Source: USA TODAY

This is about Barbara Walters — who, after many decades of dominating television news, is retiring at 83 — and power. Not just about her power, which is considerable, but about the galaxy of powerful people who have been her friends and subjects.

Actually, this is about the dinner parties of powerful people, where Walters most conveniently and dazzlingly conducted her relationships with celebrities, politicians and plutocrats, seducing them and being seduced by them — or, really, where each held the other in a trance of mutual self-congratulation and useful-ness.

In today’s climate of suspicion and social polarization, it’s hard to write about the private gatherings of the über-privileged and influential without implying conspiracies and cronyism. Certainly, if the full nature of Walters’ remarkable social schedule was exposed, it would seem absolutely to prove that the media was in the pocket of the super-rich and powerful.

But now, we’re in a different world. First, I’m not sure there are that many dinner parties anymore. When the powerful do have an intimate soirée, they are understandably reluctant to invite journalists. Frankly, there are not that many journalists who have the bearing to pull off a luxe event.

The journalist as society fixture and social hobnobber doesn’t really exist anymore — who has such an expense account?

Likewise, the journalist who has direct access to the powerful, rather than having his or her access filtered through handlers and communications professionals, is also largely a thing of the past.

However, there was once an unfiltered inner circle that invited and enveloped journalists. Walters aspired to it and reached it.

But instead of merely becoming part of it, she used it.

I have had the odd-man-out experience of attending a few such gatherings also attended by Walters. I would have said these were forced and uncomfortable occasions except for the familiar and strategic way that Walters moved among the actors, billionaires, moguls, Kissingers (once practically carrying a lost-looking Kissinger across the room to the seat next to her), royalty and the wives of various foreign despots.

I have never quite seen anything like it — the way fierce and desperate egos seemed to relax and coalesce around her; the obvious pleasure she took in the company of the celebrated, and the sense that her pleasure could shift away at any moment. I would give a lot to see it again.

At many points in her career, Walters has been the subject of ridicule. The more successful she became, it seemed, the more ridicule. Her co-host on the ABC Evening News, Harry Reasoner, a man of the old school of correct, unemotive behavior, could famously not contain his contempt for her. She became the Baba Wawa of Saturday Night Live.

For many years, she was the sine qua non of media criticism. The rap against her, emerging once again in the coverage of her retirement announcement, is that she was principally an entertainer rather than a journalist; she was not serious.

This seems to me a vast misunderstanding of what she was about.

She understood the powerful. Most journalists of the old school accepted power as a given, a fixed and fairly one-dimensional attribute. She, on the other hand, got it that the powerful were a distinct, compelling, needy and often broken breed.

She understood the voyeuristic value of star power — exposing it to the rest of the world. She used her intimate access to reveal quite a vast range of the foibles and personalities of this new elite — and to promote them, as well. She rose as they rose.

She conflated all power. The politician, the billionaire, the celebrity, were all similar entities in her telling. Largely following her lead, the media began to see them all as one.

She revolutionized how we see the public world. That world, or the media’s view of it, became a reflection of the tics, eccentricities, desires and self-promotion of the famous.

For more than 50 years, she’s hardly had an evening without an event — often two or three. Even in her 9th decade, you could set your clock by when she leaves her Fifth Avenue apartment for the evening’s first engagement.

No doubt, she sacrificed much of her private life. But along the way, in part merely by showing up, then by becoming the Nijinsky of showing up — by becoming the main draw herself — she came to know everybody. Everybody. A dinner party of anyone who was anybody would be incomplete without her in the middle of it, as the glue.

I don’t think you can put too fine a point on this: There came a moment when there was nobody of importance or influence she did not know, or could not get to know, and who would not do her bidding — and share some of their secrets.

This is journalism the likes of which, for better or worse, we won’t see again.

Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com and on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

The Upfronts are a media ritual that stretches back to the early days of television. It’s when networks offer advertisers a locked-in deal if they buy space for the fall season in the spring instead of waiting until the new shows air, when the costs, especially for hit shows, might likely go up.

Forget the fact that there really is no longer a fall season, that a hit now is hardly what a hit was then, that television networks are themselves pale imitations of what they were — once again the Upfronts are on. Theaters are rented in Manhattan, network heads and ad sales executives are rehearsed, assorted stars are unhappily drafted to participate and, in old-fashioned variety-show format, the new shows are launched and the old patted on the back.

For a generation or longer, the Upfronts have been a sleight of hand in which advertisers are offered less for more. Audiences shrink, impact lessens, rates rise and, for many years now, almost everybody in the television and advertising business has expected a collective awakening and for ad dollars to head for the exit doors.

But, no. The money still flows. Cable joined the networks at the Upfronts, and television executives and advertising agencies, in a symbiotic bid to save each other’s jobs, every year patch together in Hail Mary fashion an ever-smaller fraction of the once-great national television audience.

It’s preposterous, really. It defies reality. It’s smokin’ something. Not only is the American audience in inexorable flight from scheduled television, but the kind of person who actually watches ads, given all the available ways to avoid them, is unlikely to be sentient enough to actually hold a job and have the money to buy anything.

At least, that is the reasonable view of a great number of people in the digital media business, who for the better part of a decade have been confounded by the fact that big-brand and big-budget advertisers have failed to keep pace with the movement of the American consumer from television to the Web and mobile platforms.

Despite this overwhelming trend, and even with all the new measurement tools to calibrate the digital audience’s actual attention to advertising, not to mention the vastly lower cost of Web and mobile ads, the great and powerful American marketer has still largely turned up his nose to digital — even as it’s become a video medium. A Niagara of video.

There are many theories about why this has happened — or not happened — but several years ago those theories coalesced around a singular idea. Digital media was challenged because it lacked an Upfront.

Under the auspices of Digitas, an advertising agency specializing in, well, digital advertising, the “NewFronts” were inaugurated in 2008 to showcase digital content.

Last year, blaming logistical challenges, as well as being regularly disappointed by digital video’s failure to catch fire, Digitas turned these sub-Upfronts over to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. (The IAB sets the standards for online advertising formats, including the much-derided banner ad, and has waged a largely unsuccessful campaign to attract big brands to the Internet.)

And, once again, there is considerable anticipation in the marketplace that this is the year, as opposed to all the past years that were supposed to be the year, that online video is going to start to really claim its fair share of the advertising pie.

Advertisers have to advertise, don’t they? And they’ll have to follow the audience eventually, won’t they?

Sure, big brands have been allergic to the low-budget quality of online video. Online video may be most notable for not being watched. The digital audience is possibly even more distracted than the television audience. And “pre-roll,” that herky-jerky placement before a video starts, is a desperate and hopelessly maladroit showcase for anybody’s message.

Still, AOL and YouTube, along with Yahoo, Hulu, Blip, Crackle, Microsoft and a dozen other companies, have made especially aggressive pitches over the last few weeks that their content is not only capturing a meaningful, demographically appealing audience, but it’s cutting-edge, culture-moving stuff.

Their pitch is either “we’ve got stars like you’ve never seen them before” — Christina Ricci on AOL or John Stamos on Yahoo with a show about how celebrities lost their virginity — or “we’ve got non-celebrities who are even bigger than celebrities,” such as viral make-up videos on YouTube with a hundred zillion views.

And yet, last week, in the middle of all this strained bonhomie, YouTube announced that it is launching a subscription service, deftly undermining the hopes and dreams of an advertising Renaissance on the Internet.

The real message of the continued resistance to digital content, and the ever-disappointing digital Upfronts, is that while advertisers may inevitably leave TV — and as a generation of chief marketing officers dies out, they surely will leave — they won’t necessarily be going anywhere else.

Indeed, the Upfronts, whether for television or digital, are, in proper Mad Men fashion, nostalgic and wistful, a desire to return to better days. (And, in the case of digital, a desire to return to what it never had.)

But harder hearts in the new entertainment business, seeing a world without ads, are manning up to the fact that they are going to have to make you pay to watch John Stamos.

Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com and on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

The Koch brothers, the unimaginably rich and combatively conservative oil heirs, are telling people that they might like to buy the newspapers owned by the recently bankrupt Tribune Co. — Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant and The Baltimore Sun, among them.

Their idea, to the consternation of many liberals, is to turn these papers into a national network of conservative voices, or what The New York Times calls “a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas.”

Of course, this does not mean that they will buy the papers. In fact, the thing that many super-rich men like even more than the idea of owning newspapers is having people thinking they could own them if they wanted to.

Still, they might. The Kochs are rich enough to buy what most other sane men would not.

Of course, there are many simpler and cheaper ways to get attention for your view than buying troubled newspapers. You can fund think tanks and foundations. You can start lobbying groups. You can contribute virtually unlimited amounts of money to the candidate of your choice. You can finance advertising campaigns. All of which the determined Koch brothers have done.

But that has not, apparently, been enough.

Because, in a sense, politics is one thing and media is another.

As much as wanting lower taxes and less government interference, the Koch brothers want less liberal media — or more conservative media.

They may believe, with some justification, that media, and by that they mean mostly liberal media, is the real government — the cultural advance guard that is changing this country. As powerful as the Koch brothers are, they likely feel they are not as powerful as, say, The New York Times, or George Clooney, or Jon Stewart.

It might seem when you are rich enough to buy anything you want that one thing still out of reach is media — or at least good media. In fact, the more money you have, the worse, it might seem, you’re treated by the media. There are people who have gotten worse press than the Koch brothers, but not too many. Perhaps Michael Bloomberg is an example to them — a rich man whose favorable press comes at least in part because he can give journalists jobs.

Still, it seems also clear that the Kochs’ passions are as important as their egos. They not only believe in the usual conservative verities, but they appear to be in something of a personal war with President Obama.

The Tribune newspapers might seem like a formidable weapon for them. Curiously, most of the papers they are proposing to buy are in cities that voted overwhelmingly for the president — cities that have not had a reliably conservative base in a generation or two. (The Tribune Co. also owns Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language paper in the U.S.)

Why you would go into a business trying to sell things that your customers don’t seem to want is hard to understand.

What’s more, they would be buying enterprises staffed by several thousand unionized people who don’t share their views. True, most of these people are not in the views business and are primarily concerned with reporting local news. (Actually, many are concerned with selling advertising and trucking copies across town.) Perhaps the Kochs believe that they would create something like The Wall Street Journal, where the reporters do their straightforward jobs while the opinion pages bubble with rancor and joie de guerre. Except the Koch brothers wouldn’t be buying TheWall Street Journal. They would be buying a bunch of local papers.

Other than a few editorials tilting to their views, it is hard to imagine how they get a new conservative national voice to rise from Los Angeles, Chicago, Hartford and Baltimore — or in Spanish.

Have I mentioned that the news business is not very good? While the Kochs are rich enough not to have to worry about this, money is exactly the thing the rich worry about. So they will likely soon find themselves more concerned about paper costs than tax rates. And social-media traffic. The Koch brothers, like many rich men in their 70s, still read newspapers. But every day, there are fewer newspaper readers. So the brothers would find themselves not just worried about how to communicate their conservative views, but how to do it in a way that generates likes and shares and page views.

It is just a bit astonishing for people in the newspaper business to think about what owning a newspaper, no less a chain of newspapers, would mean for people who have never owned one, or worked for one.

The Koch brothers, though, probably believe that their success as businessmen means they have as good or better a chance to sort out the newspaper business as the professionals who have so far failed in this regard.

If they can, more power to them.

A bit more likely, they would become, not just to the liberal establishment but to their friends and fellow billionaires as well, figures of head-smacking pity and amusement.

Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com, and on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

The most peculiar media event in a pretty much non-stop show of media fumbles and embarrassments since the bombs went off in Boston, has been the New York Post‘s seemingly militant determination to commit some sort of journalistic suicide.

In the early hours after the Boston Marathon attack, the Post insisted that 12 people were dead and that a Saudi suspect was in custody, maintaining this story long after all official police and FBI representatives were saying, no, two dead (a third person would later die), and nobody in custody — no suspects even.

Still, the Post insisted. And when it gave up, it was at best irritable about acknowledging that it had changed its story.

The Post‘s editor, Col Allan, almost always willing to defend his paper and to engage his critics (he is perhaps most famous for commissioning and defending the Post‘s cartoon portraying President Obama as a chimpanzee), did not respond to my e-mail asking him, in effect, what was he thinking.

A day later, it got worse. Piggy-backing off user examinations of photo evidence on the site Reddit, the Post identified in a large headline two utterly innocent bystanders, publishing their pictures on the front page, as likely perpetrators, while ever so slightly qualifying this in a small caption.

It might be that no established news outlet had ever before missed the mark so often and so far, and been so wrongheaded, in such a short period of time.

It had abandoned the most ordinary cautions. At the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta, an innocent man, Richard Jewell, had been identified as a suspect.

Jewell eventually sued a wide variety of news organization, including the New York Post, and received significant settlements. In the past, this has made news organizations highly sensitive to premature identifications. But somehow, not the Post.

Nor was the identification of the subjects in the Post photo supported, as it was with Jewell in Atlanta, by official agencies. The ID was wholly unsourced and unvouched. The Post was about as far out on a limb as it is possible to journalistically go, without making it up.

This seemed more like a news operation going crazy than just even screwing up. The Post had outdone itself.

Certainly, there were other mess-ups. Several news organizations, including CNN and Fox News, went with an erroneous second-day story after the Boston bombing of someone in custody. (USATODAY.com posted a story on the erroneous custody citing AP and CNN.)

CNN, breathlessly rushing to get in front of this story, and then ridiculously and laboriously trying to modify it and explain its way out of it, caught the brunt of this ridicule.

Media critic Jay Rosen on Twitter noted, “The inanity, stupidity and rolling incompetence of CNN.”

And yet CNN’s hapless moment was something like high responsibility compared with the Post‘s nutty gambit.

So what was it thinking?

Every traditional news organization is, arguably, a desperate entity, looking the end in the face — in a sense, none so much as the Post, a legendary money pit for its owner, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp.

CNN, facing its own existential issues, was surely demonstrating its desperate ambition for a big first-report score. You could sense its hunger — there was John King’s almost febrile gasping out the details — to nail the custody story. To risk it.

Indeed, the new goal, it seemed more and more since the bombing the day before, was to not only stay on top of the real-time news but to get ahead of it.

This is surely because of the converging competition — almost everybody, amateurs and professionals alike, is now working with the same real-time tools. Ownership of an event occurs in fractions of seconds.

CNN stumbled, but the Post pushed the desire to get ahead into a new realm.

This was a hail Mary pass as news. It was probably not true — but it might save the Post for another year or two if it was.

In some sense, accuracy, or truth, or caution anyway are products of what news organizations have to lose.

You discourage readers, alienate advertisers and compromise your influence by getting it wrong and looking ridiculous. But none of that matters if you’re facing extinction anyway.

Indeed, the Post has seen its staff cut and many of its best reporters flee or be whittled away — some with deep police sources. Here it was trying to play its old aggressive game, but without its muscle.

On top of that, it is, hands down, the weakest paper in the News Corp stable.

The company plans to separate its entertainment assets — the Fox companies — from its newspapers, which it will roll out as an independent company later this spring. When that happens, all of the scores of papers controlled by Murdoch will have to achieve some level of self-support. Almost nobody believes the Post can get there.

Jack Shafer, media columnist at Reuters, calls the Post‘s Boston Marathon coverage “defiant inaccuracy.”

I think they were hoping that, going for broke, they might just get it right. And if not, so what, they’ve got nothing to lose.

Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com, and on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.