On Friday the Kerry Stokes media era fizzled out.

At 4.26pm Southern Cross Austereo dropped an announcement to the ASX slightly earlier than expected — 85-year-old Stokes has stepped down from the board.

Just as all political careers end in failure, the same could be said for media moguls. Very few quit at the top.

Stokes steps down — although his son Ryan remains on the SCA board — with his stake indirectly held through his private company Australian Capital Equity worth just $32m. Last night’s closing price for SCA was $314m. SGH Ltd holds 20.06% of the company, and in turn Stokes owns 50.93% of SGH.

His billionaire status comes from SGH, which is mainly an industrial conglomerate.

Stokes deserves much credit as a self-made man who came from a hard background and built enormous business success. But he was no media visionary.

He was wily in grabbing the media assets he wanted. He crept up the share register of West Australian Newspapers until taking control and merging it with his Seven TV network to create Seven West Media 15 years ago.

But Australia’s TV sector is weaker for having had Stokes at the top table for so long. He waged war against his rivals. The failure of his pay TV service C7 Sport saw Seven unsuccessfully sue Nine, Ten, Fox........

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