Company Town : Information Age Spawns New Power List : Leadership: Vanity Fair singles out the giants of entertainment and technology.
Good news for Company Town readers: Vanity Fair magazine says America’s new powerbrokers are the very people who grace these pages.
Not the reporters, unfortunately, but a select group of 19 Information Age leaders that Vanity Fair calls the “New Establishment.†In its upcoming issue, the magazine makes the case that this roster has replaced the “small group of WASP men whose breeding grounds were the playing fields of prep schools†and who ended up in government, the law and on Wall Street.
Included on the New Establishment list are movers and shakers from all of the industries loosely bunched under the entertainment-technology banner.
From Hollywood, there’s media mogul David Geffen, Creative Artists Agency Chairman Michael S. Ovitz, director-producer Steven Spielberg and singer-actress-director Barbra Streisand.
The corporate entertainment world is represented by Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael D. Eisner, Time Warner Inc. Chairman Gerald Levin, News Corp.-Fox Inc. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, McAndrews & Forbes Holdings Chairman Ronald Perelman, Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone and Seagram Co. President Edgar Bronfman Jr., who made the list by virtue of his large stake in Time Warner.
Weighing in from cable, computers and telecommunications are AT&T; Co. Chairman Robert Allen, QVC Inc. Chairman Barry Diller, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, Tele-Communications Inc. President John Malone, McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. Chairman Craig McCaw, Bell Atlantic Corp. Chairman Ray Smith and Turner Broadcasting System Inc. Chairman Ted Turner.
Finally, there are two people who are industries unto themselves: blue chip investment banker Herbert A. Allen Jr., who’s handled many of the biggest media mergers of his day, and talk show supremo Oprah Winfrey.
The group picture on the front page of today’s Business section, which is not an exact representation of the executives on the list, was taken at Allen’s annual Sun Valley, Ida., investment conference this summer. Vanity Fair says the power list was compiled by a committee.
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