LOS ANGELES: 'New York seems to float away from America'
by Steve Wasserman, Book Review editor, Los Angeles Times

The idea that a New York media cabal continues to exercise significant influence west of the Hudson is a notion so self-serving that it could only have been hatched at Elaine's. The big story, largely missed by the media sultans of Manhattan, is how New York has lost its buzz and no longer has a full Nelson on the nation's cultural life. Increasingly wealthy, wired, and worldly, Americans no longer take most of their cultural cues from a tribe of Gotham commissars whose greatest gift is their capacity for self-absorption. Does anyone seriously believe that the values to be found in the pages of, say, Vanity Fair are more those of Manhattan than Hollywood? What is striking is the degree to which ordinary Americans no longer pay much attention to the pronunciamentos delivered on high from the traditional organs of the eastern press. For example, during the long and forlorn impeachment year, a majority of Americans refused to endorse the media fatwa, led by the excellent New York Times, to condemn President Clinton for his unruly sex life. It was almost enough to give one hope in the citizenry's collective sobriety as much of the New York punditocracy grew ever more shrill as they faced the fact of their diminishing influence.

To be sure, New York pulses with money and Wall Street financiers batten on get-rich schemes for which they find a market of millions of gullible Americans. But media clout? That is another matter. It was AOL, after all, based outside of Washington, D.C., that gobbled up Time Warner, based in Manhattan. And, arguably, it is Los Angeles, the red-hot center of the nation's industrial-entertainment complex, which dictates (for better or worse) what Americans watch on television and see in Cineplexes. As for radio, last time I looked, neither Minnesota Public Radio nor National Public Radio had relocated to Manhattan. Influential opinion magazines like The New Republic and The Atlantic, Salon and Slate, to name only a few, are to be found elsewhere. Meanwhile, technology has democratized book production, and the specter of the e-book has plunged publishing into its greatest structural crisis since Gutenberg. Moreover, the single most important individual influencing book-buying habits across the country is a woman named Oprah who runs a media empire out of Chicago.

But nostalgia is a commodity whose value increases as the world it seeks to recall disappears. The very idea of a list of the most important New York media people betrays status anxiety. Is New York still important? Of course. Is it still an island? You bet it is. And increasingly it seems to float away from an America whose disdain it foolishly courts even as it presumes to speak for the rest of us.

Steve Wasserman started on the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times in 1978. He spent ten years in book publishing before returning to the Times as book review editor.