Kenneth B. Auletta (born April 23, 1942) [1] is an American author, a political columnist for the
New York Daily News,[2] and media critic for The New Yorker.
Early life and education
The son of an
Italian American father and a
Jewish American mother, Auletta grew up in the
Coney Island section of
Brooklyn, New York. His father Pat was a sporting goods store owner and founder of the Coney Island Sports League who responsible for discovering
Sandy Koufax, a young baseball pitcher playing in the league who went on to have a
Hall of Fame career with the
Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers after Pat urged the team to take a "look at this kid Koufax."[3]
While in graduate school, Auletta taught and trained
Peace Corps volunteers.[citation needed] He "got bored in a Ph.D political science program and left to be a gofer and write speeches in politics; then on to serve in government",[5] then working for then-Senator
Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign before serving as campaign manager for former
Administrator of the Small Business AdministrationHoward J. Samuels's failed 1974 gubernatorial campaign. From 1971 to 1974, he also served as the first executive director of the now-defunct
New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation under the aegis of Samuels (who was concurrently appointed as the Corporation's chairman).
After Samuels's defeat, Auletta became a daily reporter for the New York Post in 1974.[5] Following that, he was a writer for The Village Voice,[5] and a politics writer at
New York.[5] He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1977,[6][7] writing a two-part article on
New York City MayorEd Koch in 1978. He also wrote a weekly political column for the New York Daily News and was a political commentator on
WCBS-TV. In 1986, he received the
Gerald Loeb Award for Large Newspapers.[8] He was the guest editor of the 2002 edition of The Best Business Stories of the Year.
Auletta started writing the "Annals of Communications" profiles for The New Yorker in 1992.[7] His 2001 profile of
Ted Turner, "The Lost Tycoon", won a
National Magazine Award for Profile Writing.[9] He is the author of twelve books, his first being The Streets Were Paved With Gold (1979). His other books include The Underclass (1983), Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of The House of Lehman (1986), Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way (1991), The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway (1997), and World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies (2001). His book Backstory: Inside the Business of News (2003) is a collection of his columns from The New Yorker. Five of his first 11 books were national bestsellers, including Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (2009).
In late 2014 he published a profile of
Elizabeth Holmes and the company she founded,
Theranos. While largely uncritical, the profile did note an absence of clinical tests and peer-reviewed studies supporting Theranos' alleged scientific innovations; it also characterized Holmes' explanation of the Theranos blood-testing process as "comically vague".[10] Former Wall Street Journal reporter
John Carreyrou has credited Auletta's profile for stimulating his initial interest in Theranos.[11]
His twelfth book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else), was published in 2018. It described how advertising and marketing, with worldwide spending of up to $2 trillion, and without the subsidies of which most media, including
Google and
Facebook, would eventually perish, being already a victim of disruption.
He published his thirteenth book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, a biography of former entertainment mogul and convicted sex offender
Harvey Weinstein, 2022.[12][13]
^"The On-Sale Calendar: July 2022". Publishers Weekly. PWxyz LLC. February 15, 2022. Hollywood Ending by Ken Auletta (Penguin Press, $30.00; ISBN 9781984878373).