AS03: Media barons' influence wanes

Last year it looked like what you do with technology rather than the technology itself was what made someone an Agenda Setter. Tony Hallett asks why this time round the experts weren't all chanting "Content is king".

Trivia question: Can you name the bosses of Vivendi Universal and Bertelsmann? How about AOL Time Warner or, as we should now say, plain old Time Warner?

Alright, so you may know Richard Parsons as CEO of TW but the professional managers now at the helms of France and Germany's most influential media conglomerates just aren't Agenda Setters.

In silicon.com's last poll the chief executives of Vivendi and Bertelsmann, the controversial Jean-Marie Messier and Thomas Middelhoff, placed at 4 and 7 respectively.

AOL legend Steve Case was at 2 (albeit down from the top spot a year earlier) and the Dirty Digger himself, Rupert Murdoch, looked down on the rest from the top spot. The BBC's DG Greg Dyke also demonstrated the apparent triumph of content, in at 9, and that made it five media bosses in the top 10. Impressive stuff.

How times have changed. It was a good year for the BBC chief, in common with a number of other characters in the public sector. His rise to the dizzy heights of 3 wasn't on the back of having money to spend, nor even the implications of the ongoing Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr Kelly, but rather on the back of pushing the envelope on digital production and distribution. As the broadcaster and journalist Kate Bulkley said on this year's panel, he's in charge of an organisation that has "money, time and space to make innovations".

But Dyke aside, what went wrong? Murdoch fell 10 places, down from 1 to 11.

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