Wolff: The rise and fall of Time Warner

Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch, arriving at something of a final showdown, have represented two divergent strains of modern media for the past 30 years.

TW has been the ultimate liberal establishment — East Coast and Hollywood — power bastion. Murdoch has been the insurgent, seeking not only to take power from the establishment but also to challenge its liberal bias.

The eerie lack of protest last week to news that Murdoch had bid for Time Warner, from both his target and the greater liberal media world — no yowls about Murdoch the defiler or Murdoch the right wing monster out to amass more power — suggests he has won. Or that Time Warner has given up.

Of course, Time Warner is not really Time Warner anymore, not the most important and influential American news and information company, a cultural behemoth of the 20th Century. That would be Time, the publishing company Time Warner unceremoniously spun off a few months ago. (Murdoch, curiously — or alarmingly — may be separately interested in acquiring Time through his company News Corp., which holds all his publishing properties.)

In a sense, the Time and Warner combination — the event in 1989 that arguably created the modern, cross-platform, conglomerated, media state — was a marriage helped by Murdoch himself.

In 1984, Murdoch, the Australian insurgent who owned a collection of newspapers and magazines, made a run at Warner Communications. Steve Ross, the former parking lot and funeral home operator who ran Warner, was able to pay Murdoch to go away. But the cost of the greenmail, as such payments were known, weakened Warner, making it more vulnerable to the next takeover. Time, the most successful media company of its day — the Google of the age — believed its cash horde made it vulnerable to a takeover, too. Hence, the merger with Warner.

This mutual protection pact created the largest pan-media, vertically integrated production and distribution company on Earth. It was the great New York company, defining media as a celebrity, news, entertainment and marketing machine. For a moment, Time Warner was even a technologically advanced company, making efforts at interactive television and the establishment of the first commercial website, Pathfinder.

It was also a seething, factional, backstabbing, Lord of the Flies-like place.

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Murdoch, in the shadow of Time Warner and ever envious of it, had built his own integrated media company, combining print, movie studio and TV network. But his was the low-rent version. Top talent went to Time Warner, also-rans and mediocrities to Murdoch. Time Warner was prestige; Murdoch was a bit embarrassing. TW was the grand potential of media, Murdoch was media of the basest kind.

Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting and with it acquired CNN, which Murdoch had longed to buy. As a direct result, Murdoch started Fox — thesis and antithesis.

Time Warner, with its monster egos and armed fiefdoms, became more fractious. Murdoch's company, with its humbler talent and its boss's top-down control, became more disciplined. Time Warner, which first propounded the dream of media synergy, became the poster child for resistance to it — death before synergy. Murdoch, his word being as God's in his company, assembled quite a smooth-running, integrated, indeed synergistic movie-network-station-cable-sports operation.

Then Time Warner, with the greatest hubris, merged in 2000 with AOL, at the time the leading Internet company. When the dust settled and the dot-com bubble burst, this not only left a devastated Time Warner share price but also a company full of contempt for itself. From top to bottom, perhaps never before had there been such a self-hating company.

Jeffrey Bewkes, who became CEO in 2006 but had assumed wide responsibility several years before, is an Ivy League (Yale), erudite business technician — careful to eschew the pitfalls of visionaryism. In every way, the opposite of Murdoch.

He seemed to pride himself on knowing the faults of his own company — of having no illusions about it. His job was not just to fix it but to purge it. It would not be too much to read his tenure as a kind of revenge on it. It was a grand unraveling, jettisoning cable, Internet and publishing. Time Warner came to embody the new, slimmed-down ethos adopted by almost everyone except Murdoch. Bewkes was frank about it: His job was to create shareholder value, to focus the company to raise the share price and ultimately get a deal. He was an unsentimental seller.

Murdoch is and has always been a buyer. Murdoch's sole reason for being is to create an ongoing institution. Part of his obsession with his children's role is that it should be an ongoing Murdoch institution.

Bewkes turned Time Warner into an endgame institution — a place nobody believed in, a place best put to bed, a place no one would miss.

A theme of the present era of the media business has been the winding down of mogul influence and ambition and the rise of the managers and technocrats who would patiently unravel mogul grandiosity.

Not that many months ago, Bewkes, like most others in the media business, would have considered Murdoch, mired in his British hacking scandal, a last gasp of a dying era.

Instead, the mogul lives.