Soon TBS owned a large stable of cable stations, including TNT and the Cartoon Network, as well as film studios like Castle Rock Entertainment.Now Mr Turner has traded up, selling his cable TV empire to Time Warner for $7.5bn and moving across as vice-chairman (pocketing more than $2bn for himself in the process).While fortune smiled on both men, a rivalry was developing. Porter Bibb, an investment banker and biographer of Mr Turner, traces it back to a race from Sydney to Hobart in 1979 between an American yacht whose crew included Mr Turner, and an Australian entry funded by Mr Murdoch. The Turner boat won the race while Mr Murdoch's ran aground."There was this big drunken dinner after the race, and Turner got up and made mincemeat of Rupert," Mr Bibb told the Washington Post last week Mr Murdoch "was absolutely humiliated. I don't think he ever forgot it".That Mr Murdoch was jealous of CNN's reach and influence has been well documented. It gnawed at him that while Fox TV had made a respectable job of becoming America's fourth established network, its news division was feeble and unrespected. A 1994 attempt at getting one off the ground with the help of Andrew Neil, ex-editor of the London Sunday Times, was a flop.

The creation of FNC, therefore, is Mr Murdoch's latest stab at catching up at last with Mr Turner in becoming the world's premier provider of television news.Mr Turner's chip was always on the other shoulder: he ruled the news roost but had failed to become the kind of player Mr Murdoch is as the owner of a national American network. And it was not for lack of trying.In 1985, he tried to buy CBS but was rebuffed; a decade later he conducted an on-off courtship with NBC and that too came to nothing. By agreeing to be bought himself by Time Warner, Mr Turner appears to have given up on his network aspirations, but he has put himself at the top, or almost the top, of the largest, and arguably the most powerful, media corporation on the planet.THIS is much more than a personal vendetta, however bad the language. The liberalisation of the communications industry in the US, completed earlier this year, has unleashed forces that are transforming the landscape in America and worldwide. Most significant has been the rush of mergers and combinations, among them the $19bn marriage of Walt Disney and ABC television last year, Mr Murdoch's acquisition for $2.8bn of New World Communications and its string of US TV stations this year and, of course, Time Warner's deal with Turner.The prospect of a world in which every household will depend on a single cable supplied by a single company for telephone, television, banking, shopping, Internet and who knows what new superhighway treats, has convinced every player that only the biggest, the most global, the most multi-media and the richest have a hope of survival.

Only by dominating a lot of homes and a lot of media can you stay in the game.This is generating an industry of elephants, each with enormous power. Concern is growing that this process is restricting real choice and not broadening it as the deregulators promised. Mr Murdoch once remarked that he thought three national daily newspapers would be enough for Britain (two of them his own). Mr Turner clearly feels that one cable news service is enough for New York. Many will feel the two men deserve each other.But some in New York have an eerie feeling that this battle will not go all the way, for all the hard words, and that the two giants will end up colluding, rather than colliding.

Mr Murdoch's News Corporation and Time Warner depend upon each other in many ways and in many places across the globe Time, for instance, needs Mr Murdoch's satellites. Mr Murdoch needs content from Time, in particular from Warner Brothers, for Fox.John Malone, the man who likened the current bust-up to a Tyson fight, is expecting it to end with a whimper, not a bang. "In the end," he says, "they'll resolve it with some transfer of economics."How the empires square upNEWS CORPORATION(Rupert Murdoch is president and leading shareholder)Assets: pounds 14.3bn ($24bn)Sales: pounds 5.8bn ($9.7bn)Major businesses: BSkyB, Fox, Star (all TV); 20th Century Fox (films); News International(newspapers); HarperCollins (books).TIME WARNER(Ted Turner is vice-chairman and leading shareholder)Assets (incl TBS): pounds 15.8bn ($26.5bn)Sales: pounds 6.8bn ($11.5bn)Major businesses: CNN, TNT, Cartoon Network (all TV); Warner Brothers, Castle Rock (movies); Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated (magazines); Warner, Elektra, Atlantic (records); Warner Books.. Terence Donovan, the apprentice from London's East End who became a celebrated chronicler of cafe society and one of the Royal Family's favourite photographers, killed himself on Friday night, his family announced yesterday. As the news broke, tributes poured in from friends in the worlds of fashion and the arts.