The Highwaymen
Warriors of the Information Superhighway
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A struggle is taking place--not just among corporate titans, but among entire industries. At stake is control of the world's fastest-growing industry: communications. The contestants are Hollywood studios, television networks, and cable, telephone, computer, publishing, and consumer-electronics companies. All are vying to collect a toll on the information superhighway. And as they jockey for control, they tread on volatile ground, as one fixation after another (cable, interactive TV) is dumped in favor of the next (satellite, the Internet).
There is no better account of this turmoil than the one provided here by Ken Auletta, bestselling author of Three Blind Mice ("the best book ever written on network television"*) and Greed and Glory on Wall Street, who for five years has brilliantly tracked the communications industry for The New Yorker. Auletta's access to the principal players is unparalleled (six days with Rupert Murdoch, summit meetings with John Malone), and his grasp of the issues--from boardroom politics to regulatory and technological pressures--is unmatched by any other journalist.
In this riveting collection of his best pieces Auletta takes the reader on a behind-the-scenes tour of such companies as Disney, Viacom, Microsoft, Time Warner, and Telecommunications, Inc., and keenly chronicles the vanities and visions of the new Highwaymen--Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Michael Eisner, Sumner Redstone, Bill Gates, and more. Just as Three Blind Mice was heralded as "the new bible of the broadcasting business," The Highwaymen will be received as an indispensable guide to the future of this explosive new world.
* Frank Stanton, former president of CBS
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In his new book, Auletta (Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way) collects 16 of his New Yorker articles published since 1993, adding afterwards and updates where necessary and even restoring paragraphs pruned by the magazine editors. (Most of the piece on William Bennett's battle with Time Warner over rap music, for example, did not appear in the original version.) In general, the theme binding the pieces is the new booms in the electronic communications business, and in particular, the figures--usually colorful--who have dominated, however fleetingly, its rapid growth. Included are Barry Diller, who dabbled profitably in a cable shopping network, Ted Tuner of CNN, John Malone of TCI, Rupert Murdoch (who came to regret taping "fifteen or so hours" of interviews with Auletta and giving him almost complete access for a week--more exposure, Auletta notes, than Murdoch had ever allowed before), Herbert Allen, master arranger of mega-mergers and Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg together (briefly) at Disney. There's also a corporate history of Viacom, a look at the move into show business by the new generation at Seagram's, and a discussion of the "synergistic" superhighway's distrust--and fear--of traditional journalism, the craft Auletta practices so skillfully. For those who haven't kept abreast of what's been happening in the big-bucks communications world over the past half-decade, here's an ideal way to catch up.
