From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Last week, two of the world's most powerful multimedia giants starred in a double feature of the Incredible Shrinking Corporation.

AOL Time Warner announced a $54 billion quarterly write-down,

a mandatory revaluation of once inflated, now dramatically deflated, AOL shares.

They're worth roughly half of what they were when the merger was consummated.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the French conglomerate Vivendi Universal continued its stock price collapse.

Having lost half their value in the last six months, Vivendi's shares shrank yet another 25%.

So much for the juggernauts and so much for the synergies that conventional wisdom said would

propel AOL Time Warner to unprecedented domination. Joining us now as journalist Aaron Pressman, who last

was on the show just after the AOL Time Warner merger, talking about how the Colossus would have its way with us.

Aaron, welcome back to the show.

Glad to be back.

Now, when the merger occurred, there was talk of a marriage made in heaven.

Now, that was back in January of 2001 when we were living in a wholly different world.

AOL was going to gain access to the content of this gigantic media company, Time Warner, with all kinds of possibilities for cross-promotion and what they call synergy. Did any of those synergies actually come to fruition? Well, very anecdotally, the company likes to tout the fact that they promoted record stars on the AOL service to boost up record sales and things like that. But there

were a few key blunders in their assumptions in putting the merger together. Primarily along the lines

of broadband, this high-speed internet connection

that was supposed to run over the cable lines that Time Warner owned really hasn't panned out

the way that people hoped, and that was the core of the whole convergence strategy.

But what about the notion that all of this content were going to somehow serve the AOL audience and bring

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