Barry Diller was an executive-class version of the star baseball free agent, able to name a price and pick his team. As the Feb. 22 New Yorker suggests, his choice of where to toil may be a tipoff to the future of American media.
Diller, 51, stunned Hollywood last year by stepping down as chairman of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Inc., having made Fox the nation’s fourth TV network. Earlier he’d been boss of Paramount Pictures.
He exited with a severance estimated to be as fat as $150 million (though some say it was a mere $75 million) and embarked on a quest to be an entrepreneur. He spent 10 months meeting with media kingpins and discussing proposals to run TV networks, cable companies, phone companies, computer firms and publishing houses, among others.
In “Barry Diller’s Search for the Future,” reporter Ken Auletta details the job hunt, which included discussions with Steven Jobs, the Apple Computer founder who now runs NeXT Computer; Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft; and the future-focused academics who run the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Diller came away finding Jobs and the MIT gang to be “insular technocrats”).
Auletta explains how Diller’s final decision reflected an infatuation with his laptop computer, the Apple PowerBook, which Diller can convert from a word precessor to a fax, spreadsheet or link to various data networks. It let him begin to understand the speed with which technology will turn “dumb” TV sets into smart ones and help viewers interact with programming, rather than be passive consumers.
Diller decided to invest $25 million and join QVC Network, a 24-hour home shopping network, as partner with John Malone, chief of the giant Tele-Communications Inc. cable company and the most powerful man in American media, and Brian Roberts, boss of Comcast Corp., the fourth-biggest cable firm. It could be merged one day into the Home Shopping Network, of which Malone owns a chunk.
Diller did it because he became convinced the cable executives are sharper and better positioned for the future than counterparts in other media. He has bought into a vision in which technology permits us to use remote controls like “personal robots, for ordering merchandise, paying bills, collecting information on airline departures” or reserving a hotel room after inspecting it on a TV screen.
Quickly: Parabola, a quarterly on myth and tradition, devotes its spring issue to healing, including fine essays on the concept of healing in various religious traditions, American Indian healing, the Islamic view of healing as an opportunity and a Vietnamese Zen master’s seminars for U.S. Vietnam War veterans ($6, 656 Broadway, New York, N.Y., 10012). . . . March 4 New York Review of Books includes Robert Hughes, the brainy Time art critic, bashing Thomas Hoving, the high-profile former Museum of Metropolitan Art director, as a truth-bending “evangelical populist.” His review of a Hoving memoir is most useful for laying out a debate as to what a museum should be. Hughes finds Hoving an important risk-taker and a symbol of audio-visual hucksterism that Hughes finds to be undermining the traditional mission of museums, namely to let people decide for themselves art’s significance. . . . March 1 Forbes indicates that football announcer and former pro quarterback Pat Haden, 40, is making a bundle as partner in a small Los Angeles investment firm that buys small, family-owned businesses and obscure divisions of companies. . . . Winter Barrister, published by the American Bar Association, chronicles the typical workings of China’s kangaroo court system via its flagrantly bogus prosecution for alleged sedition of Wang Juntao, a leading democracy activist (available via the association, 750 N. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Ill. 60611). . . . News you can use: Winter Libido, “the journal of sex and sensibility,” indicates that Newcastle, Wyo., has an ordinance specifically barring couples from having sex while standing inside a store’s walk-in meat freezer. . . . Mel Reynolds, the new South Side representative, is skewered in March Spy in what’s largely a rehash of previously noted indiscretions but includes seemingly new tidbits on his defaulting on college loans. Reynolds will surely be aghast at Spy’s printing his explicitly off-the-record urging that it inspect the child-support-payment record of an unnamed colleague. Bobby Rush, another new South Sider in Congress, has missed such payments.
