Word: auletta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Harvard M.B.A. and former chief executive at HBO, Biondi had a style that seemed to mesh well with that of the boss: Redstone, the volatile, confrontational owner; Biondi, the even-tempered manager--Redstone's "secret weapon," in the words of a New Yorker profile by Ken Auletta a year...
THREE BLIND MICE: HOW THE TV NETWORKS LOST THEIR WAY by Ken Auletta (Random House; $25). It's no secret that CBS, NBC and ABC began hitting the skids in the mid-1980s; this long book reports the high-level pratfalls in meticulous and sometimes gossipy detail...
Still, if he is occasionally too fascinated by the trees, Auletta never loses sight of the forest. On a shelf overflowing with behind-the-scenes tomes and tell-all memoirs, his is the network book to beat...
...each of the corporate top dogs had to go through the same learning curve. Contrary to what most people think, Auletta notes, a network is neither a giant production studio nor a grid of stations but simply "an office building, where executives package programs they do not own and sell them to advertisers and local stations they do not control." Trying to deal with these stations, advertisers and program producers (not to mention the ever nosy press) startled, annoyed and ultimately chastened the corporate newcomers...
...Auletta's book achieved a certain infamy long before it hit the bookstores. Jacob Weisberg used it as Exhibit A in a much discussed New Republic piece about the alleged decline of editing standards in book publishing. To be sure, Auletta's 600-plus-page account could use trimming. But his writing is never less than serviceable, and usually quite lucid. A bigger problem lies in the subject itself. Each of the episodes Auletta recounts -- Tisch's fight to gain control of the CBS board, ABC News president Roone Arledge's battle to keep 20/20 on Thursdays...