Media: Michael Wolff opens and finishes his work on media moguls with two stories that in different ways show the effect of the concentration of media ownership and the rise of the media mogul, writes Michael Foley.
At the press conference to announce the merger of AOL and Time Warner, Wolff, writer and media journalist, ponders how this, the biggest merger of all, should be covered. As the senior executives walk in to the conference room, he is reminded of the Soviet leadership filing on to Lenin's tomb on May Day in Red Square. It occurs to him that much of the press covering the event is now owned by the newly merged company, which suggests pushing the metaphor further, by noting that in its refusal to see the bigger picture - the effect of the merger, what it means for the media - it is acting like the Soviet press.
At the conclusion he links the decision of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to relax the rules for media ownership to a decision by most major media companies to go easy on the war in Iraq.
This book is not just a chronicle of the media conglomerates and their sins. It is at one level a romp through New York's media scene, the conferences, the parties, the lunches, while Wolff looks, analyses and tells us stories of the people who run much of the world's mass media. At another level the book has a serious thesis; that the oversized ambitions and arrogance of the moguls have brought the whole industry to the brink of collapse.
It doesn't matter if this is not proved conclusively - time will tell if he is right or wrong - for this is a wildly funny look at the moguls such as Rupert Murdoch; eccentric head of Viacom, Sumner Redstone; media mogul turned mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg; the head of Disney, Michael Eisner; Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the failed Talk magazine; and many more.
Wolff lives a media life in Manhattan. His kids go to school with the children of the people he writes about; he uses the same restaurants, and seems to get better tables than the people he covers; he notices Rupert Murdoch in a too-perfect and neat track suit jogging in Central Park. He is courted though he has written critical, even nasty things, about the media moguls. As he says, owning media means being written about.
Behind the accounts of the lunches, the manoeuvrings through the social minefield that is New York's media scene, and the New Journalism writing style, is a serious book, a cultural history, which traces the very concept of media and the rise of big business. Media, he points out, was once about journalism and the idea of an industry that included newspapers, book publishing houses, movie studios, record companies and cable companies would have been considered absurd.
But the media business people do not just own companies, they control the media, so they become self publicists; after all, why own the media if you can't appear in it? Journalism becomes sidelined in favour of entertainment. The role of journalists is not to evaluate, but to supply the oxygen of publicity to the people who employ them. Media has become the most powerful industry in the world and people such as Murdoch are more influential than any politician. Such is their power that conventional politics is little help in understanding media. Of Fox television, for instance he says: "Fox isn't in any conventional sense ideological media. It's just that being anti-democrat, anti-Clinton, anti-yuppie, anti-wonk turns out to be great television. Great ratings make for convenient ideology". The irony is not lost on Wolff - and nothing ironic ever would be - that here is a network that is xenophobic, right-wing, anti the big corporations, ostensibly for the little man, but is owned by a multi-national media company and controlled by an Australian, married to a Chinese woman.
There is enough evidence in this book to suggest the media behemoths are in trouble, but whether their world is about to collapse, as Wolff suggests, or that media will simply be re-ordered in another round of mergers and acquisitions remains to be seen. At the end, the entertainment economy that the media moguls created has diminished us all. Wolff is too good a journalist to be bought by the media world he covers. The entertainment economy, he says, leads to "the banality of fun, the homogenisation of culture and the commodification of culture".
Michael Foley is a former media correspondent of The Irish Times and now lectures in journalism at the School of Media at the Dublin Institute of Technology
Autumn of the Moguls. By Michael Wolff, Flamingo, 381 pp, £18.99