It’s as ridiculous as if someone had come along and invented the “transportation” business and, within the same company and under the same management, because they were all somehow related to the same word, put car companies and train companies and ship companies and airlines together.
You get the exact opposite impression of the media business from The Powers That Be, David Halberstam’s epic 1979 book about the media industry. Instead of assholes run amok, in Halberstam’s version the media is a rational, smart, competent, inspired enterprise: the pivotal force in the rise of the civil-rights movement, the opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the investigation of Watergate and the end of Richard Nixon.
Halberstam’s media people not only have vast social and political clout, but they have businesses that throw off great amounts of cash and which have increased in value as significantly as any businesses ever have.
It’s a golden age chronicle: The media from 1925 to the late seventies (just as Murdoch is coming to America).
For a few years our kids went to school together. Halberstam was a lugubrious presence at the school, trotted out for benefits and lectures.
On the one occasion we had lunch together, I found myself thinking of him as a missing link. He’s a certain, stuffed-shirt, media establishment type—which really doesn’t exist anymore, except in some kind of martyred form.
He believes in the worthiness and primacy of civic institutions—the nineties idea that politics may have been replaced by the market, and politicians by entrepreneurs, is sacrilegious for him. He believes in owners—proprietors—over managers and opportunistic entrepreneurs.
He believes in lots of prose (anathema in modern media) and discursiveness. He’s all long form—ceremonious even.
Pop culture dismays him. Celebrities don’t interest him.
He certainly does not accept the new financial-media-technology power structure—the American Establishment as it is, for instance, annually described by Vanity Fair. (“Do these people really influence society?” he asked, and answered, at lunch. “No, not at all. This is just a scorecard of who made the most money.”) He has a different idea of power, who should have it, how they should use it, and who might challenge them on its use. The quick and the glib are not at the center of his power grid.
At a dinner shortly after Barry Diller formed USA Networks (his disparate collage of television stations and cable channels) in 1998, Halberstam stood up and, in his deep voice—with such an undifferentiated bass range that it’s often hard to understand him—asked Diller what USA Networks planned to do in the area of public affairs.
That must have quieted the crowd: You can hear the rustle of embarrassment.
The creation of media power is, in Halberstam’s telling, the creation of civic power. The Paleys and Meyers and Luces aren’t press barons (marginal, corrupt, eccentric figures). These are true American enterprise figures, as large in his telling as the Rockefellers and Henry Ford and the Kennedys. (Indeed, the Kennedys would not have been the Kennedys without the aid of many of the people in Halberstam’s book.)
Before the advent of these people and their organizations, the media was vaudevillian. Here, midcentury, the media, with its ever-expanding reach, becomes both a vastly powerful voice and amazingly lucrative business.
This is, however, the news media.
There is no entertainment in Halberstam’s media view. Movies, rock and roll, prime-time, celebrities, as late as 1979, when Halberstam’s book is published, have no place in a serious discussion of the media landscape. Even Paley’s great sitcom-and-variety-show empire is overshadowed by the position and power he acquires through his news division. The focus in the book is the American commonweal, rather than the media commonweal, political culture rather than pop culture.
Serious men engaged in serious matters.
It would never have occurred to Halberstam or anyone else he profiles and mythologizes in his book that the media industry would, over the next generation, become the nation’s largest industry because, in part, it would provide escape from this boring civic world. (People magazine, launched in 1974 by Henry Luce’s company—after Luce died—and which becomes the most successful magazine of all time, surely helps invent the new, alternative, celebritified, noncivic power structure.)
And yet while Halberstam misses the soon to be inescapable and elemental point about the media business, he nails another fundamental point: The media has suddenly become a really great business. He gets the hunger for media. People are eating this stuff up. It’s totally hot.
You can’t read The Powers That Be and not start to think, That’s where it’s happening.
It’s like the West: free land.
The romance of Halberstam’s world is not only in its cleverness and toughness and even nobility, but also that it’s so easy. Anybody could do this. Anybody could be this kind of success.
It’s the first structural analysis—who knew this person and who knew that person and how the web of connections and being in the right place at the right time intersected with the nation’s changing education levels, its advancing aspirations and the laws of supply and demand—of a media career. And it’s the first time that the media business is considered as not just the story of newspapers or magazines or television, but in the aggregate, cross-platform sense which makes it all so much, well, bigger.
Everybody I know of a certain generation in the media business read The Powers That Be and took it ever so seriously. Many of us, I’ll wager, came into the media business, rather than, say, government or academia, because of The Powers That Be.
Heilemann and Battelle had gone into partnership with one of the really deft and canny hotdogs of the post-Halberstam media age.
He was the senior figure at the Quadrangle investment firm. Before that, he was one among a handful of bankers at the center of the mergers and acquisitions that had remade the media industry.
But before that, he was a journalist too—which made everything about him all the more surprising and confusing.
Let me defer to Steven Wolff, my then eight-year-old son, just arriving home from a play date—his first at his new friend Izzy’s house.
Where I work in our apartment is close enough to the front door to hear my son’s comings and goings. By the end of the day there’s a reluctance and crankiness and heaviness—the backpack thumping, shoes dropping, coat dragging. The nanny cajoling… Just one more step… Just hang your coat up.… Just… Only the most dogged parent would inquire, at this moment, about the day or the play date or the state of the second grade. The kid needs a cocktail before he’s going to be civil. And indeed, Steven almost always heads to the other end of our apartment—to avoid disturbing a father theoretically at work, or, more threatening, a father who might want a sociable chat.
But something different was going on in the foyer. It was an audible change in the energy level—there was a frantic excitement, everything quicker, louder: the backpack not thumping, but being flung; shoes being kicked. The nanny’s voice rising, control being lost. The chatter level going off the scale, “Izzy this… Izzy that…”
I almost went out.
But I know Manhattan play date etiquette. It’s not all right to recruit your children as spies.
What’s