Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media [Paperback]

I mention this personal note since what Autumn of the Moguls is all about is, quite frankly, Michael Wolff. Indeed in the annals of self-indulgent and largely rhetorical tomes about media, Wolff has here something close to a singular achievement, something to rival (in its way) the memoirs of many a Hollywood movie producer. This is a book ostensibly about media wheelers and dealers, the money men who divide and conquer, merge and squeeze while manufacturing low-interest loans and golden parachutes for themselves. Yet Wolff's style is to concentrate on how the moguls have sought him out, how he has been invited to expensive shindigs ("I found myself on the Forbes family yacht" p. 75), while maintaining the acumen to see through their posturings and stupidities. Having established his authority--and to his credit he admits to having lost a buck or two in media deals himself--Wolff then digresses and digresses and then returns to the story, as leisurely as a patriarch at dinner with his heirs. Of course, as necessity has it, Wolff's observations and critiques are strictly after the fact. I suspect that some of the moguls mentioned herein might say that Wolff has raised Monday morning quarterbacking to an ethereal plain.

Still there is some fun to be had here and there are some tidbits worth savoring, although sometimes he becomes too enamored of his own coinages, such as when he uses "Zeitgeisty" on consecutive pages 46 and 47, or when he too frequently employs trendy words like "arrivistes." His use of paragraphing and sentence fragments for emphasis is also a bit overdone. More often however, Wolff demonstrates a gift for striking turns of phrase that unfortunately may or may not really mean anything but do indeed catch the ear, like something from Marshall McLuhan without the academic gloss. For example, he writes on page 30, "The media is...in the business of being noticed by the media." Or, "Brand is about access to media." (p. 29) Or, "the larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it." (p. 95) Or, even, "Ubiquity has become the main media standard." [paragraph break] "So this is elemental: The more available content is, the inherently less valuable it is." (p. 278)

I'm not sure that these "insights" rank with McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message," which was the then sensational title of the first chapter of Understanding Media (1964); or with the more profound understanding McLuhan reached three years later with the publication of The Medium is the Massage. Note that that's "message" first and then "massage." The media first tried to nullify content by becoming the message itself, and then realized that massaging the masses with couch potato content was an even surer way to make a buck.

However Wolff is not interested in such crass academic cynicism. Although he mentions McLuhan once in passing and, although he too is less interested in what the media publishes than what it is, his real mentor is David Halberstam who wrote a best-seller on the media business in 1979 called, The Powers that Be (not coincidentally the title of Wolff's fourth chapter). Wolff opines, "Many of us, I'll wager, came into the media business, rather than, say, government or academia, because of The Powers that Be." (p. 38)

In other words, it was the romance of media that seduced Wolff, and it is the romance of media expansion, merger and consolidation that fascinates him today. And (putting Wolff himself aside for the moment) that is what this book is ultimately all about: the politics, the grandeur, the power, and the romance of media; about how media has replaced politics, how it has become "a more influential force in our lives...than politics or government ever was" (p. 28); how in fact Wolff can write: "I don't believe any greater power has ever existed" (p. 30)

Well, hyperbole aside, Wolff's thesis that media today is more powerful than it has ever been, and that it is a cultural and political force to test the power of government, our schools and churches, and all the other institutions of society is one to be taken seriously. It is all the more alarming (to the extent that Wolff's observations are accurate) to discover in these pages the self-centered and purely acquisitive mentality of the moguls who run the media business and control its content.

The book is structured around telling the story of a conference of media executives that Mr. Wolff participated in as an interviewer. If you have ever attended such a conference, you know that the main purposes are to make money for the promoters, make contacts for the participants and feed the egos of the speakers. Mr. Wolff captured those parts well, but in far too much detail for my taste. I found myself losing interest, and found it hard to keep picking the book up again.

I rated the book at two stars for several reasons.

First, as a source of gossip the book is flawed. People in the media industry do like to gossip about each other. I'm hardly a media insider, but I knew dozens of better stories about the people Mr. Wolff writes about than he included in his book. It seems like he doesn't really know the juicy gossip. Even when he reveals something that could be titillating, he doesn't do much with it. For example, one of his subjects is gay, and Mr. Wolff makes much of that point without ever connecting the fact to any good stories (other than being told not to print the fact). One can only conclude that Mr. Wolff doesn't know any good stories about the person.

Second, his analysis of the industry and its leaders is very superficial. It won't tell you anything you don't know from watching television. Are you surprised to learn that newspapers are losing readers and the broadcast networks are losing viewers?

Third, there is almost no business perspective in the book. So this is not a book about business, but about people who work in businesses.

Fourth, Mr. Wolff seems to know journalists (from his Time Inc. days) better than he knows media moguls. I'm not really all that interested in what happens to journalists. So I found those sections uninteresting.

Fifth, Mr. Wolff doesn't like to point out anything good that someone has done. Although this book is a satire (like the fictional Bonfire of the Vanities), it lacks balance. Some of the people he writes about are fools, but some are pretty effective at what they do. From this book, the writer's perspective makes them all sound alike.

Sixth, the ultimate thesis is somewhat suspect . . . that the ego-driven need for attention by moguls has single-handedly corrupted the media. It's as though the audience plays no part in media corruption. If no one paid any attention to a new show, magazine or Internet format, that approach would soon be dropped.

I seldom feel like I've wasted my time when I read a book by a fine writer, but I did this time.

You may be wondering why I didn't rate this book at one star. I was impressed by the many occasions when Mr. Wolff acknowledged his own shortcomings in being awed by power. He isn't able to be critical to his subjects' faces like he is able to do in print. That was a nice touch. As for the rest of the book, I found his high opinion of himself as the sole voice of reason among those who write about the media to be annoying.

I would skip this book in favor of a current magazine, television show, or Web site offering the latest gossip on media moguls.