This is the pitch, I realized, they had sold the Quadrangle people. It was a serious affair—a serious affair with money.
“So what do you think,” Heilemann asked, “is going to happen? Go wide. What are the trends? What’s the—”
“I think everything is going to collapse.”
“Everything? Beyond AOL Time Warner?”
“Certainly Disney and Vivendi are totally fucked.”
“Messier,” said Battelle, naming the Vivendi chairman, “is on board to speak at the conference.”
“Really?” Messier was surely doomed, yet I was impressed that they had gotten him. I had been wanting to meet him. He was even more interesting, I thought, a greater “get” because he was out there in free fall.
“And Viacom is obviously an armed camp and can’t last after Sumner—” Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s 79-year-old chairman and controlling shareholder, was in a standoff with his handpicked successor, Mel Karmazin. “The same thing for News Corp.—it’s not a company that makes any sense whatsoever without Murdoch.”
This hypothesis—predicting the inevitable collapse of the five megamedia-opolises which dominated the industry—was as workable a theme as any.
It was 1914 in Europe.
“What about Bertelsmann?”
“Totally fucked.”
It was some measure of both the peculiar nature and commonplace self-loathing of the media business that you could hold an industry conference and be relatively nonchalant about proposing that the industry was going to implode. On the other hand, it was part of the conceit here that this was a kind of true congress, at which representatives would converge and we would discuss the future of media nations.
“Can we interest you? Who would you like to do? If you did a one-on-one, an interview on stage, who would you like to do?”
It was a time to grab a big enchilada. It was certainly no time to be modest. There weren’t that many enchiladas.
It was Diller or Murdoch.
Because more mystery attended them, more cult of personality, more secret of success, more mogul history, the interviews with Murdoch and Diller would be the big draws of the conference. What’s more, if you could do it right, cannily and subtly, and have them reveal themselves—that would be a score.
Their existence, it seemed to me, had never been adequately explained. Murdoch certainly had held more power longer than anyone else—from his arrival in the U.S. in 1976 to now, he had just kept growing, just kept becoming more and more significant. As for Diller, he may just have defied more conventions of power than anyone else. And it often struck me he was doing this with a certain humor or irony, which might be the ultimate defiance of the power convention.
“If I could face either Diller or Murdoch I would certainly be interested—definitely count me in.”
Possibly, I’ve thought, I’m something like an old-time Washington columnist—Drew Pearson, James Reston, even Walter Lippmann—in this new kind of ultimate power scene.
They dealt with matters of state and with the egos and idiosyncrasies of statesmen. I deal with the consolidation of the global media’s power and with the strange and compelling men who control much of the world’s information supply. Lippmann’s interest in Bernard Baruch might be, with a little critical interpretation, not all that different from my interest in Barry Diller.
After all, the media has replaced politics. The media is the root of consensus; it’s the organizational motor of society, now that media demographics define us; it’s the place you go if you have a cause, or a gripe, or desire for reform. It’s a great patronage machine too; loyalists and courtiers and suck-ups are rewarded with immensely valuable publicity. The media, surely, is a more influential force in our lives and in the world’s changing beliefs than politics or government ever was. Certainly, more people participate in the media than ever participated in democratic politics or government. Media is the currency of our time—the less access you have, the poorer and less successful you are. Likewise, the highest order of power and prestige is to be in the media yourself, or to control people’s access to it; people may say they hate the media, but just let their mothers see them on television. Hence, moguls became the political barons of the age. And we, the mogul underlings, became the officials and ward heelers and apparatchiks and bureaucrats of the new communications-technology complex that runs the nation.
Media has become not just the political system but the biggest industry too (a convergence which, like fascism before it, has been most comically demonstrated in Italy, where the head of state is also the head of the country’s media monopoly).
It is almost impossible to find a business that does not see itself as in some part a media business. In a transformation of vast and meretricious proportions, everybody plunged into the media game. Recognition, connection, meaning, transcendence, was something sought by even the dullest men.
Westinghouse became CBS; France’s biggest water company got reborn as a media megalopolis; GM enjoyed a period as the nation’s major television satellite company; Microsoft again and again lost billions trying to develop media savvy. And GE’s flagship business moved from lightbulbs to NBC.
You even had media companies creating other media companies to promote their core media company. The more media you owned, the more you could promote the media you owned. (Disastrously, Disney and Miramax created Talk magazine, for a time rationalizing their investment as a marketing instrument for the companies’ movies and executives.) Indeed, the modern notion of brand is really about access to media rather than the older notion of brand, which was about habit and dependability.
Every American knows the secret of success: more media. The more media, the more recognition, the more value, the more power, the more influence—the greater claim on, well, the media.
I don’t believe any greater power has ever existed.
So I began to think it could be for me just like it was for Lippmann in Washington during the thirties and forties, observing the transformation of the U.S. into the world’s great consolidated megapower.
Of course, I was no Lippmann. And I wasn’t the only one in the media business who had a clearly nagging sense of disappointment, of being less than the circumstances ought to have made us.
As big as the media got, as central as it had become to everyone’s dreams, almost nobody took it very seriously. In fact, the bigger it got, the less seriously it was taken—even though one of the reasons it got big was precisely so that it would be taken seriously.
Jerry Levin may have thought that the creation of the AOL Time Warner monolith would see him became a great man, a creator of worlds. But, as was apparent to all but the people closest to it, Time Inc., a company which used to be reasonably well thought of, became sillier and sillier as it grew larger and larger in its successive incarnations.
No matter how big media companies became, they just could not transform themselves into stately, or even manly, enterprises.
Politics and government, even though they are explicitly about power, have, or at least used to have, a carefully developed rationale for the need for power—they are,