THE men who drive America's media business tend to be larger-
than-life figures: characters such as News Corp's Rupert Murdoch
or Sumner Redstone, head of Viacom, whose legendary grit was
most famously demonstrated when he survived a hotel fire by
clinging to a window ledge with his fingertips. But the figure
whose vision has done most to shape the media mergers of the
past decade is a man who did not survive: Steve Ross, the boss
of Warner Communications, America's most powerful movie studio
and music company, who died suddenly in 1992.  Of the many
industries being reshaped by changing communications, few have
altered as fast as media. Disney bought ABC, CBS and Viacom
merged, Seagram took over Polygram, Bertelsmann bought Random
House. The basic strategy behind the mergers, though, has been
the one Mr Ross spotted more than a decade ago: different media
platforms should be brought together within one company, so that
the same piece of content could be used in different ways, and
the different products could