Backstory: Inside the Business of News
By Ken Auletta
Penguin Press, 296 pages, $37.50
Mirroring the relationship between ecclesiastical and government institutions in Western societies, there has been a conviction for most of the 20th century that building a wall between a media outlet's editorial operations (church) and its business operations (state) is the way to guarantee credibility. The concept is said to have originated with two old-fashioned press lords of the 1920s. Neither Henry Luce, who founded Time Inc., nor Colonel Robert. R. McCormick, publisher and owner of The Chicago Tribune, were businesspeople in the sense that today's professional executives running media corporations are, and they often put the news ahead of the bottom line. Nonetheless, there seems to be no record that either man used the expression "church and state," although Luce's belief in separating the two functions became a powerful part of Time Inc.'s culture and McCormick installed in Chicago's Tribune Tower separate elevators for the editorial and business staff.
This idea of church and state is at the heart of Ken Auletta's Backstory: Inside the Business of News. His theme revolves around the corporatization of the media, those mergers and acquisitions that, in the interests of synergy, increasingly combine the news media into diversified conglomerates that may include one or more of entertainment divisions, cable and satellite companies, book publishers, telcos and countless other unrelated ventures. In the introduction, Auletta writes: "The business assumptions that animate synergy — cost savings, 'team culture,' 'leverage' of size — are often a menace to journalism."
Auletta, who is among North America's foremost media chroniclers, has written the Annals of Communication in The New Yorker for a dozen years and is the author of nine books, four of them national bestsellers. Backstory is a collection of 11 of his New Yorker pieces (one of them unpublished, plus one that ran in American Journalism Review), written between 1993 and 2003, interconnected sometimes awkwardly to an overarching theme as expressed in an introduction and in postscripts that follow each story. It's his belief that the media has a bias, but not to the left or right so much as toward the business of news. Profit margins and stock prices, he argues, influence the subjects covered and the style of coverage (glitz and sensationalism sells better than serious public policy issues and international affairs, a well-worn argument that is nonetheless generally true), and modern executives seek to dismantle what's left of the wall between church and state. It's a defensible theme — there's a small library worth of books by progressive media critics making this point — but it's weakened somewhat by dramatic events having overtaken many of these stories, making the sum of the exercise less satisfying than many of its individual parts.
For example, in his characteristically thorough way, Auletta profiles former Los Angeles Times publisher Mark H. Willes, who clumsily tried to create synergies between the editorial and advertising departments. But Willes's downfall — an ill-conceived scheme to produce a special issue of the paper's Sunday magazine devoted to a new downtown development when the Los Angeles Times was part of the consortium that built it — happened two years after Auletta wrote his piece, and is reduced to four paragraphs in a postscript.
More successful is his absorbing, 17,000-word profile of New York Times editor Howell Raines. Published in 2002, the story exposed the dysfunction within the paper and the staff's discontent with their gifted but autocratic new leader's management style. A masterpiece of research, reporting and analysis, it foreshadows Raines's firing a year later in the wake of a scandal involving Jayson Blair, a rogue reporter who had fictionalized and plagiarized dozens of stories in the paper of record. But once again, I wanted to read Auletta's exhaustive reportage applied to the Blair affair itself, not just a couple of pages of postscript. Still, the story nicely supports Auletta's theme by illustrating how the Times is a rare example of a media outlet that lives up to its public trust by putting journalism values before those of business.
The most moving piece is a 1997 profile of John McCandlish Phillips, Jr., who in the 1950s and '60s was considered the most gifted feature writer at The New York Times, in addition to being a devout born-again Christian. His most remarkable, and tragic, story — sketched by Auletta but reconstructed in vivid detail in Gay Talese's definitive 1966 book on the Times, The Kingdom and the Power — was about a young American Nazi who was secretly Jewish. When the story was published, the young man committed suicide. A few years later, Phillips gave up journalism and devoted the rest of his life to his evangelical pursuits. As a reporter who, to Auletta, represents the personification of the editorial "church," Phillips provides a perfect segue into "Fee Speech," in which Auletta questions the moral integrity of today's celebrity journalists who perform on TV news programs and milk the corporate lecture circuit. (The piece is a decade old, but little seems to have changed.) Closer to the present, Auletta includes his two-year-old article on Inside.com, a smart on-line journal about the media and entertainment industries doomed to failure because its "old media" business model was wrong for the socio-cultural and economic character of the Internet. The story is followed by his rollicking 2003 study of Fox News, the jingoistic network that Al Gore refers to as an arm of the Republican Party, but Auletta's acrobatic effort to make a connection between the two is unnecessary. The articles in this book could have stood on their own, as a collection of inspired media reportage without the sometimes strained thematic connections.
The most alarming story is Auletta's 1998 study of Chicago's Tribune company, whose flagship is the daily Chicago Tribune. Clearly, Colonel McCormack's elevators have been redesigned, because at today's Tribune Company, state dominates church. Howard Tyner, the vice-president /editor of the Tribune, tells Auletta: "I am not the editor of a newspaper. I am the manager of a content company ....." There is a telling moment when Auletta quizzes David Hiller, the Tribune's chief strategist, who is telling him that today everything — such as reader preferences for horoscopes over international news, sports over science or gossip over government — is quantifiable.
"So what happens when an editor's judgment collides, as it will, with market research," Auletta asks. "If readers say they prefer horoscopes to foreign news, I ask Hiller, won't there be a pressure to drop foreign news?"
Hiller nimbly tap dances around the question, with Auletta in pursuit. Finally, Hiller admits: "'I think, long term, you're in trouble not giving the public what it wants.'"
"'And if it wants horoscopes?'"
"'Then I'd give it to them.'"
In an interview Auletta gave in January to mediabistro.com, he was asked whether the news side can ever win. Surprisingly, his answer isn't included in the book's introductory essay. He pointed out that when businesspeople talk about the "brand," they're thinking about synergies — economies of scale, lowering boundaries between departments to encourage teamwork and the chimera of convergence, which is the ultimate homogenization of church and state. When journalists talk about "brand," they mean the credibility of the journalism. Auletta's suggested strategy is for journalists to convince businesspeople that safeguarding journalistic credibility protects, and ultimately enhances, the brand. Reading about the businesspeople-in-journalist's-clothing running the Tribune Company, and others like them at other media corporations at the dawn of this new century, it strikes me that doing so will be an uphill battle.
David Hayes is a journalist and author who teaches magazine writing at Ryerson University.
