Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

The inimitable John Paczkowski rightly chides Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, for using a really, really bad historical metaphor.

Commenting on the piracy issues facing traditional media in the digital age, Parsons compared the fight over copyright protections in the U.S. to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. “The Googles of the world are the Custers of the modern world, and we are the Sioux nation” [...]

I respect Parsons. He’s really smart — so smart, in fact, that he should know better than to step into a metaphor like this. Custer was seen in his day as a paragon of the fair-haired hero type. Yes, he also hunted down Native Americans, and he was an incorrigible glory-hog, but the public found him and his exploits magnetic . . . much like they do Google today. More to the point, Custer’s side eventually won. The costs were huge — and more people will cry for the destruction of the Sioux nation than will ever cry for the fate of Time Warner — but, for better and worse, the U.S. Army finally prevailed.

It won’t surprise me if someday old-line media companies like Time Warner go the way of Sitting Bull in his later years: respected, even fondly remembered, but stripped of real power. We may look back from that vantage point and say that Dick Parsons, despite himself, was exactly right with his ill-chosen metaphor.