The man who writes The New Yorker's "Annals of Communications" column
got into journalism by accident. Ken Auletta was a student in a Ph.D.
program at the Maxwell School of the University of Syracuse, studying
political science, when he got tired of school and left to become a
speechwriter, working first for a New York gubernatorial candidate and
then for Bobby Kennedy in Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. After
Kennedy's assassination, Auletta left politics to become editor of a
weekly New York newspaper called the Manhattan Tribune.
"I had written for the school paper and such, and I basically liked the
independence of journalism. I liked politics, too, though I had no
interest in running for office. So after a while I became political
correspondent for the New York Post, then a writer for the Village
Voice, then for New York magazine, then for The New Yorker."
During the next two decades, Auletta was a regular columnist for the New
York Daily News and wrote six books, including Three Blind Mice: How the
Networks Lost Their Way. Then, in the fall of 1992, Tina Brown, new
editor for The New Yorker, asked Auletta to write the "Annals of
Communications" column.
"At first I said no, but then I decided it might be fun rather than
writing another book, because it gives me a lot of variety, a lot of
changes of pace. The column appears as often as I write it. I'll do a
relatively short piece, then maybe work two months on a profile. On
average, I write a dozen or so pieces a year."
Although he has worked at a number of New York newspapers, he wasn't
anxious to see the new movie The Paper, about a fictionalized New York
Post. "I just haven't had this compulsion to go out and see it. I
generally have not been enamored of Hollywood's take on newspapers and
how they work, and I'm even less enamored when I see the journalists
cooperating in order to get their pusses on the screen. So I have the
impression it's an incestuous relationship, and the reviews have been
underwhelming. But I'm sure I'll see it eventually."
Ken Auletta's beat at The New Yorker is "anything that has to do with
communications, and that's a pretty wide net. I've done a piece on the
negotiations to land Diane Sawyer; a profile of Edgar Bronfman and the
Seagram company's attempt to become a partner in Time Warner; profiles
of John Malone of TCI, Barry Diller of Home Shopping Network, and Arthur
Schulzberger Jr. of the New York Times; and a piece on people in
Hollywood, in which I asked each of them, from Rupert Murdoch to Michael
Ovitz to Michael Eisner to Oliver Stone to Debra Winger, 'What won't you
do?' It was an attempt to see how much the decision makers in our
culture think about ethical questions. The general answer is that they
think about them very little, though I didn't have to point that out.
You see, if you just let people speak, as I did in this piece, the
readers can make that judgment on their own. I don't have to beat them
over the head with a two-by-four.
"And I did a piece on violence in the media and what the public can do
about that, which began with a radio program in San Francisco called
'Street Soldiers,' where a guy named Joe Marshall runs a program geared
toward wayward youth. The show is on four hours a week on Monday nights
and is the highest-rated show in San Francisco, and teenagers call in
and talk out their violent impulses.
"I've written about the government's role in the information
superhighway and a piece on the 'magic box,' which was a look at how
interactive television actually works--the so-called video jukebox.
"I do press criticism on how the New York Times covers things and how
CNN covers things. And I did a piece that probed the anger overseas
about what is called American cultural imperialism.
"So it's a pretty broad beat--a fun beat. If I had to summarize it, it
would span several categories: the future of communications, press
criticism, profiles of interesting people in various aspects of
communications."
Auletta covers his beat with the wit and skepticism of a seasoned
reporter. Typical of his caution was his reaction to a recent coup by
Rupert Murdoch, who presides over an international print and electronic
media empire. Murdoch's Fox Entertainment had just wrested control of 12
major television stations from CBS and other networks. In doing so, Fox
had jolted the broadcast industry, but some media analysts were saying
things like: "It's a strange time to be getting into the network
business. Networks are dinosaurs. What's happening is interactivity."
Auletta, however, thinks that maybe Murdoch made a good move.
"You know, what Murdoch did is not so crazy if you make either or both
of two assumptions. First, if you assume, as I know Rupert Murdoch
assumes, that even if interactivity in fact comes, it will come more
slowly than its prophets believe, meaning that it will reach critical
mass in 20 or 25 years rather than four or five, and in the interim,
Murdoch has a nice business in broadcasting and can make a lot of money.
That's one assumption, and it's held by Murdoch. Another--one that's
held by others in the broadcasting business--is that there are certain
inherent strengths in broadcasting and that the computer model is the
wrong model and the right model is the television model in the sense
that people who turn on their TV set will always regard television as a
semipassive activity.
"Now, I say 'semipassive' rather than 'passive.' Television is not
totally passive; people are grazing with their remote control and they
take advantage of many more choices today than they had even five years
ago. But essentially the assumption is that people want to be
entertained, and they don't want to spend the 43 minutes that it would
take to graze through 500 channels consecutively. The fact is, all they
want to do is collapse and enjoy a passive activity. They're saying,
'You tell me what to watch.'
"Now, of course, the computer model is a very different model from that.
It's the interactive model, where you're used to making choices. Which
of the two models will be the model that will dominate communications in
the future America? We'll have to wait to find out, but there are many
people in broadcasting--and not just those who are trying to figure out
a rationale to defend a dying business, but people who are making honest
and reasonable predictions--who believe that people will continue to
treat entertainment differently from the way they treat computing."
Auletta suspects that interactive television with a "video dialtone"
that allows you to call up anything you want anytime you want it will
prove to be economically shaky as a mass model, at least in the short
run, thus leaving entrepreneurs such as Murdoch feeling they've got a
reasonably good business in broadcasting, so what they have to do is
control their distribution systems, which is what Fox did by acquiring
12 TV stations.
"Of course, there are lots of weaknesses in broadcasting, and at a time
when technology offers unlimited channel choices, the value of a single
channel will clearly be less. However, there's a third assumption that
broadcasters make, which is that a brand name is valuable, and in some
ways may be even more valuable in a world of unlimited channel choices
where you get so confused that you want to go with the familiar such as
CBS, BBC, '60 Minutes,' 'Roseanne,' CNN, whatever. My own view is that
these assumptions today are not provable or unprovable. I think that
time alone will be the tester."
Asked to comment on the ideas of information technology guru George
Gilder (who regards television as a mass media corpse to be replaced by
interactive telecomputer), Auletta says, "You know, I really approach
this stuff, I hope, with some humility. George is an enthusiast and a
believer. I'm more of a skeptic. It's part of my nature, but it's also
part of my journalistic training, part of the discipline under which I
live. George is very certain about this and very logical, and I
understand his logic, which emphasizes the power of the computer, the
flexibility it gives you, its speed, its memory, and all of that. But I
remember listening once to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara make also
very logically compelling arguments about why a fence along the border
between North and South Vietnam would keep out the Viet Cong and quell
the uprising in the south of Vietnam. And McNamara had people put out
flowcharts and had quantified things and it was all very logical. But he
didn't prove to be correct, because people don't often follow logic.
"I also remember listening to Nicholas Negroponte, head of MIT's Media
Lab, give a talk in the 1980s about what the average American home would
look like in just a few years. Everyone would have on their walls these
huge, flat, high-definition screens of movie quality and movie size. And
I remember thinking as I listened to him, My God, I understand the logic
and the attractiveness of this, but has anyone looked at the economics?
And what are the economics for citizens? I mean, how many people have
enough space to spare a whole wall for that? That's not how most
Americans live! Negroponte was spinning and concocting a feature that I
believed was divorced from the reality of how life is really lived. And
I wonder whether Gilder isn't doing the same thing.
"I understand that kids will be more computer literate than their
parents, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the TV model will be
replaced by the computer model. Maybe they're separate instruments. If
the assumption is correct that people want to be entertained and don't
want to do a lot of work at the end of the day--I mean most people; I'm
talking about a mass audience--then George is wrong. But of course the
problem is that there's no way to prove whether he's right or wrong. The
idea will be tested soon, but that's going to take some time. We'll have
to wait and see.
"Actually, I hope he's right. I hope that technology will liberate us
from our schedules and will give us access to things we do not have,
such as a great professor's lecture series. If there were some way my
daughter could enjoy a brilliant professor at the University of Chicago,
even though she were in New York, and could ask that professor
questions, it would be wonderful; I'm filled with awe at the prospects
for education. But do I believe this will actually happen? I don't know.
I keep on falling back on that line of Lewis Mumford's, which is, 'I'm
an optimist about possibilities and a pessimist about probabilities.' I
worry too about some of the social consequences, by which I don't mean
only information haves and have-nots--which I think is a real concern
with technology--but also what happens to our sense of community. And
what happens to reading.
"And I worry about too much instant democracy, in which there's no time
for reflection. One of the weaknesses of broadcast journalism, and you
see this where you have live events, is that you have no time to filter
and edit and weed out what's not important. If we're not careful, we
could have that problem in every realm of our lives. If they can take
hourly polls of the public and how the public feels about an issue,
where's the need for a deliberative democracy?"
As a veteran newsman, Auletta is appalled at the thought that newspapers
might die off or turn into something like Negroponte's "Daily Me," which
would aim to provide a news service custom-tailored to each individual's
own special interests. "I think it's important that the public have at
least the option of receiving a newspaper or news in a package that
says, 'This is what we as the editors of, say, the New York Times or
CNN, believe are the most important things that happened today, and
please don't read just about health because you're interested in health
care, but read also about what's going on in the former Soviet Union,
read about human rights in China, read about famine in Africa, read
about the environment. These are things that are important for you as a
citizen.' One of the worries I have with this brave new world is that it
will diminish our sense of community and make us more self-centered than
we already are. That would be very troublesome to a democracy,
especially to one like ours, which has so many racial and ethnic and
ideological groupings. Those groupings constitute one of our strengths,
but it could turn into a weakness if everyone is into 'me' and there's
too little 'we.'
"I think it's good that people will be able to call up information they
care about, have access to libraries and books, and not have to wait and
that they'll be able to call up magazine or newspaper articles that
interest them so they can do research or just know more. That's
wonderful. But I still hope people get news in a form that's not just
customized to their interest but says, 'Stop! As a citizen, you need to
know other things; here's the package.' In my paradigm, there would
always be a package as well as 'me' news.
"So I worry about these things, and I hope that Gilder's brave new world
doesn't fully come to pass. George is a very smart guy, a real
individualist, but I don't know whether his paradigm is the correct one.
Maybe so, maybe not. As I said, I don't think many of these questions
are answerable right now.
"On one hand, think about the CD. In 1983 there was no CD player, but it
was about to be introduced, and the experts were saying, 'It will never
happen. People will never discard their vinyl records or their tapes.
Why should they? To spend more money on a CD player, and with CDs more
expensive than records or tapes? Just for better-quality sound? No way!'
Well, that was just a decade ago, and now 60 percent of all recordings
sold are CDs. So is that the paradigm? Or, on the other hand, is the
paradigm Atari? or QUBE? or other failed experiments?
"There have been lots of fads and then some facts, and it's not knowable
now whether the consolidation of your TV set and your computer will turn
out to be a fact. Last week I was talking to Mickey Shuloff, head of
Sony US, and I asked him if he could imagine all the electronic
instruments joined somehow into a single unit that contained the CD and
tape deck and amplifier and computer and telephone and fax and printer
all in one box. He said, 'No way! Too many things could go wrong.' It's
not a surprising answer. Recently I needed a new TV and VCR and I was
tempted to buy a VCR that was built into a TV set, but I resisted the
temptation because I realized that if the VCR broke, I'd also lose my TV
while getting the thing repaired. I was following human logic. I was
thinking like a consumer, not like a theoretician, and, using a
consumer's logic rather than a theoretician's logic, I reasoned that I
didn't really want to combine my TV and VCR in one machine. It made
sense to separate them. And I think that people like Shuloff and those
who run Hewlett-Packard believe that TVs and computers and VCRs and so
forth will remain discrete pieces of equipment for a while. But the
businesses will continue to move closer together, and overlap, and form
partnerships."
A pessimist with respect to probabilities, an optimist with respect to
possibilities, Ken Auletta will continue to make his thoughtful and
skeptical entries in the annals of communication.
(Ken Auletta will be a keynote speaker at the Educom'94 conference in
San Antonio.)