Media Mogul is a Rotten Job, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #273 | @MDWorld

May 7, 2012 Mike Gold 15 Comments

With great power comes great ego, and historically there has been no better ego-booster than the successful control of information. For today’s history lesson, we are going to look at a trio of contemporary media barons.

For Canadian-born mogul Lord Conrad Black, the good news is he’s finally out of prison. The now-former owner of the London Daily Telegraph, the Jerusalem Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Catholic Herald and Canada’s National Post, among others, was convicted of defrauding his own company of $60 million, later adjusted by a sympathetic appellate court to one count of mail fraud and one count of “obstruction of justice” – the latter a made-up crime. That cost him a ton of money, most of his power and 42 months of his freedom.

His is an interesting story, but nobody really cares. We all care about the Australian Charles Foster Kane, Rupert Murdoch. He suffered a fate that, one can argue, was even worse to a man of his ego and position that that suffered by Lord Black. He was condemned by Great Britain’s House of Commons Committee on Culture, Media, and Sport (sic) as “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.”

Man, that’s gotta hurt.

The guy runs Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, the New York Post, England’s The Sun, and lots of other stuff. Rupert is distained by all left-thinking peoples for his support of far right-wing politics and the hiring of the soul of the dregs of the Republican party, the paranoid Roger Alies, to run his Fox News racket. He was called out by the House of Commons for running his now-defunct paper News of the World, as though it were a masterpiece of yellow journalism.

This is unfair. Yeah, sure, his reporters hacked into people’s cellphones and computers, terrorized politicians and celebrities and oriented their reporting to suit the political needs, desires and whims of management without regard to fairness or accuracy, but compared to people like Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Bernarr Macfadden, Rupert is a model of journalistic morality. He gives the people what they want – News of the World was the biggest selling English language newspaper in the world – although he drapes it in his politics.

A previous British media mogul, Robert Maxwell, held similar power and authority in his ownership of the London Daily and Sunday Mirror, the New York Daily News, Collier and Macmillon books, and, again, lots of other cool stuff. Maxwell was so damn interesting he could have been hired to sell Dos Equis.

A fairly left-leaning mogul, Maxwell and two of his kids were accused of looting their companies’ pension funds in order to stay in business. Robert didn’t live long enough to see the outcome: in 1991 the 68 year-old media baron was found floating facedown in the Atlantic Ocean off of the Canary Islands. Sadly, things only worsened for Maxwell after his death: it was revealed that he had “ties” to the Mossad and was even an agent of that Israeli intelligence service. He was then immortalized as the villainous Elliot Carver in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. Mind you, being portrayed by Jonathan Pryce is almost as cool as having Orson Welles front your story. His life and/or death also inspired a great many novels and several television shows and radio plays, and Maxwell’s posthumous visage also graced an Iron Maiden single.

I have always been fascinated by these people and their ink – the aforementioned Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Bernarr Macfadden as well as folks like Lord Beaverbrook (William Maxwell Aitken), the Medill/McCormack/Patterson family, and others. Each wielded enormous influence on every level; many, if not most, wound up broken, endeared in the manner in which we regard Al Capone, Charlie Luciano and Meyer Lansky.

Today we have an entirely different type of media baron. Thus far we have not produced a Hearst or a Murdoch – or, perhaps, we have but these folks have learned the lesson of their predecessors.

Personally, I doubt it. I believe once they get the power that comes with success, the great Internet barons will suffer from the same disease that brought down the others: a professionally fatal case of hubris.

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The Lamont Cranston of Influence, Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times) and available On Demand at the same place.