I’d even argue that television, with its ever-more-specialized topics, smaller and smaller audiences, more and more complex distribution routes, increasingly meager profits, and ever-expanding dial of choices, is the new print—which, for television people, is possibly the worst news.
So what did Andy and Walter see in it besides the job titles and the dough?
As news president, Andy was faced with the daily (and, for a news guy, thrilling) task of deciding what was important in the world; as head of the network, it was his decision whether to air Weakest Link on one night a week or two, and how Fear Factor could keep topping itself (there are millions of dollars in profit margin dependent on clever humiliations and gross-outs). As for Walter, I’ve heard him talk about television before, and judging from his I’m-trying-to-be-with-it tone, I really don’t think he watches television much.
Neither guy was necessarily a natural.
I’m tempted to think this was hubris—that Andy and Walter both overreached.
Then too, I can’t help thinking that they both made a sort of devil’s bargain. They would use their Serious News Guy rep to front for the fact that they were running dumb-it-down businesses. For whatever news talents they might have, they were being employed now for their other talents—as semilowbrow packaging whizzes.
Getting on their bellies with Fox may be, in the end, what they’d both been hired to do (something Tom Johnson, Walter’s predecessor at CNN, seemed to have no heart, or talent, for doing).
But I also suspect that I’m not seeing the full breadth of the career moves here. That I’m stuck in an old idea of form and function. After all, so many of the careers that we planned on and are now stuck in have eroded or don’t quite exist anymore (which is the real point of these emails from the disaffected that I get all the time). Even Walter, on track to get the job he’d prepared for all his career, the Time Inc. editor-in-chief job, the Henry Grunwald job, understood, I think, that this job doesn’t exist any longer—you can’t be the editor in chief of 64-plus magazines; you can’t even read 64 magazines.
Andy and Walter, I think, have realized that they aren’t really journalists anymore. They’ve mutated into mere mediaists.
Being a mediaist has to do with having some finer understanding of the almost-impossible-to-grasp function of a massive media company. In other words, Walter and Andy may get it, while the rest of us mostly don’t. It’s alliances, it’s leverage, it’s transactions, it’s franchises, it’s platforms and what all.
At NBC, for instance, there has been a telling change in vocabulary. The news division, if you’re in the know, is called a nonfiction-production unit (sometimes a “multiplatform nonfiction-production unit,” feeding content to myriad outlets). The point being distribution and convergence and modularity and interactivity, rather than just news.
So it isn’t about journalism. In fact, it may not even really be about television, but rather whole new demanding levels of ambition, canniness, charm, and survival skills.
This seemed to me what they ought to be talking about here—not news, not journalism, but their own careers in the media business.
Because they were both up against it.
Most everyone here knew the background, too. So there was a poignancy.
Walter and Andy were expendable.
They had been put in harm’s way because a natural ambition, or hotdogism, propelled them blindly forward.
They caught the mogul thing.
They really thought they could be, just might be able to be, moguls.
That they could ride astride one of those great and ridiculous companies.
Why not try, was their point. They knew that what they did—this journalism job—was over with. At least in any high-cultural, go-to-the-head-of-the-class sense. So they had to segue.
Unbeknownst to them, they became a kind of executive fodder.
In their own efforts to be a part of the mogul class, they led the news business into its transitional phase.
But it was not likely that they would become moguls or transform news—at least not without enduring great setbacks.
That’s what they both looked like now. Guys enduring.
Possibly it was Fox that had driven them both to the brink of despair. Andy Lack had, more and more at NBC, two dysfunctional cable stations, MSNBC and CNBC. Fox, the rough beast, had reinvented the cable news genre, and made MSNBC and CNBC pathetic.
As for CNN, its crisis was larger. In some sense, it carried the burden of liberalism itself. What a fate: Walter would be responsible not just for the end of news, but for liberal democracy as well.
But it was not just Fox they were up against.
They were, of course, up against themselves. This desperate need for position and approval and visibility, to be at the center of everything, is what brought us all into the media business—this mogul gene or virus or monkey on the back that we all possessed—sustained the business and would continue to sustain it long after it was ready to collapse. We held it up by our comical weaknesses.
I stood in the back of the room with another Walter watcher. We deconstructed him as you would any serious man of great power and stature: his flagging skin tone, the droop of his shoulders, the oomph or lack of oomph of his voice, the fading quality of light in his eyes, wondering how long he could last.
The room was starting to recede. Walter and company turned out not to be such good closers. As they wound down, the audience, one by one, made its excuses, and began to scuttle from its seats.
Ennui mixed with anticlimax.
The world is as it is was the message, which was actually reassuring to many people.
The media business was a vast, excessively complicated, capital-intensive industry. There would be shifts of power among the existing powers, and there would be the establishment of new fiefdoms—Rattner’s fiefdom, possibly—and there would be the decline and fall of older fiefs. But its power and influence would not go away quickly or easily.
That was, anyway, how you would see it if you were in the middle of it.
Otherwise, you had an industry built by singular men all who were in, pretty much, final scenes of last acts. You had a system that, on its face, had little long-term logic to it: amass, buy, aggregate, assemble, consolidate, take over, until somebody makes you stop. And you had a business which was inevitably plagued by what all businesses came to be plagued by: ensuing generations of weaker and weaker leadership.
Still, it was the kind of thing that certainly wouldn’t change today, and, if it changed at all, would change only in hindsight, and when that did happen, by regulation or technological innovation or new and unimagined cultural trends, then that was the opportunity that everybody here was charged with divining and getting in on.
The other possibility, of overthrow—of rapid, helpless transformation, of the thing turning against itself, of a time and generation passing and then a sudden deluge, of a stunning, visceral, breakdown in the value proposition—wasn’t much, I don’t think, on anybody’s mind but my own.
Certainly, none of these people, even if they had the jitters, would be sharing them. Their very job was not to have the jitters—or not to let on.
This is why the inevitable always took so long.
I said good-bye to Heilemann and Battelle and Rattner and took the subway home.
EPILOGUE:
WINTER
AND SPRING
An odd thing happened: Lots of people started to get pissed off about the FCC’s decision in the spring of 2003 to relax the media-ownership rules.
Even in Congress there was a wholly out-of-character march to undo the undone rules.
This pissed-off-ness was rightly unexpected by both the media conglomerates petitioning the FCC and by the FCC commissioners. After all, it wasn’t that easy to explain what the rules were in the first place—and what would be different if they changed. For instance, before the rules were relaxed, no one conglomerate could own television stations th
at reached more than 35 percent of the U.S. audience; after the change, the conglom could reach up to 45 percent. So what’s the big deal? The FCC seemed genuinely perplexed. What’s more, if there was to be a hue and cry about consolidation and the commonweal’s vested interest in media independence, more logically it should have happened ten years ago—before Time and Warner, before Viacom and Paramount, before Disney and ABC—rather than now, when all but the final gasp of consolidation had already taken place.
But possibly it was the finality of this, the sense not just of victory on the part of the media conglomerates but of obnoxious victory. They had it all anyway, now they wanted more—always more. This was what, after so long, seemed to be galling to so many people. It was a mindless grab. The arrogance of it was, finally, just too irritating.
And then there was the FCC commissioner himself. I don’t think the negative effect should be underestimated of a public figure giving people the creeps. Michael Powell was not just puffed up—at once epicene and porcine—and he was not just full of these shiver-inducing black-is-white bromides (“consolidation increases choice”), but he was the son of the secretary of state, for God’s sake. How could everybody not feel the fix was in everywhere? That the game was rigged.
And then there was radio: Clear Channel—and its PR geniuses. Radio was everybody’s media touchstone. It was comfort media (we weren’t couch potatoes as much as front-seat turnips). But in the space of a few years, as Clear Channel’s holdings climbed from a handful of stations to more than 1,200, radio was altered and disrupted. Radio—wherever you went in America and on the drive-time dial—was as regulated, as planned, as bureaucratic, as formatted and formulaic, as removed from personal interaction and bedside manner, as an HMO. Clear Channel was Kaiser Permanente.
And then there was Fox. For the first time a television network was not dissembling about its power. It was not talking about the public good and the public airwaves and the public interest. It was not bowing and scraping to the usual FCC shibboleths. Quite the opposite, it was openly ridiculing those things. We report, you decide. And, in doing so, it was courting and amassing, and even creating, dramatic political power. There arose something of a collective “Yikes.”
But it was not just Fox. Rather, where Murdoch went, everybody went. This was perhaps never more apparent—and unsettling—than during the Iraq war.
Indeed, let me follow a thread between the search for the weapons of mass destruction and the FCC’s move to relax the media-ownership rules.
First, the weapons: The Bush guys had obviously played Saddam for a fool. He wanted to have those weapons. He was a broken man without them. The Bushies, by their wild accusations, conceded to him the very illusion of power that they knew he would happily and fiercely cling to and that they could then set out with appropriate fervor to protect us from and to take away from him.
Saddam had a get-out-of-jail-free card: He just had to reveal to the world that he was bereft of resources, spent as a force, bankrupt as a ruler. But Rummy and Wolfowitz and Perle, and everybody else in the Bush administration who had been obsessing about Saddam for fifteen years, understood that it would be at least as difficult for him to admit to not having such power as to get tarred for having it.
He needed to appear threatening. They needed him to appear threatening.
They needed him to dissemble. He needed to dissemble.
Everybody was party to the creation of an alternate—and, likely, entirely false—reality.
There was even a neat moral justification for letting Saddam hang himself: While the Bush people surely had an extensive understanding of the truly dismal nature of the Iraqi military resources, Saddam’s squirreliness allowed them to maintain an iota of less-than-absolute certainty (and then, of course, Wolfowitz and company couldn’t help throwing in a little bogus intelligence). Indeed, North Korea, threatening to blow up the world in the middle of this, turned out to be helpful. Here was a down-on-its-luck regime apparently producing serious offensive weapons—so it could happen. (But since we weren’t running to the barricades on this, it probably meant that the weapons produced by a down-on-its-luck regime were of limited usefulness; or, on the other hand, it meant that if we did really fear that a rogue regime has them, we would tread very carefully.)
Even in the aftermath of the war—when looking for the weapons had become something of a Monty Python routine—the Potemkin-village logic continued:
If we can’t find them, they still must be here—or they must have been here—because Saddam could have avoided all this if he had just admitted he didn’t have them (and while he did say he didn’t have them, he didn’t say it as convincingly as he would have said it if he really didn’t have them).
The logic of the war was the logic of the Jesuitical arguments popular on right-wing television and radio. It had been war by syllogism.
We settled—and continued to settle—for an abstract deduction over actual proof.
Still, this deduction was not so ironclad, or brilliant, or irrefutable, that it could not be disassembled.
And yet this low-rent logic remained, in the public mind, largely unassailable, because nobody—certainly not with any concerted attention—had assailed it.
Why not? It was a setup. A ruse. A cheat. Hello?
How had the Bushies gotten away with this?
Now the FCC:
So every news organization from CNN to Fox to the networks to the big newspaper chains to the New York Times(although, heroically, not the Washington Post) was eagerly petitioning the Bush FCC for the freedom to substantially alter the economics of the news business. For the newspaper companies, the goal was to get out of the newspaper business and into the television business (under the old rules, it was a no-no to own newspapers and television stations in the same market). For networks with big news operations, the goal was to buy more stations, which is where the real cash flows from. Anyway, the whole point here was to move away from news, to downgrade it, to amortize it, to minimize it. And as the war got under way, everybody knew the FCC decision allowing the media conglomerates to do precisely that would come shortly after the war ended.
You’ve got all of these media organizations that wanted something for the most basic reason up-against-the-wall companies can want something: because they think this is what will save them (by transforming them). There’s almost nothing—really—they won’t do for this. Indeed, these congloms had already spent many years and millions of dollars trying to make the FCC change its rules. What’s more, all of these companies were in lockstep (save for the Washington Post); nobody was breaking ranks.
All right then. The media knew what it wanted, and the media knew what the Bush people wanted.
So is it a conspiracy? Is that what I’m saying? That the media—acting in concert—took a dive on the war for the sake of getting an improved position with regard to the ownership rules? Certainly, every big media company was a cheerleader, as gullible and as empty-headed—or as accommodating—on the subject of WMDs as, well, Saddam himself.
But conspiracy wouldn’t quite be the right word.
Negotiation, however, would be. An appreciation of the whole environment, the careful balancing of interests, the subtleties of the trade (at this point, the ritual denial: “There was no quid pro quo”).
The interesting thing is that in most newsrooms, you would find lots of agreement with this view of how businessmen and politicians get the things they want. A general acceptance of the realities of ass-kissing, if not a higher level of corruption. You’d find nearly everybody saying, Yes, duh, everybody gets something in return—but not when it comes to the news. Not like that. Not so … quid pro quo.
Now, this is not entirely true. The people at Fox certainly wouldn’t swear on the life of their grandmothers that the news wasn’t customized for larger business purposes.
And everybody at NBC seems to understand that if Bob Wright, NBC’s chairman and GE’s man on the scene, doesn’t like what he h
ears, he’ll be calling the control room.
And ABC and Disney, oy.
And CBS and Viacom and Jessica Lynch! (CBS, in an effort to get Jessica Lynch, the captured POW and most famous foot soldier of the Iraq war, to give her first interview to CBS News, offered the private a book deal through its Simon & Schuster division and the possibility of a talk show at MTV.)
Still, it comes down to the literal point of influence. Who said what to whom? Did anybody in any news organization actually say, “Go easy on the war”?
We tell ourselves it doesn’t go that far.
But do we believe it?
Although the BBC meticulously dismantled the Jessica Lynch rescue in the weeks after the war, the U.S. media was not just defending the story but bidding for it.
Even the term WMD is a nod to an inside joke—that the existence of the weapons has been established only by constant repetition.
And it was telling to examine the war justifications in context of that particular media moment in time, when the theme was not to give anybody any wiggle room. Anybody in any position of authority—political, business, journalistic—was being held to the strictest interpretations of meaning and context and responsibility. This cannot equal that. Transparency is the grail. Except for the Bushies. They had a media pass.
The war was one of those great, suspicious, excessively justified, what-you-see-is-not-what-you-get, dubious-accounting, reality-distorting, even Clintonian (although it seems far vaster in its plasticity than anything the Clintons ever did) endeavors. The Bushies piped it.
Autumn of the Moguls Page 30
