Paper boy: Ken Auletta's Gotham-centric musings on the media.

• Author: Warren, James
• Position: Backstory: Inside the Business of News - Book Review

Backstory-Inside the business of news By Ken Auletta The Penguin Press, $24.95

One can safely wager that Roger Ailes, the remarkably successful uberfuhrer of FOX News, frowns on Ken Auletta, media writer for The New Yorker. In a revealing portrait of Ailes and FOX included in Backstory, Auletta captures the metaphysical absurdity of their "We Report, You Decide" marketing mantra and lures the brainy, combative boss to rail about stuffy, self-righteous, liberal-dominated media elites at the very time Auletta gently disdains Fox in a manner common to self-righteous, liberal members of the media elite. He even lets a Fox competitor, CNN's Aaron Brown, whom Ailes scornfully lampoons on air for resembling a dentist, get the last, and negative, word. Ouch.

That both would talk to Auletta is no surprise since the reporter's Larry King aplomb in drawing A-listers into his interrogations is the hallmark of an author's effective, unthreatening modus operandi which, (and I speak having submitted to it myself), appears to have been learned at the Brian Lamb School of Interrogation. Diligence and a poker face have served him in good stead, as one is reminded in what is largely a compilation of revealing New Yorker stories of the past decade.

Indeed, one of the oldest, a 1993 look at changes at The New York Times under a then-new publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., may be more insightful now than at the time. Auletta takes us on a journey through the paper's attempt to shake up a hidebound culture and improve internal communication, replete with touchy-feely retreats for executives of the nation's premier news organization. A task force had even been assembled to democratize the institution and alter a fear-laden, top-down culture. In light of the Jayson Blair episode, which at the very least revealed that the hierarchy's monarchical top was insulated against admonitions from below essentially to "stop this guy before he kills!," it would appear that very little was learned.

It's the same with a wonderful 1994 recitation of the "fee speech" which is a fixture of a top sliver of the Washington press, with four-and-five figure speaking fees common for stars and hacks alike, assuming the latter regularly appear on television. Cokie Roberts, Robert Novak, Mark Shields, William Satire, Tim Russert, Fred Barnes, Chris Wallace, Morton Kondracke, Wolf Blitzer, Gloria Borger the list went on and on and on, back then, and the buck-raking is unabated today...