Executives at the Gate | Vanity Fair

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The men in line to run Americas most powerful media corporations arent
fire-breathing, world-conquering moguls like their predecessors. Theyre
cheerful, civilized guys. Call it leadership by default, or the management of
decline.
Michael Wolff

t Rupert Murdochs News Corp., if youre in the innermost circle, you refer to the
73-year-old Murdoch as the old man. Hes the all-knowing father of the media
agesand everyone else is unlearned, ill-equipped, small-time. Theres an
unbreachable generational divide. And, too, an ever present sense of portent, of
passing, of mortality, of inevitability. The end is nigh.
The old man appellation is used differently at Viacom for its founder, the auburn-haired
Sumner Redstone. It suggests impatience, frustrationembarrassment evenat the
persistence and longevity of the 81-year-old chief executive (Anyone, in Redstones
opinion, who says age is chronological is an asshole), who has finally put in place a
credible succession plan (of course, there have been other credible plans before this one).
While Disneys Michael Eisner, at 62, is younger than Murdoch and Redstone, in some
sense hes been around even longer20 years at the helm of a great media enterprise
(News Corp. did not become a broadcast company in the U.S. until 1986; Viacoms big
move to purchase Paramount wasnt until 1994). Its required a titanic struggle on the part
of his accumulated corporate foes to force him finally to announce his retirement schedule.
But that date is now fixedhis successor will be announced by June, and hell be gone by
2006.
Time Warner, an amalgamation of larger-than-life showmen, despots, and egomaniacs
Steve Ross, Ted Turner, Jerry Levin, Bob Pittman, for startershas finally shed them all.
T.W. (having also shed its troubling AOL moniker) has settled into being practically a
modest company, run by the diplomat and glad-hander (he has large, enveloping arms)
Dick Parsons.
At the collection of assets known variously as MCA, Universal, Vivendi, USA Networks,
NBCwhose stewards have been such figures of media myth as Lew Wasserman and
Barry Diller, and triviality as Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Jean-Marie Messiercontrol has
devolved to G.E. and its theories of scientific management.
Its unusual, and epic, and unsettling, for all the major corporations in an industryin this
case, the most influential industry in the nationto reach a generational change at the
same moment. But this is not just the passing of the founders; it is, potentially, a
sensibility overthrow. The moguls have raised a generation quite unlike themselvesand

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now the personality of their business, its main motivations, possibly its entire reason for
being, are in play.
Youve got Peter Chernin, the wisecracking number two at Murdochs News Corp. (hes the
hipster brought to heel). Jeffrey Bewkes, the self-deprecating co-C.O.O. at Time Warner
(hes the class president). Tom Freston, co-C.O.O. and everybodys favorite boss at Viacom
(hes the heartthrob). Les Moonves, the smooth and dapper (come to think of it, all of the
baby moguls are smooth and dapper) former actor and other co-C.O.O. at Viacom (hes the
kid with the really great car). And Bob Iger, the long-suffering number two at Disney (the
class suck-up).
To this group the eager headhunter would likely add Jeff Zucker, cancer survivor and
homegrown boy wonder at NBC-G.E. (hes the most likely to succeed); Zuckers former
NBC boss, the big-voice, big-eyebrow Andy Lack (hes the bandleader) and the boyish
Michael Lynton (hes the valedictorian), at Sony. And, not least of all because they are
conveniently out of jobs (if youre a headhunter you always want someone who is definitely
available), Michael Jackson, the delphic, and memorably named, former head of Channel
4 in the U.K. (hes the aesthete), whom Barry Diller brought to the U.S. to run the
Universal-USA Networks television business (Zucker added this job to his others when
G.E. bought Universal), and Tom McGrath, the brainiest guy in the business (hes the
math whiz) and number two to Paramounts Jon Dolgen, the meanest man in the business
(Dolgen and McGrath were recently ousted by Freston).
Its a well-behaved group. Deference is its character note. Theyre eager to please. Its
funny or poignantthese normalish fellows, these yuppies, side by side with the control
freaks and, often bellicose, authoritarians theyll be replacing. These may well be not just
accidental moguls but the inverse: anti-moguls.
Brian Roberts, the C.E.O. of Comcast, also rightly in this 50-ish age group, is the only
next-gen media executive who truly controls (because his father started it) his company
(and because of this control, he overreached this past spring in his effort to take over
Disney and fell on his face). Otherwise, nobodys an owner here. Nobodys a creator of the
media statethe Stalin model. They just grew up in it. Nobody here is personally
responsible for how these gargantuan, unwieldy, and largely out-of-favor post-industrial
combines came into being. Whats more, most dont seem to have the temperament, or
even the skills, to run themmaking the baby moguls potential Gorbachevs.
hese few companies which have come to control the U.S. media are among the
most complexly engineered financial enterprises to have ever existed. But these
future moguls are, largely, creative executives. What that means is not exactly
that they are creative, but that they are marketers of what creative people create.
Theyre pop-culture packagers, Zeitgeist, if not balance-sheet, specialists, of which MTVs
Freston, 58, is perhaps the leading exemplar.
He attends St. Michaels College, in Vermont (much about Freston seems offhand, casual,
even unambitious). Then theres a stint as a bartender. A year traveling around the
Caribbean. A year traveling around Europe. A lamentable chapter as an account grunt at
Benton & Bowles. Then eight years in Afghanistan and India. Import-exportyou know.
Then back to New York. Late 70s, early 80s, hes hanging around music bars on Second
Avenue. His brother has a job at Epic records. In 1980, Freston gets a music-biz job at the
Warner Amex Satellite Company. (It was just luck. If Id shown up a week later the job
would have been gone.) Hes low man on the totem pole at the incipient MTV.
MTV gets sold by Warner Amex to Viacom. Freston, living through the operatic age of

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media-business turmoil and acquisitions and dislocation, stays at MTV. With an

impressive head of squirrel-brown hair and big droopy eyes, he sticks to his knitting (this
is a corporate metaphor, which means that, stupidly or strategically, you just keep doing
what you know how to do). This is real success (MTV Networks expects $5 billion in
revenue in 2005), but old-fashioned too. One thing done right. Focused. Mom and pop
almost. (Freston has a big house with lots of dark-wood wainscoting on Manhattans
Upper East Side and, like Moonves, makes $12 million a year, which is not chopped liver,
but hardly within sight of the billion-plus of real moguls.)
His aw-shucks-ism is real. There is, or seems to be, no overpowering need here, no reports
of his humiliating people in public (a commonplace media-company activity), no
semi-demented vision of a new world media order, and, too, no advanced math skills (real
moguls can always make two and two equal five).
Six months ago, after nation conqueror Mel Karmazin (he built up the Infinity radio
network, which he used to take over CBS, which he then merged with Viacom) is expunged
from Viacom, Freston is elevated, along with Moonves, to the penultimate spot. Its a
face-off: one of them will get the top jobeven though neither is a dealmaker or a financial
whiz. (Redstone, however, is still telling people that his 51-year-old daughter, Shari, might
yet get the job. The baby moguls tolerate such slights. They arent proud.)
hese are default moguls: they are who they are because the people who were
supposed to take over were sacked.
This would be Jeffrey Katzenberg, who, at Disney, campaigned furiously and
annoyingly for the heir-apparent job, until his boss, Michael Eisner, banished him
(Katzenberg then started DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen). And
Michael Ovitz, the superagent who took the number-two spot at Disney without quite
understanding the meaning of number twohe was gone within the year. And Michael
Fuchs, at Time Warner, the canny head of HBO and Warner Music, a Jerry Levin protg,
whom Levin dispatched. And Bob Pittman, protg of Warner Communications founder,
Steve Ross, and conquering executive at AOL, before he was scuttled. Along with Karmazin
at Viacom, there was Frank Biondi, who wasnt patient enough with Redstone. And, most
notably, Barry Diller at Fox, who told Murdoch he wanted a piece of the company (Say
what?).
All of the above over-identified with the men who controlled the companies they worked
for. They believed they could acquire, amass, control, dominate as well (in the words of
one, Live it, breathe it, will it, and drag everybody else across the finish line). They were
screamers too. And press hounds (failing to realize that survival demanded they stay out of
the limelight). They were all as large, as self-dramatizing, as willful, and as loaded for bear
as their bossesindeed, if theyd survived it would have been something of a seamless
transition.

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