Yes, there are two Time Warners, and AT&T isn’t buying the cable company

AT&T Inc. won’t be buying your cable TV, internet connection and home phone service provider. It wants to buy the other Time Warner.

Confused? You aren’t alone.

Concerned? Others are, too.

And if consumers were confused and worried about exactly who was in this proposed $85.4 billion corporate marriage, they had reason to be. Media outlets — including The Kansas City Star — helped to fuel the mix-up.

AT&T agreed to buy Time Warner Inc. It is not trying to buy Time Warner Cable.

Its deal is with the New York-based business that owns familiar producers of entertainment such as HBO, Warner Brothers and Turner Broadcasting, itself the owner of the Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and Turner Classic Movies, among other cable channels.

Time Warner Cable is a different company, also based in New York, that brings those shows to your TV set through a cable connection, as well as supplies internet service and home telephone service.

If AT&T wanted to buy Time Warner Cable, it would have to talk with its new owner, cable company Charter Communications that now calls itself Spectrum. It completed a $60 billion buyout of the cable company in May.

So why are there two Time Warners? Because they used to be one company.

Time Warner Inc., the company AT&T wants to buy, owned Time Warner Cable until March 2009, when it spun off the cable business as a separate publicly traded company. The cable company kept Time Warner in its name, and there have been two Time Warners ever since.

In the rush to report the merger talk this weekend, media outlets of all stripes were tripped up by the twin Time Warner twist.

The Bakersfield, Calif., ABC affiliate named the wrong Time Warner in its headline, and used the cable company’s imagery in sending out the news.

The Wall Street Journal had a report that Apple Inc. was interested in Time Warner Inc. (the same one AT&T has agreed to buy) well before AT&T neared a deal. But its story triggered a mistaken identity report by the website Investopedia that talked about Time Warner Cable. And that mistaken report spread thanks to the Twitter feed of a business news service called Nuusie Business that bills itself as being driven by artificial intelligence.

Even when writers got it right, the visuals caused confusion.

Forbes contributing writer Peter Cohan mulled over the idea of an AT&T deal for Time Warner Inc., but the image plugged into the story online and carried on tweets of the story included the Time Warner Cable logo.

And that’s where The Kansas City Star comes in. We made the same mistake in Saturday’s newspaper.

The Star included a New York Times account of the merger talks on page 9A but used a Time Warner Cable image on the front page to alert readers to the story inside.

This story was originally published October 24, 2016 at 3:55 PM with the headline "Yes, there are two Time Warners, and AT&T isn’t buying the cable company."