Ken Auletta this week got the kid glove treatment from Charlie Rose, who quizzed him on the makeover of Lou Dobbs from corporate cheerleader to self-appointed mouthpiece of the American middle class. It was far different from the treatment Auletta got last week at a New Yorker breakfast sponsored by the Newhouse School and held at the Condé Nast building in Times Square.

In a flower-anointed room with just-so lighting holding the likes of New Yorker editor David Remnick, CBS digital's Larry Kramer, the New York Times' Stuart Elliott, Henry Schleiff, Jack Myers and other media luminaries, Auletta was the questioner of Martin Sorrell, the head of advertising megalith WPP. Sir Martin was all about "disintermediation" — how consumers are going around big media through everything from YouTube to MySpace. "You're in dangerous territory when you start to say to consumers I know better what they should like or what they shouldn't," he said. He couldn't resist joking to Auletta that he was going to "try to disintermediate you, too," as their knees practically touched on the dias.

Sorrell presented what we thought was a cogent argument for why huge ad holding companies like WPP can't maintain their leadership position indefinitely. He talked not only of the disintermediation, but also: