The Media Thing
Autumn
of the Moguls
In the opening scene of his 1998 book, Burn Rate, Michael Wolff described himself as ''embarrassed.'' A longtime journalist, he had found himself running a company that might or might not make him a fortune during the Internet boom, and specifically he was ''embarrassed by my hunger for affection and approval, preferably in the form of another round of financing for my company.''
His company failed, and Wolff is best known today as the media columnist for New York magazine, a job that won him a National Magazine Award last year. His new book, Autumn of the Moguls, is largely ''derived'' from that column. Readers of either may be surprised — given Wolff's fondness for nasty insults and sweeping condemnation — that he once hungered for ''affection and approval.'' But this would amount to a total failure to understand Wolff as media commentator, and a pretty significant misunderstanding of media commentating in general.
Wolff's big theme this time out is that ''the media business is collapsing.'' Synergy is all bunk; the merger mania that built infotainment conglomerates from Viacom to Time Warner to Vivendi is doomed; and pretty much all ''moguls'' are frauds. In fact, they have built their empires on ''bravura narcissism,'' not logic: ''The larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it.'' Perhaps the way Wolff fits into this, he muses, is as a Walter Lippmann figure in an age when (he asserts) media is the ultimate beat. (The implication that he not only observes but influences his subjects might help explain why Wolff is currently among those angling to buy New York from its current owner, Primedia.)
He never really pauses to make a sustained argument on behalf of his thesis, nor is there a story per se. Driving the narrative is, of all things, a conference: early in the book he is invited to participate in a media conference, and hundreds of pages later, he does. This is a daredevil level of anti-plot, and you have to admire it for sheer nerve. He gets away with it because the real point here is the tangents, the asides, the riffs. Wolff loves to riff, and it suits his style, which manages to be breezy and grandiose at the same time.
His bit on the endangered music industry is an example of a riff that works: he suggests a future in which that business survives, but ends up looking more like book publishing. Launch budgets will shrink and A & R salaries will ''max out at $150,000,'' and the industry will live on, making occasional hits, but mostly becoming a low-glamour, thin-margin, ''pop culture afterthought.'' His funniest riff is about a media consultant named Michael J. Wolf. ''I get his mail and telephone calls and get asked to make his television appearances. . . . Once, when I unraveled the confusion on one television show — that it was not me they wanted but the other Michael Wolf(f) — the producer said I would do anyway.'' The other Wolf apparently has advanced a more upbeat view of the infotainment complex in a book that our Wolff pronounces ''ghastly'' and ''certainly not a book that anyone has ever truly read.''
Still, the great eye for telling detail that made Burn Rate a pleasure mostly eludes Wolff here. Despite this book's subtitle, he stands at a considerable distance from most of the people and events that he is riffing about, and is reduced to a lot of portentous-sounding but meaningless shorthand — about Wolff's own ''Zeligness,'' Barry Diller's ''Barryness,'' a media party's ''publicness.'' While he's never at a loss for words, he often seems at a loss for insight as he rambles about the ''noblesse oblige thing,'' the ''Jesuit thing,'' ''the need-for-validation thing,'' the ''banana republic dictator thing'' and even ''the meta thing.'' At the climactic conference, he is scheduled to interview Rupert Murdoch, with whom he intends to discuss ''the thing. The whole big thing.''
And there are, of course, the insults. Miramax's Harvey Weinstein? ''Obese and grotesque.'' The Viacom chief, Sumner Redstone? ''A vainglorious, old-school egomaniac.'' Roger Ailes, the Fox bigwig? ''One of the great creepy figures of the age.'' And so on. Again there's no insight here; the point seems to be to reinforce Wolff's brand as a brave truth-teller unafraid to mock the gods of media. But the idea that this is risky behavior is a myth. The worst that will really happen is that they'll insult you back — which amounts to a career boost, particularly if it makes the paper. ''Publicity is the currency of our time,'' Wolff wrote in Burn Rate (and writes again, twice, in the present book).
For evidence, see this book's curious epigram, which is an item from The New York Post's gossip column, Page Six. Wolff and Barry Diller, who had traded insults, were seated near each other at a fashionable restaurant, where ''all attention'' was focused on the two to see if they would fling drinks at each other. But ''the two didn't seem to make eye contact,'' the item concludes. So nothing happened, except that the non-happening was mentioned on a page that a lot of media people read, and that's something. Reproduced here, it tells us that Wolff is among those chronicled even when inactive. (Maybe this is the self-reflexiveness thing?)
It also explains what at first seems like an inconsistency in Autumn of the Moguls, which is Wolff's exasperated question: Why do we take moguls so seriously? Obviously Wolff's whole enterprise relies on the idea that we take moguls seriously, even if very few people outside the media industry really care about them any more than they care about the top executives in, say, the pharmaceutical industry. So it's not so much that Wolff takes moguls seriously as that he needs them. He's less like Walter Lippmann than like a 70's rock critic: the soaring verbiage, the wild riffs, the intense love and hate for his distant subjects. He's the Lester Bangs of media culture.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing to be. One of the attractive things about Wolff as a writer is how withering he can be in assessing himself, his own botched predictions, his spineless toadying. Failing to charm one of his social betters at a media party, he fawns pathetically and asks himself, ''Why do we need the approval or the affirmation or the acknowledgement of the rich?'' Possibly, some of us don't. But Wolff is more than happy to admit that affection and approval are still the things he craves. What is a little surprising, looking back on that scene in Burn Rate from the vantage of Autumn of the Moguls, is the possibility that he was ever embarrassed about it.
This review appeared in the November 2, 2003, issue of The New York Times Book Review.
