Business Insight Zone

It’s not much news that Jeff Bewkes is succeeding Dick Parsons atop the Time Warner masthead. But I liked these paragraphs from the International Herald Tribune’s story:

Parsons, one of the most prominent black executives in corporate America, has spent much of his five-year tenure as chief executive repairing the damage from Time Warner’s agreement in 2000 to be acquired by the pioneering Internet company AOL.

The grand synergies promised by the deal never materialized, and the company later faced, and settled, shareholder lawsuits and U.S. investigations stemming from questionable accounting practices at AOL.

There it is, plain as day: “repairing the damage,” “never materialized.” The deal failed. That’s the verdict.

There are a few folks who would still dispute that, which is fine — people still argue rightly about Andrew Jackson’s role in U.S. history. But this is a reminder to the journalist in me that, in the longer run, the historian in me will have the last say. We keep up with what’s happening from day to day, and we try to peer as far as we can into the future (read: not very far). But in the end, the confusions of today will be less confusing, even though they will be replaced by other confusions in turn.

Category: Media, The language of business