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Robert TeitelmanFormer editor in chief, 'The Deal'

GET UPDATES FROM Robert Teitelman Like 8 This Year in Meta-Davos Posted: 01/29/2013 7:51 pm Follow

The New York Times , Journalism , Davos 2013 , Financial TImes , The New Yorker , Journalists , Thomson Reuters , Business News
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It's cold and it's January, so it must be Davos time. That means most of us can mutter away at the power elite and their accompanying staff and journalists, helicoptering into a Swiss ski town to network, party and indulge in long chin-pulling sessions on global improvement. This has been going on since 1971. As always -- or at least over the past decade or so -- the most fascinating thing about Davos is not the empty effrontery of it all (that's old hat) but the fact that it's not what it used to be. It used to be smaller, cozier, glitzier, with better parties, wine and celebrities, and no bloggers. It used to mean something, particularly before the technocratic elite lost their trousers in 2008. Now they'll let anyone in. Like journalists. And some people aren't coming. Like Google.

Is there any other evergreen story so infused by the first person? No one covers Davos; they cover themselves covering Davos, as if the new journalism had come to this snowy Swiss peak to cough itself to death. Indeed, that little observation of wisdom is old news; everything at Davos is old news, including the fact that there are roughly three groups of pundits who prattle on about the meeting annually: the media that recently scored an invite and who are gobsmacked by the awesomeness of it all (fairly small); the veteran Davos media who adopt a world-weary, done-that, what an empty, corrupt exercise I'm forced to endure (larger); and the media stuck at home who get to bitch and moan and belittle the affair (largest).

There is a ritualistic quality to this, like a Borscht Belt routine. Every story seems to mention fondue, the forbidding Klaus Schwab and the party lineup, usually at the Hotel Europa piano bar. Henry Blodget this year posted about a party last year that featured the singing sister of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and the elusive appearance of Google's Eric Schmidt accompanied by a video as dark as a cave. This might have been satire; even so, the headline is a fake job. In fact, the ironic Davos post has become a genre, with its own rules, depending on which group you belong to. The Financial Times' John McDermott confessed that Martin Wolf got the last FT ticket and so he is holding a counter-Davos in snowbound Dalston, outside London. Ironic. Martin Wolf is as much a Davos figure as the New York Times' Thomas Friedman; you can just see Wolf grimly marching through sessions on the macroeconomy. But McDermott gets to bask as a Wolf standby, which, in status-land, isn't a bad thing. It's like getting kicked off Air Force One by Hillary Clinton.

Everyone knows by now that most reporters are embarrassed to be at Davos, to be cheek-to-jowel with elites, at least in their copy. (One exception: the irony-free USA Today, which headlined a dispatch from Davos, "Davos forum tackles economic issues." I mean, what else would they be doing besides gabbing, groping and networking?) They cope with this by focusing on the meta-story, particularly the parties or the celebs (Charlize Theron! Derek Jeter!), as if to yank the tail of World Economic Forum major domo Schwab and thus retain their self-respect.

The New York Times and CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin, a long perpetrator of the Davos meta-story (his best: how much it costs to go there), offered one of his perspectives on the meeting this year by wondering whether Davos was in trouble because the party scene seemed subdued. (This was before the party scene actually got started. It also wasn't that many years ago that Sorkin worried about a shortage of actresses.) Reuters' Felix Salmon then chimed in that Schwab often seems to be reining in the party scene, while not really making much difference. Salmon, by the way, is a well-known Davos contrarian, which involves many twists and turns. When he wasn't invited, he snarked it to death. When he did attend, he belittled it some more, targeting fancy-wine chugging at a hedge fund party and pointing out its hollow seriousness in the midst of the Egyptian protests in 2011. Now he seems headed in the opposite direction: He actually got excited by a session on smart cars. Awesome.

Another Davos standby is the Schwab story. Generally, year after year, reporters wonder portentiously how the godlike Schwab pulls it off. No one actually talks to Schwab, who remains as distant as Thomas Mann; thus Schwab becomes a free subject of speculation. Several years ago, The New Yorker's John Cassidy suggested that Davos works because Klaus -- despite his forbidding exterior, Klaus it is -- has made it somehow into a "positional good," that is something that's desired because it's so exclusive. The phrase is a nifty piece of Davos-speak applied to Davos, though Thorstein Veblen, who never attended, got there first. The FT's John Gapper, who's blogging and writing columns at Davos, approached the Schwab story with knowing ambivalence and offered a different spin. The "lugubrious" Schwab, noted Gapper, is "a canny entrepreneur" who has built a kind of proto-social media operation that "is not conspiracy; it's infotainment." Gapper also unearths the single best, if suspiciously polished, back-of-the-hand quote I've read this year about Davos, from David Rothkopf, the well-traveled Beltwayer, author (most recently Power Inc.), CEO of Foreign Policy and thus -- so very Davos -- an expert on elites who is an elite himself: "Davos is a factory where the conventional wisdom is manufactured."

Rothkopf does put his finger on what Davos really seems to do: It essentially tells everyone what they already think they know, and as Gapper notes, in a kind of opaque business-school-meets-corporatese that is well-nigh impenetrable: Schwab-talk. It's true. If you have the fortitude to sit through sessions on smart cars or the macroeconomy, you might learn a thing or two, but you don't really need to go to a Swiss mountain to do that. And the denizens of Davos -- the non-journalistic elite -- are masters of offering the unoriginal, orotund statement of the blindingly obvious as if it's holy writ -- no one more skilled at that than Klaus himself. The conventional wisdom, of course, is fodder for the media, which never wants to get too far from any idea that's not shared widely. (A vast amount of time every year is spent discerning the mood of Davos.) It's all very democratic in that sense for all its elitist trappings. Indeed, it reflects the deep technocratic tendencies in post-World War II Europe, with its heavily bureaucratized Brussels and its welfare-state democracies.

Sorkin provided evidence of this in his column just before Davos began when he noted how poorly predictions at Davos had fared. This was a typical Davos piece: Sorkin seems to believe that the elites at Davos, or the technocrats at the World Economic Forum, should actually be able to read the future. (The headline is unintentionally funny: "Prophecies Made in Davos Don't Always Come True.")The underlying assumption of the piece is that the great experts at Davos were once better at prediction, then foundered with the coming of 2008 and the eurozone crisis. Instead, Davos simply suffered the same fate as the economics profession and central bankers: They had really no idea what was going on, with the legendary exception of party animal Nouriel Roubini. But is that really a surprise? Keynes warned many decades ago about the difficulties of prediction and we've had many opportunities to witness the truth of that ever since. This is why it's a classic bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you Davos story. Let's snuggle up with the folks who don't control the world. And did you check out the swag?

FOLLOW BUSINESS Like 46k Get Alerts #ad_bottom_article_text {margin-bottom: 15px} The New York Times Journalism

SenGillibrand As Christine @Lagarde said at #WEF2013 in #Davos: "when #women do better, economies do better." http://t.co/pwFNcmD5 #offthesidelines 9 hours ago from web

ariannahuff Talking about youth unemployment with @PoppyHarlowCNN in @Davos #WEF http://t.co/YrBASpP4 13 hours ago from web

Logic_Bomb RT @paulwaugh: .@edballsmp to the Chancellor re Davos: "I don't know whether he got in any skiing but he and his chums certainly went ou ... 13 hours ago from Twitter for Android

StewartWood Murdoch in Mayfair, Xmas Dinner w/ Rebekah, pizza at Davos: odd that two alumni of a Dining Society have such political trouble with meals. 14 hours ago from web

paulwaugh .@edballsmp to the Chancellor re Davos: "I don't know whether he got in any skiing but he and his chums certainly went out on the piste". 14 hours ago from web

lucianaberger Welcome green focus in #Davos last week highlighting important relationship between big businesses and climate change: http://t.co/ajIDEOLf 15 hours ago from Twitter for iPhone

moorehn Davos: "When any of the beautiful, lightly clad young ladies were asked what they did, they answered 'l'm translator'." http://t.co/7Nc3qsOT 16 hours ago from Tweetbot for iOS

BlogsofWar RT @vihargg: Ehud Barak at Davos: U.S. Could Strike Iran to Block Nuclear Progress http://t.co/CsPZBwQi 17 hours ago from HootSuite

jenlipman RT @RichardHaass Overheard in #Davos: pres of Shimon #Israel Peres to pres of #Iceland "You are the frozen people; we are the chosen people" 19 hours ago from TweetDeck

billneelyitv @lindseyhilsum Timbuktu? Davos? Loved your half blind woman tossing away the hijab. And the Saudi receipt. Both v telling. Enjoy. 20 hours ago from Twitter for iPhone

richardquest Heading home after 2 week trip. Seoul, Davos, Zurich and home! Suitcase way too heavy. 1 day ago from Twitter for iPad

LeeCamp My kind of women! -- "FEMEN Topless Protest In Davos: Feminist Activists Demonstrate Outside World Economic Forum" http://t.co/HKctv5OT 1 day ago from web

umairh Ha. Very good. RT @mattbish: Sean Parker, Charlize Theron, Angela Merkel and "shadow Davos". My reflections on #WEF http://t.co/oW34iKbZ 1 day ago from TweetDeck

tomgara The WSJ's Marketplace editor @dkberman reflects on the search for a mushy kind of consensus at Davos: http://t.co/tC3sYBmQ 1 day ago from TweetDeck

CharlieBeckett Best thing I've read on Davos. By @gideonrachman http://t.co/Ocj6UrJ8 A 'conspiracy of reasonable people' 1 day ago from Twitter for iPad

moorehn This "ideas from Davos" post http://t.co/jPLLAv0K reminds me of this: http://t.co/xXiutKkS 1 day ago from web

kuminaidoo Sorry, no subtitles, but the bear manages to tell the story of an Arctic put under pressure by Big Oil. https://t.co/b9CLehGz #wef #davos 1 day ago from web

nature_org At #davos, our pres/CEO @marktercek talked #climate & #sandy w/ @weatherchannel's @jimcantore http://t.co/QQYoCUbh #wef 1 day ago from SMX:Thrive

QuebecSolidaire "Qu'a-t-on obtenu en changeant de gouv.? Les mêmes orientations politiques. L'austérité à tout prix et l'esprit de Davos" #assnat #polq 1 day ago from web

BloomsburyPress Davos Euphemism of the Week, via @mattbish: "I'm translator." http://t.co/1bKLipnz 1 day ago from HootSuite Show more results TOP INFLUENCERS ON THIS TOPIC

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