With Ted Turner's descent, end of an era?

Once, to hammer home his point about a pending telecom bill, Ted Turner dropped to the floor of a senator's office, clutched at his throat, and rolled around like an infant, crying, "You're going to kill me!"

In the end, though, it was not overzealous lawmakers, but the media industry itself, that sent the television magnate into exile. The quirky founder of CNN - a man who once challenged Rupert Murdoch to a Las Vegas boxing match - stepped down earlier this month as vice chairman of AOL-Time Warner, a media giant that some say had grown too big for its own good.

Now, the fall of Mr. Turner's fortunes could affect everything from buffalo herds to UN budgets. It also calls into question the future of Turner's brand of upstart entrepreneurism in an industry with fewer and fewer big players.

As the largest private landowner in the US, second only to the US Bureau of Land Management, Turner is unlikely to recede quietly into a Western sunset. Some say he'll retire to his Florida mansion; others suggest he'll buy back the Atlanta Braves, which he first acquired in 1976; still others predict he'll become a vocal critic of media conglomerates that put profit over public service.

"Ted recognized that the big media mergers have had a destructive effect ... on the quality of the news environment that he helped create at CNN," says Jeff Chester, a merger critic and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington. "These media companies are in control of democracy's central nervous system."

At the same time, critics see Turner's sidelining as a symptom of a media industry in deeper turmoil. "Part of [Turner leaving] is that you're seeing less and less of the individual visionary ..., but it also signifies a change in public policy," where Big Media can dominate not just national, but also local media markets, says Larry Grossman, former head of NBC and author of "The Electronic Republic."

At first glance, it's a business that needs all the saviors it can get - eccentric or not. Right now, profits are in free fall at several media groups. The problems are the worst at AOL-Time Warner: Before Turner's announcement, the company declared a $98.8 billion loss - the largest in the history of corporate America. Disney, which owns ABC, has also lost 20 percent of its stock value in the last year.

Some of it is simply due to the troubled economy. But others say these media giants increasingly suffer from a lack of vision, and may be breaking apart from sheer bulk. Indeed, some divisions of AOL-Time Warner are reportedly considering hiving off of some of their corporate stashes.

But on the whole, AOL-Time Warner's travails are not likely to end of the bundling of smaller TV and cable outlets into big companies like Viacom or Disney. Indeed,the current prognosis is for a tide of "mini-AOLs," says Mr. Chester

Once described as a latter-day Rhett Butler, Turner came to symbolize the South's rise out of its Jim Crow ashes. His career arc mirrored the rise of Atlanta as "Turner Land," where a newly brash city became the hub for a new generation of high-flying entrepreneurs.

Born in Cleveland, Turner took over his dad's billboard company at 24, using proceeds to turn a fuzzy Atlanta UHF station into the "Superstation" - one of cable's first quality offerings. His founding of CNN, the first 24-hour news channel, earned him comparisons to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.

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