Historians will squabble over the exact date that the mass media became a playground, an ego trip for billionaire dwarves.
The process probably began when Jimmy Carter's administration began deregulating communications, airlines, and railroads. It surely accelerated during the Reagan years, when the federal government abandoned any pretense of overseeing large corporations and the era of downsizings, mergers, and takeovers began with a vengeance. A decade later, job security, media independence, and individual corporate identities are already historic notions.
However you date the origins, the billionaire dwarves have engulfed the information business, transforming it from a civic institution, the Fourth Estate that once helped us understand - however imperfectly and incompletely - and grapple with civic issues, into an out-of-control monster that overwhelms, confuses, and fragments us. Media companies are now run precisely the same way as cereal companies, which is to say that, with few exceptions, they are vastly more efficient and profitable than they used to be, and almost devoid of any useful civic role or moral purpose.
Aside from the occasional monomaniac like William Randolph Hearst, big-money players in American history rarely considered the press to be of much interest. They preferred to seek their fortunes in more profitable realms: real estate, mining, banking, railroads.
But in the 1980s, moguls with money started buying up all the big media companies they could find. Previously little-known and mostly short people with huge egos and big bank accounts were scarfing up newspapers, broadcasting companies, magazines, and TV networks at a rate so astonishing that they now own almost every single one. They all seemed to come to believe at the same time that it was much more glamorous to own communications empires than office buildings.
Being a billionaire dwarf in lumber might mean big profits, but you're not likely to be photographed for Vanity Fair, snare tables at the best restaurants in LA and New York, or have congresspeople swoon at the mention of your name. To do that, you need to be a billionaire media dwarf.
Few people outside Boston had heard of Mortimer Zuckerman when he was building hotels and office buildings. But when he bought The Atlantic Monthly, US News & World Report, and the New York Daily News, he became a political power player. He rocketed onto the "A" party lists and started dating famous women. His views were sought and taken seriously. He has an office in Washington, where he regularly lunches with the major movers and shakers.
When Ted Turner ran some regional cable outlets, he was just another broadcaster from the sticks. Now, he's helping run Time Warner Turner, ruining Montana by drawing his glitterati friends there, and dabbling in world politics.
Lawrence Tisch discreetly ran movie theaters and insurance companies before he bought and looted CBS in the late '80s. Suddenly, at cocktail parties, Diane Sawyer was dying to hear his views on Middle East policy, and he was lunching with Don Hewitt and the gang from 60 Minutes.
Rupert Murdoch, media's Dark Prince (compared to whom Mr. Gates is an altar boy), built a few Australian newspapers into an empire that's transforming global culture. Sumner Redstone ran movie theaters in Boston before re-casting himself as a Hollywood mogul of the old school, whose vast empire now includes Paramount Pictures.
Al Neuharth edited a paper in Rochester before scarfing up a significant portion of American newspapers, making a lot of little papers better - but almost every single big one duller yet vastly more profitable than it was before.
Or consider Michael Eisner, who took over much of the media world following a publicized internal squabble with then-employee Jeffrey Katzenberg and following open-heart surgery - both experiences having left him determined to show the rest of Hollywood how full of vitality, power, and vision he was.
Then, of course, there is Bill Gates; just a few short years ago, the world's most reclusive nerd, so shy New Yorker writer John Seabrook had to email him to reach him. Then Microsoft became a media company as well as a software manufacturer, and now, reporters whiz in and out of Redmond like soccer players through a Pizza Hut on weekends. Bill's handlers couldn't get him to give interviews then. Now they can't get him to stop.
Just a couple of weeks ago he hosted his already infamous CEO summit, summoning the vice president of the United States, who responded like an eager puppy to tour his new castle.
Gates is our newest short, fabulously wealthy media mogul. In our vision-starved country, Bill Gates has become our most hailed millennial seer, embodying the great maxim that "in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king."
Why are they all short? Okay, we don't really know. Why do they have this desperate need to conquer media? And why are they all so warrior-like and mean-spirited? Why does every one seem to care about absolutely nothing but money or power? Why is there among them not a single stirring vision or creative idea, aside from buying things and devouring competitors?
And why has nearly every one been lovingly profiled in the New Yorker?
There is, of course, the Napoleon thing. Wars are out of vogue at the moment, but if you see media empires as kingdoms to fight for - remember the Barry Diller-Sumner Redstone battle? The Eisner-Katzenberg fight? The Zuckerman-Murdoch clash? The Murdoch-Time Warner brawl? - it makes a bit more sense. These short guys with big egos, slugging it out with other short guys with big egos. All building kingdoms and tyrannies and presiding over them. It's not that new a story after all.
Although their battles with one another are often epic, the natives in these feudal nations - us - are pretty hapless, even pathetic, in our resistance. News consumers mostly sit by, slack-jawed, while developers, theme-park operators and light-bulb manufacturers take over our information culture. Future citizens will not judge us kindly, if our media moguls come to symbolize our time. Anthropologists will puzzle over a culture that would turn over so vital a cultural institution to these vertically challenged, ill-tempered monarchs.
What a truly amazing transformation for American journalism, founded by raggedy outcasts, misfits, idealists, and quarrelsome colonial pamphleteers, none of whom would be allowed to drive Michael Eisner's limousine today. And would that H. L. Mencken's ghost were to appear from the mists to haunt them in the manner they so richly deserve.
Of course, life isn't all conquer and devour for these people. In order to sustain their mogulhood, billionaire media dwarves have to do a few things. They have to strip their new acquisitions of any "excess" expenditures so the analysts and traders on Wall Street will be impressed, side with them, and give them more money.
They have to turn editorial control over to mass-marketers. They have to avoid content that's controversial, idiosyncratic, or too brainy. In the 1990s, the people running media ape one another in the most important ways: They value market research, profits, status, and expansion.
And just about all the billionaire dwarves - Gates, Redstone, Eisner, Turner - are drooling over the Internet, their next frontier and battlefield, fresh territory to conquer, more money to make.
Maybe the new millennium will bring an unexpected miracle. Maybe the billionaire dwarves will get interested in medical technology or space travel. Or mining in Kazakhastan. Maybe mass transportation will finally become glamorous. Maybe we are doomed to suffer these rapacious and predatory people until another giant comet comes crashing to earth and makes them extinct.
Maybe this is really what the Heaven's Gate cultists foresaw in their tormented visions before they decided to flee: that the Web was the newest playground of the billionaire dwarves and Hale-Bopp wasn't going to crash down and save us from them.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
