Customer Reviews

Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you want to read a book of common gossip about the foibles of those who head media companies, Autumn of the Moguls is the book for you. Mr. Wolff sees himself as a critic of the media and its leaders, and the gossip takes mostly a negative slant. He's a talented writer, and he does succeed in lampooning those in power . . . while acknowledging that even he feels the power of the media moguls when in their presence.

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.

What do you say about a book like this? The style and pose of the book is such that if you praise it you are derided as a fool and if you express dislike it you are vilified as a flack for the vast media conspiracy or at least a naive phoole. Maybe what can be safely said is that if you like your gossip bilious, splenetic, and snarky, well, this is the book for you. It is hard to look away when someone has a powerful figure in his headlights and is driving them down at a high rate of speed. The act is so fascinatingly horrible that we just watch it happen no matter the guilt we feel for even tangentially being a part of such violence.

What you will find interesting in this book depends on your threshold of what you count as analysis. My own view is that the book is actually very light on serious insight. When Wolff passes judgment there is never supporting evidence beyond an anecdote or light witticism. There is a lot of stating, after the fact, what "everyone new at the time" when in fact few if any did. To Wolff almost everyone is a fool, a crook, or worse. Even his compliments have to be left-handed and include at least a back handed slap and an anticipatory retraction. He congratulates himself too much for minor accomplishments. He seems to think that saying merely outrageous things that draw sporadic and spasmodic approval he is somehow a serious analyst rather than a blind squirrel gathering an occasional nut.

And for someone who postures as one of the true insiders (note how proud he is in being invited to the inner-sanctum of the Foursquare conference) he, finally, comes across as quite provincial. He seems to actually believe that the media industry is the most powerful industry in the world and that we, all of us mere bumpkins, simply bow and scrape and accept every one of its pronouncements, promotions, and products. The standard ploy, regurgitated here, is that the fearsome enemy has all power but is simultaneously a complete and ineffectual fool. I don't know why this ploy works, but it does and is never true. One only needs to note the endless failures of network TV shows, magazines, movies, and books to skewer that kabob. Just as the small time villager projects his values and manner of life on the world, so does the blinkered Mr. Wolff.

But that is his job, his gig, his sense of himself. And more power to him, I suppose. Wolff writes with style and if you like that style, acerbic lapels and all, you will like this book. It really is all about style being its substance. There is actually no serious analysis that will do the student of business much good. But nearly everyone likes to read the dirt on the rich, powerful and the formerly rich and powerful. That is what this book provides.

I am giving this book four stars because I think it succeeds at what it is trying to be, however, for my personal tastes I would give it two stars.

Let's face it, Wolff is a writer and is paid to write. Therefore, he has to fill the covers of this tome with enough chapters to justify it's existence. In reality, the book could be boiled down to about 5 really good chapters and still get his point across nicely. But then, it wouldnt be very thick and thick books make for nice ego-feeders, they also feel "right" when you pick them up and pay for them. It's almost like you are getting something for your money, right? Wrong.

Bottom line: it should have been a 2-part article. I don't need to know nearly what I've been told to get the "point" (and I think he had one) of this dreary and politely mean diatribe.

Don't waste your money, just read his articles online instead. You get the same venom without wasting your time reading about large apartments, snobby luncheons and all the would-be, has-been, wanna-be's of the media world.

Also, be sure to note that nearly all the favorable reviews here are from the NYC area or the east coast. Draw your own conclusions.

I suppose this book's presence in the bargain rack is testimony enough, but I will pile on anyway. I believe Mr Wolff's point is that the media industry is in constant disarray becuase media moguls really don't know what they are doing, with the possible exception of Rupert Murdoch. Trouble is, to get there one has to endure a 365 page rant which has all the (and maybe more) free-associative ramble and digression of a drunk guy at a bar who WILL NOT SHUT UP. A disaster from the get-go.

I read Autumn of the Moguls in disbelief. This is the "journalist" New York magazine was paying a half million dollars a year to for his supposed insights into the media business? What insights? What a lazy book this is. I was insulted by Wolff's arrogance, relentless posing, and absolute lack of any substance. So, cool. He got to sit at the same table as Rupert Murdoch. He's met Sumner Redstone. He gets invited to "mogul" meetings now and then. Big deal. The guy comes off as a total loser. No, wait: "total loser"--that's me. I paid full price for this meaningless rubbish.

It is an irony, a special irony appreciated only by me, that during the period in the early seventies when Michael Wolff went to work as a copy boy for the New York Times, a headhunter was gently explaining to me that because I had only an undergraduate degree from UCLA and not, e.g., a master's in journalism from Columbia, that I had no chance of being hired by the New York Times, and indeed would not even be interviewed. Instead I went to work for the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press while Wolff went on to become a best-selling writer and a columnist for New York magazine.

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 dialectic in this book is Wolff's inability to resolve his attraction to the titans who run the media industry with his understanding that these are the same people who have corrupted the business. Wolff is as aware of this tension as anyone. On several occasions he describes this, in his disarming and disconcertingly honest way, as one of his key failings.
I have read several reviews which, in fact, seem to regard this ambivalence of Wolff's as a literary failing of the book. But that is, I think, a mixing up of some new Enron-like morality with a deeper literary strategy. Wolff's special contribution here is to explore the predicament of knowing in your head that these are all bad guys--driven exclusively by ego, money, and grandiosity--who have, while making themselves rich, brought nothing but harm to the businesses they have accumulated, while in your heart being drawn to their size, their wealth, their ambition, their determination, their assurance, their mastery, and their charm.
I would argue that only by exploring this conflict can we understand just who these moguls are--the Redstones, Eisners, Murdochs, Dillers, et al, who, likely, will rank with the Vanderbilts, and Goulds, and Rockefellers, as the Robber Barons of their age.
Along with the psychological and literary insight here--the portraits in Autumn of the Moguls are surely as compelling and nuanced as any character studies in any recent nonfiction--it's important to note the writing itself. Wolff may be the best nonfiction stylist writing today. You have to go back to a different time (the seventies) to find surprising, stylish, personal, lyrical writing like this. This is essay writing in the league of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr, and Norman Mailer.
What's more, it's hard to describe just how impish, satirical, scabrous, rude, and hilarious this book really is.
I agree with an earlier reviewer here that this is a very unlikely business book. On the business shelf, it is miscast. Otherwise it is an extraordinary piece of social commentary.

I don't know why this is called a business book. It reminds me much more of Norman Mailer. It's a social and personal essay. I know Wolff's work well. His column in New York magazine is one of the best things there or, for that matter, in any other magazine. It's incredible writing. Who else is writing prose like this? Who else is this funny? It's deep, subversive, blasphemous humor. This book, like his column, is theoretically about the media business, but it's really about the sanctimony of American culture. Wolff rips it apart. He says what every person knows, but is too well-mannered, or repressed to say. Wolff is a great writer and this is a great book.

Wolff looks down from on high at the `moguls' of media. The Bronfmans, Diller, Murdoch, Redstone, Turner, Levin, Redstone, Eisner and others. Although very well written the book smacks of arrogance. Just who is Mr. Wolff? He is a nobody who happened to wriggle his way into a conference under the cover of interviewing Murdoch and spends the time pretending to hob nob with the largest media `moguls' of our time. Wolf seems to think these men are mere mice in his vegetable garden. If only Mr. Wolf could be given the reigns he could do ten times what mere mortals like Diller have done. He criticizes each man and breaks these `Moguls' down to size. In doing so he does help to explode some myths.

His analysis of Bronfman is insightful, Mr. Bronfman has mismanaged his empire, but at least he dared to take his family out of the stodgy booze business. He says of Diller that his success has been `luck'. Well if its all been luck then why hasn't he gotten unlucky, instead Mr. Diller has climbed higher and higher year after year. The author aims his guns at Roger Ailes of Fox news saying he is `creepy'. Well maybe he is creepy but he has turned Fox News into a very powerful news network and created a number of media stars like Bill O'Reilly.

This book is a scathing account, its intellectualism is a thinly veiled attempt of someone who is deeply jealous of the power these `moguls' have. Mr. Wolff may be a good writer but that's no excuse to basically say everyone who has been successful in media is either a moron, a cheat or just plain lucky. Apparently even Mr. Bloomberg is a fool according the standards set forth by the author. The book is merely a simple way of the author telling us he is unhappy he hasn't accomplished more in his life.

This book had great potential as a close and inside look at the men who forged media empires and use them to bend the way we think. Yet it falls far short in its endless ranting and small minded attacks on people that are all to easy to attack. Lastly the authors conclusion that the media business is about to collapse is his most off base and irrational comment. A total fallacy!

Mr. Wolff has been criticized both for being too close to the moguls he skewers (by people who didn't object to "embeds" in Iraq) and for never really getting close enough. Truth is, he's somewhere in the middle and it's quite terrifying to watch him walk that tightrope strung between lunching with the moguls and verbally punching them the next day. It's also, from a journalistic perspective, a remarkably feat to not get suckered in by these media powermongers and remain skeptical, if not outright cynical, about their competence, their motivations, and their tactics. Anyone who's lusting after scholarly analysis of the media empires that control Western culture, forget about it. This book plays a different role. It kicks the demi Gods of media off their pedestals and displays them to the rest of us as merely human, equally dysfunctional, and rather grotesque. Which is very useful because these tasteless characters are after all the tastemakers of contemporary culture. Read this hilarious book and just give in to the belly laughs.