The Reality

Where does the so-called Information Superhighway actually lead, and who will be collecting the tolls? Ken Auletta, author of the book “Three Blind Mice,” which chronicled the demise of network television, has spent the past five years exploring that issue, covering the communications industry for The New Yorker magazine.

His latest book, “The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway,” compiles 16 in-depth pieces Auletta wrote during that period, showcasing the writer’s rare fly-on-the-wall access to entertainment moguls such as Fox’s Rupert Murdoch, Disney’s Michael Eisner, Viacom’s Sumner Redstone and Time Warner’s Gerald Levin.

Auletta, 55, was called “an anthropologist” by director Nora Ephron during a reception for him in Beverly Hills Wednesday, someone who lives among media power brokers to monitor their actions.

Some matters Auletta writes about are also dealt with in the HBO movie “Weapons of Mass Distraction,” in which two media barons leverage their diverse assets while going to war over ownership of a professional football team. The movie brings to mind not only Murdoch’s negotiations to acquire the Los Angeles Dodgers but also the public feud between Murdoch and Time Warner Vice Chairman Ted Turner, which spilled over into Murdoch-owned newspapers.

Auletta likens the current media battlefield to 19th century Europe, where a handful of powerful nation-states jockeyed for dominance. Yet in this case, thanks to new technology, the rules keep changing. “The dangers of monopoly today are often more subtle than they once were,” Auletta writes.

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Question: You’ve written a lot about media consolidation. Why should the public care? What’s the public-interest issue?

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Answer: There are several issues. The public has always cared about trusts, about bigness, about restraint of trade. The new form that monopoly can take is more subtle than the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the J.P. Morgans.

The rubric is convergence. You have all these industries basically creating the Japanese model of keiretsu, which is “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours and we’ll have this alliance.” . . . If Microsoft and NBC are in business together, as they are, will NBC aggressively pursue an investigative story about Microsoft?

A second set of questions is the images that the people at the top of these communications companies perpetrate, and disseminate, have great impact on a society and its people. Rupert Murdoch owns a major publishing house, so he decides what books get published. Fox has great impact. When they decide to take “Melrose Place” and move it from 9 o’clock to the traditional children’s hour [at 8 p.m.], that was the beginning of the end of the children’s hour. Big decision. These are people that have a big impact on what we think, and the values of a society.

Third, those industries are now negotiating and maneuvering to make decisions that will have huge cost consequences for us as a consumer. . . . When I write about these people, I don’t think I’m just writing about private businessmen who are going about their little esoteric maneuvering. They’re making impactful decisions.

Q: Is there something unique about this generation of moguls, in terms of comparing them to the ones who started the movie industry?

A: There are a number of differences. When we think of press lords--the Hearsts, the Luces--we’re talking about people in one industry, newspapers or magazines, in one country. Murdoch is on five continents, [and] he’s a multimedia mogul: He’s in print, newspapers, book publishing, magazines, TV, satellites, movies, online, music. The level of power Murdoch has, to cite one example, or Ted Turner, to cite another, is much greater than the power of [the earlier moguls]. The question is, do you abuse that power?

Q: That’s the notion in “Weapons of Mass Distraction”--the idea of whether they can use that power to bludgeon their enemies and reward their friends.

A: As I demonstrate in the profile of Murdoch, there are occasions when he has abused, in my judgment, that power. He did not follow the precepts of Journalism 101, that you don’t exhibit an interest. . . . The Sun [in England] has often become a partisan newspaper, just as the New York Post has--and I don’t just mean the editorial page, I mean the news pages. That shouldn’t happen.

Q: You’ve said this consolidation is bad for journalism.

A: It’s broader than the characters we’re talking about here. The buzzwords that are very common in the business lexicon--like “synergy,” “leverage,” “borderless companies,” “teamwork”--are oftentimes anathema to good journalism.

Our job presupposes that we have a sense of distance from the people we’re writing about. We don’t want a borderless company. We want the wall between the business side and the editorial side to be tall--a church-state separation. We don’t want to cross-promote. In fact, if we do, we lose credibility with our readers and viewers.

Q: As educated as these guys are, you observe that nobody really knows where this Information Superhighway is going, and the future may be becoming even murkier at this point.

A: I think that’s true. I’ve had a great seat to watch something unfold where the truisms of the moment are dead the next moment. . . . The shifting continues to go on. [Microsoft’s] Bill Gates may be one of the smartest men on the planet, but he doesn’t know the future, he’s guessing. He tries to hedge his bets by spending $2 billion on research and creating a lot of alliances. Ditto with Murdoch, and Time Warner, but they don’t know.

Q: The term “information superhighway” got an enormous workout. Is that really an illustrative term?

A: Again, it’s an expression of a certain frustration and confusion. What people are looking for is to understand, to comprehend what is happening, so you’re looking for symbols, metaphors, that will make intelligible what seems to be unintelligible.

This is very complicated, and it’s baffling. When you look closely at the people who are trying to rule this information superhighway, it’s often baffling to them. . . . When you talk to these people, what they basically say is you’ve got to make a lot of little bets. They don’t know where it’s going to come out.

Q: When there’s discussion of feuds within the business--Murdoch and Turner, for example--the person who you’re competing with in one venture is going to be your partner in another. Can anyone really allow themselves to hold grudges the way the business is configured now?

A: Logically, no, but then there’s human logic. Murdoch and Turner, if they followed business logic, they should not be at war. In places around the world they have common business interests. But because they’re people, they sometimes follow human logic, which means they want to kill each other even though they shouldn’t, and hate each other, even though they can’t afford to. That’s how wars start. It’s not always logical. . . . I always come back to that human factor.