Q&A with Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff is an odd duck, in a younger-Woody Allen sort of way. He's written the column "This Media Life" for the editorially deteriorating New York since August '98; prior to that assignment his opinions appeared in The Industry Standard. "The New Economy," especially when it was booming, has been Wolff's main beat, and on this topic he's contributed some of the most astute commentary in the mainstream press. It's a subject the 48-year-old Upper East Sider is well-acquainted with: in 1991 he founded Wolff New Media, which created one of the first Internet directories in book form and then was an early online portal. The company raised, and spent, a lot of venture capital and then went belly-up. Wolff's experiences formed the basis of his book Burn Rate.

The columnist, who's a regular on cable talk shows, has unusually thick skin, an exceedingly rare characteristic in journalists. Suggest that New York fire him?as this newspaper has done on a number of occasions after he's written remarkably uninformed, unsourced political screeds?and Wolff is more than likely to e-mail a note of disagreement and then invite you to lunch.

But when Wolff sticks to media criticism he's on more solid ground, regardless of whether you agree with him or not. One of his more memorable observations was, upon attending a conference, that Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner didn't know what a T-1 line was. While newspaper and magazine writers embarrassed themselves in 1999 on the launch of Tina Brown's Talk, producing fluffy stories about her "buzz" and ingenious embrace of "synergy," Wolff was one of a handful who not only predicted the monthly wouldn't survive, but that Brown's joint venture with Miramax and the Hearst Co. was sure to be very ugly.

Wolff sat down for an interview at New York Press' offices on Thursday, Feb. 7. We followed up a few points by e-mail the following week.

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Russ Smith: Your Feb. 11 column about Enron was your best column in a year.

Michael Wolff: I'm sure I could disagree with you if I could remember one column.

RS: I've had a problem with your columns in the past year, as you know?

MW: Am I gonna have to remember all my columns for this interview?

RS: I remember them. Did you get a lot of angry e-mail about the Enron column [in which Wolff offered "some sympathy for Enron"]?

MW: Actually, surprisingly not. I got a fair sprinkling of e-mail from people who seemed to miss the point and just said, "Why are you defending Enron? How could you defend Enron?" I replied with a defense like, you know, who needs enemies? I'm not sure that anyone embraces Enron as a major story?or actually understands it.

RS: Clearly the politicians don't understand it. The media, aside from some of the financial press, don't understand it.

MW: I did Jim Cramer's show [CNBC's America Now] the other day with [Michael] Isikoff and Floyd Norris. It was this odd thing, because we were all very polite to each other, and I suddenly realized we're all polite because we're afraid that we don't understand this story. So we're afraid to engage each other.

RS: Well, Isikoff was a fish out of water. Norris has his own views. What struck me about your Enron column was that it was the most detached column?and by that I mean, let's look at this as if we're from Mars, as opposed to all the other media coverage. Some newspapers have different agendas, politicians have different agendas. You looked at it as a phenomenon. It didn't automatically paint the company and paint the particulars?clearly someone's gonna go to jail?but you didn't paint them in a black-and-white situation. About a year ago, it seemed to me at the end of the dotcom bust that someone was going to have to pay, because so many people who were day traders lost money. I didn't know whether it was going to be [Amazon's Jeff] Bezos or?

MW: Or the analysts.

RS: But there was gonna have to be a Milken. And now Enron has filled that void.

MW: The interesting thing is I can't figure out whether this is fundamentally bad or fundamentally good. The reason that it may be good is that this may be the logical outgrowth of what entrepreneurial capitalism does, and does well. Whatever it does well produces something extreme, and this may be it. This may be the path that this economy is on, and the thing that actually sustains it. I think I can argue the other side, too, that the entire economy is based on hype and illusion and deceit and fraud, and that whenever a business guy says anything, it's a lie. I think I could argue that just as well.

John Strausbaugh: Your argument that Enron was emblematic of the New Economy in general I think is true.

MW: The problem with journalists is you've never made a dishonest dollar. If you've been involved in this, which, to some degree, at least for a few years, I was, you get to understand this way of thinking. And the way of thinking has a couple of themes. The first theme is how do we stay in business? And remember, this is startup stuff, this is creating something from nothing, it's fundamentally alchemy. And you're gonna be in situations?I'm sure you guys have been in this situation?in which you look and you say we can't make payroll this month. We're bankrupt. And then you don't tell anybody.

My father, who was no stranger to business difficulties, used to say you're not bankrupt until people know you're bankrupt. I think that's part of the mindset that these entrepreneurs get in. Is it fundamentally bad? Well, let's forget that. Is it fundamentally deceitful? Yeah! And that's true for everyone. Now, does it become more deceitful when you create businesses that are billion-dollar businesses? Does the deceit become somehow greater? Does it become fraud at that point?

JS: Is the deceit greater if it's a larger corporation? Well, no, morally not. But the bigger the corporation the more people get hurt, so then it becomes a political issue.

MW: Absolutely. And you have to step back and say also that the bigger the corporation, the more people participate in its $90-a-share boondoggle.

JS: That's why I was surprised a year ago that no indictments came down when the whole Internet thing collapsed. Do you think there's going to be fallout from this now? Is Bezos, for example, going to be looked at more closely?

MW: We're not even sure that there's gonna be indictments coming out of Enron. I mean, yes, there'll be some indictments, regarding the coverup and those kinds of things. But how fundamentally illegal is this? Nobody knows. If I'm a financial engineer and my job is to get debt off the balance sheet, that's my job. I'm gonna put as much debt as possible onto the balance sheet? No. At what point do you cross a line? At what point do you do your job too well?

JS: Maybe when you're shredding documents.

MW: It's an interesting thing that document shredding must be built in, must've become institutionalized at some point. It's not like, oh my God, they're onto us. Let's shred the documents. It's probably more the case that documents are being shredded all the time, everywhere.

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RS: In your columns about Bush, you've basically called him a drunk.

MW: Well, wasn't he a drunk?

RS: He's said he gave up drinking at 40. You've written that you think he's fallen off the wagon. Where's that coming from?

MW: Just a slur.

RS: And he's the ultimate public figure, so you have no problem with libel.

MW: Exactly.

RS: Do you really believe it?

MW: I have no idea. I mean, that thing with the pretzels, I thought, damn, that's a falling-down drunk for you! I have absolutely no idea. No more idea than you do. What do you think? Do you think it really was the pretzel, or was it??

RS: I believe he's on the straight and narrow. You've got serious Bush problems. You wrote two Bush columns recently, one basically about how stupid Bush is, and then, the next column, you never mention his name, you just call him "the president." Describe your problem with Bush. Has your opinion changed since?

MW: My opinion hasn't changed. I'm not sure exactly what my opinion is. I have no sympathy for the guy. I don't feel that he's intelligent, or very intelligent. I feel that he is, as a figure, uninteresting. What are we looking at here? What's the point of inspiration? What's the point where we can find this guy compelling or instructive or those kinds of things? Is he a bad guy? I hope he isn't. I have no reason necessarily to believe that he is.

I'm looking for interesting characters. Not like Al Gore. I have struggled to find Al Gore interesting and failed. But [Bush] doesn't qualify either. In the column that I wrote about the war, I thought it was interesting that you could have seen someone else treat this war in an entirely different fashion. It became this thing of semiotics: was this really war? Well, it was war if you couldn't think of anything more interesting to do with your time in office. Then you would say, let's have a war.

RS: Well, I think that's a little disingenuous.

MW: It's a little disingenuous.

RS: There was a major terrorism attack. Bush and Rumsfeld have said since the beginning that this is going to be a multi-year war. In that column you basically said there is no war.

MW: Exactly! There is no war, or the war that we have had is no different from the other wars that we have had that we called not being at war.

JS: So you're saying at a different point they might've called this a police action or whatever, but it needed to be called a war.

RS: The Balkans was a war. Clinton called it?

MW: No, he didn't. If he called it a war it was all about how limited this would be.

RS: He didn't want to take any casualties.

MW: Bush doesn't want to take any casualties either.

JS: But he's saying the opposite?that this is going to take years, that we're gonna pursue these guys around the world?

MW: Absolutely, but we are not doing that. Nothing has qualitatively changed. I have really no argument to make here about what's right and wrong and what should be. We're caught in this kind of odd thing. It means one thing here, and the same thing means a different thing here. Part of this is our media moment, we can spin this, we can play this. This is our media moment and this is how we're gonna fashion this. What does that mean? It just means, and my point is?that we get fucked up about this?because it's all a facade. It's Enronish.

RS: Well, it's not a facade when people get killed. My point is in that column you were saying it was basically a mirage and ignoring what the government is saying?that this is going to go on for years.

MW: But what is going to go on for years? I didn't disagree that it should go on for years. What I was saying is that there is a difference between war and good management. What do we need here? There was obviously an enormous blunder that took place that allowed the World Trade Center to be blown up. How should that be approached? It was managed badly. I'm not saying that Bush or the Bush administration has done anything wrong. But what I'm saying is that we're being sold something. There's a message here. What's the message? What's the meaning of the message? I'm just saying that it means something different than the last time. It's a mixup. It's a mixup of meaning, of signals, images. It's a media thing.

JS: I remember back in '99 when you were writing about Time magazine and "the death of news." Obviously, by Sept. 12, news was back in a very big way.

MW: The media guys went crazy, especially the news magazines. This was "Goddammit, we're back!" That was interesting, because that attitude was different from the Kosovo attitude. There are obviously reasons for that. We had this horrible thing happen in New York. It would be different if that horrible thing had happened in Boston.

RS: Let's not ignore Washington.

JS: Everybody has. It gets no play.

RS: War is different now. Maybe the media hasn't caught on.

MW: That's partly my point. I think it's a media point, it's a Bush point, of making believe that this is a good old war, essentially in a World War II context.

RS: I don't think Bush is doing that. Rumsfeld's certainly not. They're saying this is not a 500,000-ground-troop war.

MW: They're actually doing a different thing, putting us in a Cold War context.

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RS: Your Tina Brown column ["Failure Is Hot!," Feb. 4] was a good one. One got tired of reading about Tina Brown?

MW: However, it turns out one never gets tired of writing about Tina Brown.

RS: I just had one quibble with your column. You wrote, "Indeed, it was just at the time that Talk was launching that all the boom-time expectations that had been raised?the new economy, the new media, the new earnings multiples?began to crumble." That certainly was not the perception. Talk launched in August '99. The collapse of the new economy happened in March, April 2000. But in '99?

MW: I knew it was crumbling?

RS: Yeah, right.

MW: You're right, it wasn't really until the beginning of 2000 when this started to happen. I actually did a column during that Talk pre-launch period in which Tina described the magazine, "We want it to be like the Web." Tina had obviously never seen the Web. I think that was part of why this affair was so misguided. Because it was really about, "I want a piece of this. Everybody's getting rich but me. I, Tina Brown, am gonna be an entrepreneur." When clearly I, Tina Brown, was not an entrepreneur.

RS: What that magazine launch showed me was that she had lost a step. It seemed to me that if she wanted to move onto the next step it wasn't another magazine, certainly one that had no niche, but it would've been tv or movies.

MW: Well, I'm sure she now thinks that, too.

RS: She was golden back then?she could've done a David Frost-type interview show?

MW: Whatever. I think it was just a miscalculation. She went into this?we can begin to guess?because she wanted to show Si [Newhouse] that she could do it alone, because she was mad at Si and because everybody else was doing a startup. She had to start up something. Despite the fact that she obviously didn't spend any time thinking about what she was gonna start up, that she didn't have an idea for a startup, that she knew nothing about actually the way startups work.

RS: This is obviously gonna be a tough year for magazines, because postage costs are going up, liquor advertising is probably going to tv. Cigarette ads are out of the picture. What magazines do you see in the most peril?

MW: Overall, I see any magazines that went into this recession in marginal condition as imperiled. I think basically that you can't make it unless you have the commitment of very deep pockets to support it. Something like Time Inc.'s Business 2.0. I think that they've probably made the decision, we're gonna just stay with this magazine and at the end of this we're gonna be the only people left. I don't think that there are too many others. I think everybody's gonna get rid of their marginal books, unless they can make some really strong argument that at the end of the day we wanna be left standing here.

RS: You've gotta think there's gonna be some high-profile closings?

MW: Well, there already have been. I mean it's from The Industry Standard to Mademoiselle to Lingua Franca?which was a small magazine, but of some importance?actually small enough that it was odd that it closed.

RS: It appears that U.S. News & World Report is in real jeopardy.

MW: Right, but it depends upon Mort's [Zuckerman] interests. I mean, I would close it.

RS: It seems that Red Herring will be done soon.

MW: I think virtually all of the technology books?

RS: What about Fast Company?

MW: I don't see that it has a future.

RS: Wired?

MW: Wired is an interesting question. I would probably bet against it at this point. It's one of those things, can Newhouse float Wired through this? It looks odd to me lately.

RS: What about US magazine? This has gotta be Wenner's most difficult patch, aside from the early days. Rolling Stone is a joke.

MW: For Rolling Stone, I think losing the cigarette ads is a devastating blow.

RS: It's dipping under 80 pages an issue.

MW: I suppose US is wholly an issue of what Disney wants to do.

RS: Four favorite print pundits?

MW: I like Frank Rich?I wish he were funnier, but he's usually saying what I wished I'd said (actually he often is saying what I've said). I like David Brooks. Safire is still the best. And Andrew Sullivan?I think he's a wacko, but I admire him. I admire that obsessive output, that passion. On the other hand, I think he really is crazy. I worry about him.

RS: Four least favorite print pundits?

MW: George Will. And that Harper's guy, the editor, I can't even remember his name, what a stuffy prick. Peggy Noonan I'm not fond of?it's not just that she's so righteous, but she obviously just phones it in. If you're going to be righteous I think you should at least sweat some. And I don't like [James] Wolcott. There's something about what he does, the same thing over and over and over again, for so many years, hitting that one note, all that snobbery and vindictiveness, that cackling sound, that gives me the creeps. I take it personally. I find myself thinking I don't want to end up like Wolcott. That's my life's fear.

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RS: What do you make of the Fox/CNN rivalry?

MW: I don't think Fox is making any money. I watch it, I look at those ads and I know what they're discounting for. There's nothing there. Obviously they've managed to get a big audience. But they can't monetize it. Nobody wants to sell ads to them. Whereas CNN, for all its problems, that's a rich ad environment.

RS: It's not that rich. They have a ton of house ads.

MW: Let's take rich back. At this moment there are no rich environments. Look at the difference in ads, though. There's a qualitative difference between CNN's national brand advertising, big high-margin stuff, and what Fox gets, which is all niche. It's misleading seeing the same ads across networks, because the issue is, what are you paying for these ads? And my understanding is that Fox is heavily discounting this space. Rather than position this against CNN, which still remains a premium environment, but nobody wants Fox. It's a real hard sell.

RS: You've got a real problem with Fox.

MW: No, that's not true! I like Fox!

RS: That's not what you wrote a year ago.

MW: I think Fox does?it's very clear what it is?it doesn't seem to me to be a moral issue. It seems to be, can you create a media package that can find an audience and make a little money?

RS: You write in your Feb. 18 column that the twilight is near for "media moguls" like Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone and Michael Eisner. Do you feel a similar pattern might emerge with the Big Three network anchors, that there could be a change of guard soon? Who would be smart replacements?

MW: Well, sure. There's a Lenin-esque preserved-for-viewing quality about the Big Three anchors. And while I assume the networks will employ heroic efforts to keep them functioning, sooner rather than later the deterioration is going to be evident to everybody?if it isn't already. Then it's a crisis. The networks know that they'll never be able to create anchors as well-known as Rather, Jennings and Brokaw?these guys come from an age, which is of course gone, of three networks with a 98 percent share. In a real way, there is no future for network news?I think everybody knows this. But I'm arguing in my column that the most interesting face on network news?intelligent, serious, likeable and, as it happens, the most well-known?is George Stephanopoulos. I'm thinking he could really be a postmodern sort of Cronkite.

RS: Any opinion on Aaron Brown's CNN news show? He grated on my nerves during the 9/11 immediate crisis, then I sort of liked the fact that he was an Ambien to Chris Matthews' methamphetamine. But now, with his "mystery guests," not very clever digs at Fox and poor-man's Charles Kuralt routine, I'm tuning him out again. You?

MW: I was going to do a column about Brown and spent a few days in the studio with him, but then he stood me up in a bar on 9th Ave. and I got annoyed?it was a really depressing bar. But what I would have said is I do like the guy...or anyway I like the idea of the guy...an intelligent normal schmo talking about the day's events. Obviously the issue is can he sustain doing that post-post-9/11... I mean slow news is where the real talent comes in. But you're right there's something a little off. You're always left wondering if maybe he just made a joke?or maybe not. He has a weird swallowed-the-canary look. He manages to look both self-satisfied and incredibly sour at the same time. It's hard to read.

RS: Who'd you rather be stuck in an elevator with for 10 hours: Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity or Wolf Blitzer?

MW: Okay. O'Reilly. I know that I've called O'Reilly virtually the stupidest man who ever lived. But not too long ago?I don't know what I was watching?I saw O'Reilly doing this riff about George Bush and the death penalty, which was hilarious and devilish. Subversive even. So I think there's the possibility that O'Reilly as a dummy is just Fox shtick. Judging by this little clip I saw, O'Reilly could possibly be a genius. Of course, I don't remember where I saw this?and it could have been a dream.