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The flamboyant career of the man who invented 24-hour cable news, Ted
Turner, ended yesterday when he quit as vice-chairman of the AOL Time Warner
media group after it announced a $US98.7 billion ($167 billion) annual loss -
the largest in US corporate history.
Mr Turner, who once said he wanted to be America's ``conscience", said he
wanted to devote more time to philanthropic interests and ``several socially
responsible business efforts".
The CNN founder said yesterday: ``I have not come to this decision lightly
... As you know, this company has been a significant part of my life for over 50
years."
However, AOL Time Warner said Mr Turner is expected to remain on its board.
AOL Time Warner's losses stem from write-downs in the company's assets,
reflecting the $US100 billion in value that has been wiped from its share price
in the past 18 months.
The scale of the losses underscores how much value has evaporated from what
once was the largest and most heralded merger in corporate history, the ultimate
marriage between old and new media.
Mr Turner's resignation ends a remarkable media journey. Starting out with
250 employees working out of an old clubhouse in Atlanta, Georgia, he
transformed news broadcasting.
For many, the cable station's high point was its coverage of the 1991 Gulf
War, when two of its correspondents reported live to the world from a Baghdad
hotel room as the bombs rained down.
That year Time magazine named Mr Turner its man of the year, saying that
under his direction the very definition of news had been rewritten ``from
something that has happened to something that is happening at the very moment
you are hearing of it ... A war involving the fiercest air bombardment in
history unfolded in real time before the cameras ..."
Mr Turner sold the business to Time Warner in 1996 but fiercely opposed the
latter's merger with AOL, announced in January 2000.
The acquisition was predicted to reshape the corporate landscape for
companies as diverse as Disney, the US telecom giant AT&T and Microsoft.
The plan was to open AOL's subscriber base, and hundreds of millions of
internet users, to Time Warner movies, music and publications, but the going
proved harder than expected.
AOL, the new-economy dynamo, failed to live up to the dotcom hype or the
inflated share price that financed the purchase.
The portents of disaster came when the company revealed that the revenues and
subscriber numbers for its online business fell for the first time last year.
Only ``stellar performances" at Time Warner propped up the group's sales, it
said.
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