Word: auletta
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...Auletta; Random House; 656 pages...
...Auletta, a resourceful and very fortunate reporter, was sitting at breakfast with Tisch that morning. In fact, Auletta seems to have been practically everywhere he wanted to be over the past six years. He began researching Three Blind Mice, his exhaustive behind-the-scenes look at the three broadcast networks, just as they were entering the most turbulent phase in their history. Cable and other competitors were gaining power; network audiences were shrinking; new corporate owners, with a bottom-line orientation, were taking control. Through it all, Auletta was the proverbial fly on the wall. He talked regularly with...
Name a well-publicized episode over the past six years, and Auletta supplies the kind of detail that sources offer only when they know their accounts will not blow up in their faces in the next day's papers. What led to NBC News president Larry Grossman's downfall? Auletta traces it partly to a disastrous dinner party that Grossman gave on the night of the sixth game of the Mets-Red Sox World Series. (General Electric chairman Jack Welch, a rabid Red Sox fan, wanted to watch the game.) Why did Dan Rather walk off the set in September...
Even more impressive are the intimate glimpses Auletta provides of the men at the very top and his nuanced picture of the different corporate cultures they fostered. Welch, the brusque, combative chairman of GE, which took over NBC in 1986, treated the network as another GE unit to be whipped into shape. (Why, Welch wondered, was there so much agonizing over layoffs at NBC when hundreds of people were getting axed at GE's turbines division? "You think they're happy?" he snapped.) Tisch, the Loews chairman who had never fired an employee before taking over...
Burrough is the biggest beneficiary yet of readers' hunger for tales about the pratfalls of the corporate elite. For many other top financial journalists, six-figure book advances have become the rule. Publishers pay handsomely for such potential blockbusters as author Ken Auletta's probe of the television industry, which brought him at least $500,000 and is due on shelves next summer. Connie Bruck, a New Yorker writer, reportedly signed a $400,000 contract for a profile of Time Warner chairman Steven Ross. Other high-priced works in progress include Wall Street exposes by Anthony Bianco of Business Week...