Strutting their stuff

H. L. Mencken once said that the function of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but few of us manage to live up to that standard today. On the contrary, most of us are more likely to hurl ourselves at the feet of the high and mighty and ignore everyone else. Mencken’s thoroughbreds are now so rare that when you come across one it’s like encountering a unicorn.

Michael Wolff is one such creature. He’s been throwing custard pies at the rich and powerful since he was appointed New York magazine’s media columnist in 1998. His willingness to skewer the robber barons of the media-industrial complex has made him one of the most famous journalists in America and Autumn of the Moguls is his greatest hits collection. Listen to his description of Jean-Marie Messier, for instance, whom he happened to spot walking down Park Avenue during his brief tenure as a Hollywood tycoon:

He occupied a wide swath of the sidewalk, with a strut to the left and then a strut to the right, nodding and smiling, or rather bestowing blessings, on passersby, who gave him a wide and incredulous berth. He seemed to see himself as some combination of Pope and maestro — his idea, I suppose, of an American mogul. I do not think he would have considered spontaneous applause to be out of order.

Such observations — and there’s one on every page — aren’t motivated by any anti-big business agenda. Michael Wolff is no Michael Moore. By his own admission, he’s desperate to become a mogul himself. In his previous, equally entertaining book, Burn Rate, he documented his efforts to become a dotcom billionaire and even though he failed he hasn’t resigned himself to being a spectre at the feast. Towards the end of last year, he put together a consortium and attempted to buy the magazine that’s been employing him for the past six years.