Mario: Documentary Screening and Conversation with Ken Auletta, Madeline Cuomo, Steven Cohen, Teddy Kunhardt, and Harold Holzer

Ken Auletta launched the Annals of Communications columns and profiles for The New Yorker magazine in 1992. He is the author of thirteen books, including five national bestsellers: Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed And Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of The House of Lehman; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Super Highway; World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies; and Googled, The End of the World As We Know It, which was published in November of 2009. His other books include:Backstory: Inside the Business of News; Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire; The Streets Were Paved with Gold; and The Underclass. His twelfth book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else), was published in June 2018. His thirteenth book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, was published in July 2022. Ken is currently reporting a documentary on Murdoch with acclaimed director Matt Tyrnauer, and is also writing about The Murdoch Puzzle.

Auletta was among the first to popularize the so-called information superhighway with his February, 1993, profile of Barry Diller’s search for something new. He has profiled the leading figures and companies of the Information Age, including Google, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, AOL Time Warner, John Malone, Harvey Weinstein, the New York Times, Sheryl Sandberg and Facebook; he has dissected media meteors that fell to earth like “push” technology and interactive TV, probed media violence, the PAC giving of communication giants, the fat lecture fees earned by journalist/pundits, and explored what “synergy” may mean to journalism. His 2001 profile of Ted Turner won a National Magazine Award as the best profile of the year. He covered the Microsoft antitrust trial for the magazine. In ranking him as America’s premier media critic, the Columbia Journalism Review concluded, “no other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta.” New York Magazine described him as the “media Boswell.”

In another life, Auletta taught and trained Peace Corps volunteers; served as Special Assistant to the U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce; worked as the first Executive Director of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s effort to make the New York Democratic Party more attractive to young reform voters, and joined his 1968 campaign for the Presidency; was Executive Editor of the weekly Manhattan Tribune; was state Campaign Manager for Howard J. Samuels, helping him lose two races for Governor of New York; and was the first Executive Director of the New York City Off Track Betting Corporation.

Starting in 1974, he was the chief political correspondent for the New York Post, then staff writer and weekly columnist for the Village Voice and Contributing Editor of New York Magazine. He started writing for The New Yorker in 1977. Between 1977 and 1993, he wrote a weekly political column for the New York Daily News. He has hosted numerous public television programs and served as a political commentator for both WNBC-TV and WCBS-TV. He has written for numerous publications, written and narrated a 90-minute 1995 biography of Rupert Murdoch for PBS’s Frontline, and appeared regularly on Nightline, the News Hour with Jim Lerher, and the Charlie Rose Show. He was the guest editor of The Best Business Stories of The Year 2002, an annual volume published by Random House.

Of his bestselling Three Blind Mice: How The TV Networks Lost Their Way, Frank Stanton, who was President of CBS from 1946 to 1973, hailed it as “the best book ever written on network television.” Before insider trading scandals burst into our consciousness, Auletta captured the ethos of Wall Street in the mid eighties with Greed And Glory On Wall Street, which drew a chorus of praise and was a national bestseller. The New York Times wrote, “A riveting chronicle of the lust for money, power and reputation. Invaluable.” The Wall Street Journal called it: “A towering reportorial achievement.” And long before the notion was in the air, Auletta’s third book, The Underclass, inserted this phrase into our national language, triggering praise from the left and right. “Personal, vivid and irrefutable,” wrote Michael Harrington in The New Republic. James Q. Wilson in New York Magazine wrote, “Sympathetic and yet dispassionate... splendid... a call for intellectual honesty and political courage.” His World War 3.0 prompted a media storm because of the more than ten hours of interviews Auletta conducted with the Microsoft trial judge; in a review it was hailed by noted attorney Floyd Abrams this way: “I cannot recall a book written about a complex civil trial that describes it as completely and compellingly... a journalistic tour de force.”

His eleventh book, Googled: The End of The World As We Know It, was published in November 2009 and quickly became a bestseller. In narrative fashion, it provides the fullest portrait yet of Google as a company, how it began and has grown into a behemoth. It seeks to probe the “secret sauce” for Googles success. And it shows how traditional media was late to awaken to Google and the multiple ways the digital revolution would disrupt their world, crowning a new King: the consumer.

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, was a victim of disruption, and without its subsidies most media, including Google and Facebook, would perish.

His thirteenth book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein And The Culture of Silence, to be published in July 2022, is a biography of a Hollywood luminary who behaved like a monster while also birthing brilliant movies. Hollywood Ending seeks to uncover what made him a monster, how a culture of silence shielded his foul behavior, and the nature of his talent. Readers will be exposed to a surprising array of voices—including those of Harvey Weinstein, his brother Bob, and childhood friends who describe the atmosphere in the brothers’ Flushing, Queens home—and documents that demonstrate how Harvey Weinstein’s inability to control his raging impulses crippled his business.

Auletta has won numerous journalism honors. He has been chosen a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, and one of the 20th Century’s top 100 business journalists by a distinguished national panel of peers. Appearing before the Financial Writers Association of America in 1997, Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger turned to him and declared, “I really think that the kind of stuff you do for The New Yorker is terrific. I’d love to see more of that kind of stuff on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.... I think you set a standard.”

For four decades Auletta has been a national judge of the Livingston Awards for journalists under thirty-five. He has been a Trustee and member of the Executive Committee of the Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. He was a member of the Columbia Journalism School Task Force assembled by incoming college President Lee Bollinger to help reshape the curriculum. He has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror and a Trustee of the Nightingale-Bamford School. He was twice a Trustee of PEN, the international writers organization. He is a member of the New York Public Library’s Emergency Committee for the Research Libraries, of the Author’s Guild, PEN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Auletta grew up on Coney Island in Brooklyn, where he attended public schools. He graduated with a BS from the State University College at Oswego, N.Y., and received an MA in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. The State University of New York awarded him a Doctor of Letters in 1990, and in 1998, he gave an address at the inauguration of Deborah F. Stanley as President of Oswego State University. (You may read the text of that speech here.)

Ken and his wife, Amanda Urban, a literary agent, live in Manhattan. Their daughter, Kate, is an editor.

Steven M. Cohen has more than 30 years of experience as a lawyer in private practice and in public service. He is the founding member of Blue Raven, a legal advisory firm focused on providing strategic advice to businesses, corporate boards and Kaplan Martin LLP, a litigation law firm. Prior to Kaplan Martin, Steve served as General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer for MacAndrews & Forbes Incorporated, where he oversaw the legal, government relations and communications needs of a diversified corporate portfolio. In his eight years at MacAndrews, Steve was involved in all manner of legal issues including complex corporate litigations, shareholder litigations, internal investigations, regulatory inquiries, corporate acquisitions and public company governance matters.

Steve also garnered significant attention for his successful effort to gain the release of two men wrongfully convicted of the 1990 Palladium nightclub murder. For his efforts, he was named New York Bar Association Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year.

Early in his career, Steve served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he participated in the creation of the Violent Gangs Unit, which he supervised as Unit Chief.

In 2011, Steve was appointed Secretary to New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo. Among other things, Steve was tasked with overseeing the administration’s successful effort to secure the passage of the Marriage Equality Act. Before serving in the Governor’s Office, from 2007 to 2011, Steve was Chief of Staff and Counselor to New York Attorney General Cuomo. In 1984, twenty-five years before joining Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration, Steve began his career working for Governor Mario M. Cuomo, first as an intern and then as staff aide.

Steve graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and earned his undergraduate degree from New York University. Following law school, Steve served as law clerk to the Honorable Stanley Sporkin of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and Frank X. Altimari of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In the civic realm, Steve is a member of the following boards: New York University, the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, the Perelman Performing Arts Center and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He previously served as the Chair of Empire State Development and Vice Chair of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. Steve also is an adjunct law professor at New York Law School, where he teaches corporations and securities regulation.

Harold Holzer, one of the country’s leading Lincoln scholars, is the Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. He assumed in the post in 2015 after 23 years as Senior Vice President for External Affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He served for ten years (2000-2010) as co-chairman of the U. S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (appointed by President Clinton. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal. In 2026, Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal appointed Holzer as Manhattan Borough Historian.

Holzer is the author, co-author, or editor of 55 books on Lincoln and the Civil War era. His Lincoln and the Power of the Press won the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and awards from the Columbia University School of Journalism, and Harvard’s Kennedy School. His book Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French won the New England Society Award and the Saint-Gaudens Medal. His latest book is Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration (2024).

Holzer was the historical advisor to the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln and wrote the young readers’ companion book. Holzer has received eight honorary degrees and written 700 articles, along with chapters or introductions for 70 additional books. In 2026, he earned the John Jay Medal for lifetime contributions to American history.

He served as press secretary to Mario M. Cuomo in the 1977 runoff and general election campaigns for Mayor of New York and from 1984-1992 served in Cuomo’s gubernatorial administration as a communications executive for the State Urban Development Corp. In 2008, Holzer interviewed Governor Cuomo on stage at 92Y.

Holzer and his wife, Edith, live in New York City, and have two daughters and two grandsons.