatigable Kissinger, it was clear that the presidential, sweep-of-history Time had been dramatically contracting, and a new Time, concerned with issues like genealogy (“How to Search for Your Roots”) and blockbuster movies (the Star Wars keepsake issue, which we pore over in our house), had taken its place. Time’s beat, in other words, under Walter, was no longer America-writ-large but the various private preoccupations, emotional and aspirational rather than ideological in nature, of large blocs of Americans who don’t much relate to great events or great men—or read a newspaper, or even watch television news.
After all, the headline form itself is a relic—we know what’s happening pretty much the moment it happens. Washington’s status as the news capital is heading the way of Detroit’s status as a center of economic strength; there’s no lower-selling type of news than political news. The news business, which was once dominated by a small circle of players, is now a competitive free-for-all. Add to that the demographic revolution: Everybody has his or her own socioeconomic, psychographic, ethnic-gender-generational view of what’s news.
And one more thing: The overwhelming sentiment in any news organization is insecurity. Hardly anybody thinks he will be doing the same job he’s doing now five years from now.
Practically speaking, none of us is really in the journalism business anymore—not even the most Reston-ish or Lippmann-esque or pompous among us. We’re in the magazine business, or newspaper business, or television business, or, even, online business—we’re in, of course, the media business—trying to answer the one question many of us imagined we’d never have to answer: What is the unique selling proposition of our product? News is not unique.
Under Walter, Time managed to come up with a sort of answer—Time as a lifestyle magazine, Time as a feel-good book, Time as the outside-the-Beltway, salt-of-the-earth journal.
Part of Walter’s elevation in the media business was that he could wear this humiliation with some verve and confidence.
I’m not sure there is anyone of our around-50 generation who is as self-consciously a journalist as Walter. His sense of his own importance and his almost otherworldly identification with the profession’s grandest gentlemen (you can hardly have a conversation with him without his evoking Time’s former editors and various Washington-press-corps grandees) are still a cause for wonder among his classmates at Harvard. (Imagine being the most self-important person in your class at Harvard.) Walter was clearly born to be the prime minister of the Fourth Estate and to confer with his peers at State and on the Hill and at the White House and to bring the concerns of the powerful to the people.
He even speaks with that old Luce-ian, American Century, Teddy White Making of the President tone; you never quite feel you’re saying something important enough when you speak to him.
Still, he was never—not even for a second—defensive about Time’s new, more modest interests.
“We used to have great access to great events and report them with Lippmann-esque certitude. Now our goal is to tell stories that connect with the way we live,” he once explained to me. “We want to know about the debates happening around the dinner table rather than the Senate committee tables.”
Still, while he was willing to throw over the old Time augustness, I was never sure he entirely appreciated the social changes he was speaking to.
“Walter, I’m not sure anyone sits around the dinner table anymore,” I found myself pointing out.
“Hmmm. The water cooler, then.”
It was almost quaint that Walter, as he deconstructed the polemical and pontifical Time, was still thinking about people having debates and about journalism as the basis for social discourse.
Among Walter watchers there are many explanations for his constant adaptability in the face of overwhelming obsolescence. There’s the Nixon-in-China analysis about Walter: He was the one person who could lead Time out of the death throes of pompous white-man news, because his pompous white-man news credentials are better than anybody else’s. And there’s Walter-as-a-Clinton-surrogate: Walter, like Clinton, recognized the nineties-style notion to make it personal, that people relate more to the trivial, the local, than they do to the momentous.
And then there’s Walter-as-company-man, the ultimate media conglomerate factotum: Walter gave up being a journalist in favor of being a mediaist, even a synergist, and what he did was turn Time into an amalgam of the company’s other, more consumer-friendly “products.” Time became a little bit of People, a little bit of Entertainment Weekly, a little bit of Money, a little bit of Parenting, and a little bit of Health, along with a small remaining bit of Time. Walter, in other words, was the packager-in-chief.
Which is how, in one of the great media career leaps, Walter got to be the chairman of CNN.
Now, news guys—like Walter and NBC president Andy Lack—no matter how close they come to power, don’t usually get the power themselves. They don’t usually run nations or corporations, but watch, warily or admiringly, the people who do.
Of course, that was before the media world changed and news and information “became so vital to our portfolio,” as Lack has described NBC’s collection of programming and cable channels.
Such a paradox! While nobody wants news anymore (not news, at least, in the old-time sense), a newer sort of news (or let us call it nonfiction programming) is now among the most valuable currencies of the current television age—if only because it’s cheaper than sitcoms and hour dramas to produc
e.
So having news credentials can, counterintuitively, make you something special. A major-hitter media executive.
Of course, neither Andy nor Walter is just a news guy. I don’t think that just any news guys could have gotten the jobs they’ve gotten. It’s not like Edward R. Murrow, were he 50 and living in Bronxville, would have gotten the job. Andy and Walter are new news guys. They demonstrated they could match the news to the market.
Under Andy, Dateline, with its “storytelling” mix of consumer exposés and real-life crime dramas and survivor sob stories, became the mainstay of the NBC schedule. It’s news, but—in the manner of Walter’s Time—this was news in the largest, broadest, most entertaining sense.
“It’s all about unlocking value,” Andy once told me, talking nonnews talk.
Of course, it’s possible that Andy and Walter were being allowed to run networks because the guys above them didn’t think that running a network was as important as it used to be. Network guys at Andy and Walter’s level (as opposed to the more abstract strata of men who engineer massive distribution shifts) are just content producers—and content hasn’t been king in a while. NBC, in the era after the departure of GE’s media-loving Jack Welch, will also, likely, be rationalized in a more corporate way. And CNN, post—Ted Turner and post—Fox News, is just a problem on top of other larger problems in the AOL Time Warner calamity.
In the tons of email I get from disaffected people at dysfunctional media companies, nobody vents more than television people. The tone of my mail from CNN is rage that Time Warner fucked the company up, and now it’s all coming apart. The tone from NBC is more existential: What will become of us?(Though one correspondent did point out that a bad day at NBC is still better than a good day at ABC.)
It could even be that some smart management person realized you don’t want professional television guys (sales, finance, and affiliate guys) to be running the television business now, because whatever happens is bound to be a disappointment for them—and you don’t want depressed executives bringing everybody else down. All numbers in the television business will get smaller—that’s the only certainty. The television business is a hardscrabble business. Which is why the content guys were given a shot, because they didn’t know that it was all downhill.
Autumn of the Moguls Page 29
