Off the Grid Index
Posts by Michael Wolff

OFF THE GRID is about why the news is the news. Here are the real motivations of both media and newsmakers. Here's the backstory. This is a look at the inner workings of desperate media, the inner life of the publicity crazed, and the true meaning of the news of the day.

Murdoch and Microsoft: The Mice Are Trying to Roar
Off the Grid | Nov 24, 09 10:26 AM CST
Michael Wolff - Microsoft is a company that Rupert Murdoch understands. When he talks about the technology business or about the Internet or Google, which, on at least one occasion, I’ve heard him call Gadget, he invariably reverts to talking about Microsoft, which, on at least one occasion, I’ve heard him call IBM. What is Microsoft going to do? he asks,...

Books Are Bad for You
Off the Grid | Nov 23, 09 9:01 AM CST
Michael Wolff - A few years ago, writing about the book business and how dumbed down and craven books had become—and pathetic, designed only to sell and then not selling—I wrote the line “books suck,” subjecting me to much middlebrow opprobrium. I’d like to revise that line: Books are evil. They’re pernicious. They represent...

The Health-Care Wars Have Just Begun
Off the Grid | Nov 20, 09 8:40 AM CST
Michael Wolff - My 84-year-old mother was full of venomous indignation at dinner last night over the great mammogram take-back. Bureaucrats, in her view, will happily kill women to save money. My colleague, Caroline Miller, Newser’s editor in chief, took umbrage in this space the other day about the new guidelines. She noted the obvious cold efficiencies...

Sarah Palin Deserves Some More Attention
Off the Grid | Nov 19, 09 10:20 AM CST
Michael Wolff - This is a phenomenon that just keeps giving. Its very lack of explanation, and ensuing incredulity and apoplexy, propel it. There may not have ever been anything like it in modern American politics. Well, Ronald Reagan perhaps. But his was, at least, a 20-year phenomenon. In little more than a year, Sarah Palin has gone from zero status to significant...

China and the Obese: The President Meets His Greatest Problems
Off the Grid | Nov 18, 09 8:56 AM CST
Michael Wolff - For all sorts of obvious reasons, it seems like a greatly unacceptable and possibly discriminatory thing to say that the obese are a lot like the Chinese (though it’s unclear which group, if either, is being slurred). But hear me out. It is simple math. In eight years, according to a new study released yesterday, 43% of Americans will be officially...

Rupert Murdoch’s Guy Gets It
Off the Grid | Nov 17, 09 6:56 AM CST
Michael Wolff - If Arthur Miller were at it again, he’d call the play Death of a PR Guy . Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch’s PR guy who got the ax yesterday, used to beg me not to call him a PR Guy—his official title was Executive VP of Global Marketing and Corporate Affairs—but that was his job: making Murdoch look good. If not good, less bad....

The President Wants You to Know He’s Too Dopey to Use Twitter
Off the Grid | Nov 16, 09 8:05 AM CST
Michael Wolff - “First of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. I notice that young people—you know, they’re very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone. But I’m a big believer in technology, and I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information.”...

Does Warren Buffett Know What He’s Talking About?
Off the Grid | Nov 13, 09 7:11 AM CST
Michael Wolff - Nobody I know who is smart and rich (albeit much less rich than they used to be) thinks the economy is patched up and ready to roll—except, apparently, Warren Buffet (who I don’t actually know), who announced yesterday that “the financial panic is behind us.” But then he is also a man who believes the future is railroads....

Is Lou Dobbs the Last Conservative Pundit?
Off the Grid | Nov 12, 09 7:09 AM CST
Michael Wolff - At the top of the Internet boom, Lou Dobbs left CNN to start his ill-fated Space.com, from which he returned ignominiously not long after. Dobbs left CNN again yesterday, at what is possibly the top of the conservative pundit boom, to, as CNN put it with a certain dig, pursue his “advocacy journalism” elsewhere. The progression of...

Who Was the Fort Hood Shooter?
Off the Grid | Nov 11, 09 9:15 AM CST
Michael Wolff - It seems to be coming to this: Was he a Muslim or a nutcase? The nation’s two most sententious conservative columnists have weighed in with their view. Both David Brooks, in the Times , and Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the Wall Street Journal , believe that the evidence—ie, he was a practicing Muslim, and, to boot, he shouted “Allahu...

Rupert Murdoch: The Internet Does Not Exist
Off the Grid | Nov 10, 09 9:23 AM CST
Michael Wolff - Rupert continues his war with the Internet. Over the weekend, he told an interviewer (the interviewer, on Sky News Australia, works for him) that as part of his campaign to charge users for reading his content, what he plans to do is to block Google from indexing his newspapers. As of a year ago, Murdoch had never used Google—never once,...

The Health Bill Will Pass. Won’t It?
Off the Grid | Nov 9, 09 10:58 AM CST
Michael Wolff - I think they have it. If they don’t have the votes for the best and purest version of the bill, I think they at least have a fallback position which holds 60 votes. I believe this has to be true because you wouldn’t risk your presidency and place in history and epochal humiliation if you did not have the votes. You would not have brought...

Galleon Scandal: Shocked, Shocked by Insider Trading
Off the Grid | Nov 6, 09 9:41 AM CST
Michael Wolff - How is it that we get a major insider trading scandal every two decades or so? The last big one, which ultimately ensnarled Michael Milken, the legendary junk bond king, happened in the late eighties. The current one, with a mass of arrests yesterday, threatens the hedge fund industry. It seems reasonable to assume from the intermittent decades...

Rupert Murdoch Is Mad but Cute
Off the Grid | Nov 5, 09 9:04 AM CST
Michael Wolff - The Wall Street Journal was a great paper. It is still a pretty great paper but it is not the great Wall Street Journal . That former paper, with its particular look and feel and characteristically myopic focus on business and finance, has departed the stage, replaced by a vigorous, strong-minded paper focused on equal parts business, politics and...

Skype Lives!
Off the Grid | Nov 4, 09 8:39 AM CST
Michael Wolff - I follow entrepreneurial dramas the way other people follow sports (did somebody win the World Series?). In these comedies, tragedies, or farces, people really do rise beyond human limitations or get ignominiously crushed. Sometimes there are second chances. Entrepreneurs—true entrepreneurs—pride themselves, like none-too-bright boxers,...

Why the GOP Will Rise Again
Off the Grid | Nov 3, 09 9:49 AM CST
Michael Wolff - The strange business that is going on in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, which occupies some other universe than the one commonly associated with New York, wherein the designated middle of the road Republican fell to a crypto-fascist sort conservative, is meant to signal, at least for liberals, an internecine death struggle within the...

Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston: How They Took America
Off the Grid | Nov 2, 09 8:47 AM CST
Michael Wolff - Of all the outcomes of the 2008 presidential election, the strangest, beyond the rise of Sarah Palin herself, is the success of Levi Johnston. He, in fact, may be the antidote to her rise, dogging her with his smile and his scabrous asides. Or, as likely, they enable each other. Both stoke the other’s publicity machine. Levi wouldn’t...

Why the Media Is Taking So Long to Die
Off the Grid | Oct 30, 09 9:27 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - I participated the other night in an oddly formal, anglophilic, Oxford-style, for-and-against-the-proposition debate on the topic of (you guessed it) the mainstream media. I was on the side arguing (you guessed again) that it should be buried as fast as possible. My side, with radio host John Hockenberry and Politico founder Jim VandeHei, resoundingly...

How the Internet Got Lost and Why Google’s GPS Won’t Show Us the Way Out
Off the Grid | Oct 29, 09 9:02 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - I had lunch yesterday with my old friend and former colleague, Chip Bayers, who, 15 years ago this week, after having left my fledgling Internet business in New York, helped start HotWired in San Francisco. This is significant because advertising on the Internet started with HotWired’s launch and because it started with the banner ad, invented...

Pot Will Save Us
Off the Grid | Oct 28, 09 11:10 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Wow. Pot. Just like that, on its way to being legalized. Well, just like that after 50 years or so. In order to save itself from financial oblivion, the state of California seems inclined to just do it . Just say yes. To become Amsterdam. It may be the biggest thing to come out of the financial meltdown. We won’t get meaningful reform...

Is Obama a Sleaze?
Off the Grid | Oct 27, 09 9:06 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - So it turns out there’s a reason the president hasn’t wrapped up health care or Iraq, figured out Afghanistan, closed Guantanamo, or found anybody a job. He’s been out raising money. He’s been schmoozing, and golfing, and kissing ass. The Wall Street Journal has outlined in quite excruciating detail just how the president...

Have Fox News and Roger Ailes Goofed?
Off the Grid | Oct 26, 09 9:13 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Who’s tweaking whom? I have come to believe that the nearly daily back and forth between the White House and Fox News is good for both sides. I have further come to believe it’s good for the political class in general. For one thing, the fight is deeply self-referential and true inside baseball (who is doing what to whom on the basis...

Newser’s iPhone App: Are We Nuts?
Off the Grid | Oct 23, 09 9:11 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - The most popular news medium became, over the last 10 years, the computer, effectively putting newspapers out of business and changing the nature of television news. Over the past year, it has become clear that the next news medium of choice will be your phone. The latest iPhone version of Newser launched this week. I think it's great, but we...

A Grossly Disproportionate Paycheck Is Still Okay
Off the Grid | Oct 22, 09 9:16 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - One of the big changes that took place in America over the last 25 years was that people at the top came to be paid so much more than the average person in their companies. It was an exponential increase. Where not long ago the top guy made 20 or 30 or 40 times more than the average salary in his company, his pay packages skyrocketed to as much as...

Please Don’t Ever Forget Bernie Kerik
Off the Grid | Oct 21, 09 9:12 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - I have never met Bernie Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and Rudy Giuliani crony and business partner, but he is my Facebook friend. He friended me. This might be because, indicted on a variety of tax abuse and public corruption charges, he’s looking for good press. He was sent to prison yesterday for leaking sealed...

I’ve Changed My Mind on the Obama-Fox Showdown
Off the Grid | Oct 20, 09 9:59 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Here’s what nobody seems to know: whether we’re a liberal nation or a conservative one. For a long time the conservatives convinced us that we were, largely, in our souls and pocketbooks, conservative (even though the Republicans have, in recent memory, not gotten more than 50% of the national vote). But then we elected a young black...

Do the Balloon People Have a Right to Publicity?
Off the Grid | Oct 19, 09 8:10 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - The boy in the balloon or, as it were, the boy not in the balloon, is a publicity stunt which has many people outraged, questioning the sanity of the boy’s father, the intelligence of the media, and the values of a media-driven culture. But other than the lower-than-usual trick of using a child’s welfare to get attention, and...

Will the White House Defend Its Gay School Czar? Probably Not
Off the Grid | Oct 16, 09 8:44 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Here’s the setup: There’s a gay guy named Kevin Jennings who’s made a career dealing with the issues of gay kids in American schools. In what must have seemed like a kinder-gentler-bureaucracy good idea, the Obama administration gave him a job promoting school safety, which seems to be about dealing with bullies instead of recruiting...

What Rush Limbaugh’s Bid for the Rams Tells Us About Hate Speech
Off the Grid | Oct 15, 09 8:37 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - I think I’ve got it—the hate in America and where it’s coming from. Rush Limbaugh’s effort— aborted by his fellow investors, it seems—to buy the St. Louis Rams has given me the insight. Other people, when they don’t get something they want—and rich guys really want football teams; for them this...

What Do We Want From Bernie Madoff?
Off the Grid | Oct 14, 09 9:55 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Bernie Madoff shoves a 60-year-old inmate in the prison yard and, as of this morning, it’s the top story on Newser. But a series of books about Madoff started coming out this summer and not one of them has done any business to speak of. Aside from the obvious point that books are long and Newser stories are short, how come we’re...

What Should Obama Do About Fox News?
Off the Grid | Oct 13, 09 8:40 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - The plan now is to harrumph. Fox is "undertaking a war against Barack Obama," the White House says, and therefore it’s not going to treat Fox the same as "legitimate news organizations." That’s a harrumph. A petulant harrumph. And a gift—to Fox. The network was out in force yesterday, basking in the White...

Liz Cheney Is the New Dick
Off the Grid | Oct 12, 09 8:51 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Who’s the most venomous and pernicious person in American life today? That person who, without an iota of irony or self-dramatizing exaggeration (Rush Limbaugh, in that sense, is rather a kitten), really believes the nation has descended into a malignant state and can only be saved by baneful and constant censure? Nominations? Here’s...

Fat Is the Issue in New Jersey
Off the Grid | Oct 9, 09 8:58 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Politicians used to be fat, and voters used to be thin. This has been turned on its head: Now a fat politician is an unusual bird, while the majority of voters are corpulent beasts. Fat used to be an attribute of a successful man, suggesting power, status, and fine dining—the proverbial fat cat. A few generations ago, Teddy Kennedy would not...

Berlusconi Is Going, Going…Almost Gone
Off the Grid | Oct 8, 09 7:26 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - It could be that in the years ahead every Italian alive in the strange years of Silvio Berlusconi, as both his nation’s leading media mogul and dominant political figure, will take a certain pride in being able to tell the tale. Grandchildren will gather round. Historians will debate the significant moments and, for years hence, be dishing out...

This Is the Way Obama Goes to War
Off the Grid | Oct 7, 09 8:31 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - The commander in chief has taken the first step toward spelling out his war strategy in Afghanistan. Or, really, by avoiding a specific strategy, he is embracing a radical new one. The New York Times reports that in a bipartisan meeting at the White House the president said he wanted to “dispense with the straw man argument that this...

Who Will Save Glenn Beck?
Off the Grid | Oct 6, 09 9:20 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Should I be worried about Glenn Beck? In my long experience, when advertisers boycott media it’s media that’s too out there in a too-permissive liberal-lefty sort of way. I can’t actually remember in the history of modern media a boycott of something because it’s too conservative. But that’s what’s happening...

Do Women Hate Men Who Cheat?
Off the Grid | Oct 5, 09 9:44 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Part of the post-mortem on the Letterman-sex-and-shakedown story is about the damage he might have done to his female audience. Women may stop watching him with the same consistency or attention because he wasn't monogamous. The implication is that the women of America have an instinctive sympathy for the person he was supposed to be having sex...

Obama Is a Snooze—John Edwards Is the Real Story
Off the Grid | Oct 2, 09 8:13 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Barack Obama is an uplifting but, so far, ultimately boring story. The greatest political saga, the one that has it all, that gets to the real heart of American politics, is the John Edwards story. It’s too bad that, for reasons of shock-shocked morality and heavy political correctness, we can’t really revel in it. All good people...

Soda Is the New Right-Wing Issue—and Fatsos the New Base
Off the Grid | Oct 1, 09 9:16 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - The new thing we are going to hear about, constantly, repetitively, like a nail driving into our heads, is the soda tax. We’ll wake up from our dreams with those words in our head: the soda tax . The proposal is to put a tax on carbonated sugar drinks because, well, they are valueless and probably pernicious and do nothin' for nobody,...

Obama, Palin, Polanski, Beck...They're All Our Little Hitlers
Off the Grid | Sep 30, 09 8:56 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - So if it isn’t Hitler’s skull , does that mean he didn’t die in the bunker? Hitler’s possible escape, and the theories about his ongoing life in South America, were among the greatest tabloid stories of my youth. It was an exotic and stubborn tale that persisted even in the face of definitive evidence (which now turns out...

Sarah Palin Is Winning
Off the Grid | Sep 29, 09 9:12 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - I have said this before: There are only two political stars in the country. One is president, the other is Sarah Palin. They are both sui generis and cultish. They both have less to do with ideology and more to do with who they are. In both cases their careers did not lead them to run for president; rather, their careers took off because they seemed...

Why Nab Roman Polanski Now? Revenge
Off the Grid | Sep 28, 09 9:00 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - This is what they have been doing in the Los Angeles Country district attorney’s office: they have been Googling “Roman Polanski.” Polanski, the French movie director who fled the US 31 years ago after pleading guilty in a murky case involving sex with an underage model, was arrested over the weekend in Switzerland on a US...

Mackenzie Phillips Scores
Off the Grid | Sep 25, 09 7:21 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Okay, let’s not shy away from it: Mackenzie Phillips, and whether she did or did not sleep with her father, is the big news. As it happens, whenever we follow an incest story at Newser it becomes the biggest story. The Phillips story is even bigger because it’s not just an incest story but also a disputed incest story. And because...

Who's Afraid of Glenn Beck?
Off the Grid | Sep 24, 09 9:48 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - I have never watched Glenn Beck. I had never heard of Glenn Beck until he arrived at Fox News…when? Not that long ago. But then, overnight, he became a ratings phenomenon, and among the most significant figures in the American conservative movement. Actually, even though he is a ratings phenomenon and among the most significant figures...

Foreign Policy: The President Is a Screw-up
Off the Grid | Sep 23, 09 8:47 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - “A wholesale reconsideration of a strategy,” as the Times described the Obama administration’s present position on Afghanistan, might not be as bad as it sounds. If the Bush White House had ever had a wholesale reconsideration with regard to Iraq, the world would likely be in a better place. Still, it doesn’t fill you...

The Old Media Is Dead—Really, Truly
Off the Grid | Sep 22, 09 9:40 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - The world is about to radically change. Let me explain. The Internet business, which began to radically change the world in the mid-nineties, stalled out in 2001 partly because the Internet didn’t work very well. It just wasn’t fast enough to do all the things it promised to do. Then high-speed connections became the norm and the business...

The ACORN Video Tells Us What We Need to Know
Off the Grid | Sep 21, 09 9:30 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - It seems hard to argue with what’s on the video. Still, I would like to know more about the technical aspects used by the conservative pranksters or activists or whatever they are to get the goods on these ACORN people. Is it possible that, without great cost and technical acumen, we can all be outfitted with a see-all and record-all...

It’s a Cold War: Fox Against the President
Off the Grid | Sep 18, 09 7:59 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - The president will do a series of interviews on Sunday with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Univision, culminating on Monday with an appearance as an exclusive guest on David Letterman . He is not, however, going on Fox News, and the network and many Republicans are spitting mad about this. “If people are going to be on the Sunday talk shows,...

Who You Calling a Racist?
Off the Grid | Sep 17, 09 8:54 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - Has anyone, besides the self-aggrandizing loony fringe, ever actually admitted to being a racist? Nobody ever says, black people are so inferior (or when they are effectively saying this, they have a baroque rationale). Or, ohmygod, you’re right, it hadn’t occurred to me, I must be a racist. (At least when you accuse someone of being an...

White Guys Can’t Apologize
Off the Grid | Sep 16, 09 9:06 AM CDT
Michael Wolff - What do we mean when we say we’re sorry? Or what do we mean when we say, “Say you’re sorry!” Apologizing has become some formal social, political, and media condition. It’s a ritual and nicety like a thank you; it’s part of a political process, like a campaign; it’s a media event like a season finale. ...