On Wednesday morning, Disney announced its blowout second quarter with a 21 percent increase in earnings, to 58 cents a share—topping Wall Street expectations by 7 cents.   
 
As a former employee and a current shareholder of rival media-conglomerate Time Warner, I struggled and failed to remember a quarter anywhere near as strong.
     
Since Jeff Bewkes took the Time Warner C.E.O. post, in January, there has been much talk of the possible spinoffs or sales of various divisions. Bewkes finally announced during the Time Warner quarterly earnings conference call last month that he would further separate the operations of the cable division from the rest of the conglomerate, making Time Warner, owner of HBO, Warner Bros., and CNN among other properties, a content company.
 
Eventually, Bewkes will have to do something with AOL (though at this point, even typing those three letters feels anachronistic, like typing TWA or ITT). And finally, maybe, if the debt markets improve, he will sell off the
always profitable but sluggishly growing Time Inc.
 
None of this, besides divesting cable, will be easy to do in the midst of an advertising downturn. Which raises the question: What did Bewkes' predecessor, Dick Parsons, actually achieve while he was C.E.O., besides buying a vineyard in Tuscany and reputedly making some very nice wine?
 
Isn't it time to reassess the generally well-regarded Parsons? He did leave the company in better shape than he inherited it, but consider the state of Time Warner when he took over, still reeling from the worst merger in corporate history with the stock battered, at one point, into single digits. (There should be a term for executives who take over after calamitous results. No one benefits as much from the tyranny of low expectations, as Isiah Thomas' successor at the New York Knicks will happily discover.)
 
But Parsons' term was conspicuously lacking in any vision or return for shareholders. In January 2002, when Parsons took over from Gerald Levin, the stock opened at $31 a share. It opened this morning at about $16. Parson's strategy was defense—which actually isn't a strategy.
 
It's what happens when you're attacked. He cut costs and paid down debt, once boasting that his strength was "It's hard to get the ball from me if I have it." That kind of conservative thinking might have been appealing immediately after the debacle of the AOL-Time Warner merger, but it didn't serve the company for the last few years of his reign.
 
The Time Warner annual report shows that the company's major investment in 2006 and 2007, Parson's last two years, was buying its own stock, spending about $20 billion on share repurchases. Imagine what Rupert Murdoch could do with $20 billion. Parsons, of course was busy fighting off Carl Icahn and Bruce Wasserstein, two aging corporate
raiders who, in the financial world equivalent of an 80s hair-metal band reunion, joined together to squeeze a few hundred million out of the company.
 
But consider what other media companies were doing during Parson's tenure. News Corp. was buying MySpace and Dow Jones and investing in Hulu, along with NBC Universal; Disney was building theme parks in China and launching the most successful tween franchises in history; and at least Viacom managed to get its divestment out of the way and snap up DreamWorks.
 
Besides paying to thwart the Icahn-led revolt, Parsons is usually given credit for a host of nebulous issues: healing the postmerger trauma; cutting down on interdivisional rivalry; stopping the bleeding. In other words, he gets credit for not making a colossal blunder.
 
Which made me realize that yet another terrible legacy of the AOL-Time Warner merger may have been that the company was so shell-shocked that it allowed a dolittle C.E.O. to stay in office precisely because he did little.
 
Meanwhile, though, other media companies were doing an awful lot and may now have earnings growth to show for it.