David Bauder
Ted Turner, the outspoken television pioneer who created a media empire and transformed the news business by creating CNN and introducing the 24-hour cable news cycle, has died aged 87.
The father of five died on Wednesday surrounded by his family, according to Turner Enterprises, the company that oversees his vast business interests and investments.
Turner’s empire expanded far beyond media – owning professional sports teams in Atlanta and huge chunks of the American West. He raced yachts too, defending the America’s Cup in 1977.
He donated a stunning $US1 billion ($1.4 billion) to United Nations charities and fuelled conservation efforts.
Turner married three women – most famously actor Jane Fonda – and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”
He once bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
He was slowed in later years by Lewy body dementia. Long since out of the television business, he concentrated on philanthropy.
His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.
US President Donald Trump, reacting to Turner’s death, called him “one of the Greats of All Time.”
“Whenever I needed him, he was there, always willing to fight for a good cause!” Trump posted on social media.
Turner’s signature achievement was creating the Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980.
In part, Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked past 8pm, after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air.
He took a chance by starting the operation in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.
CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad, but CNN stayed, capturing arresting images of a war’s outbreak.
Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.
“The mistake I made was losing control of the company,” he later said.
Turner’s rise from uni dropout to media mogul
Robert Edward Turner III was born November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was nine, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University, Turner came to Atlanta to work for his domineering father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.
On December 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems across the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation.
TBS’ motley collection of old movies and sitcom reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted fans nationwide through their superstation exposure.
In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with scepticism. But the acquisition gave his company a library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks.
He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.
Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of southern Plains bison.
He had a net worth of $US2.5 billion in 2023 but had dropped off Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money,” Turner once said.
Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus freaks,” later apologising for both remarks.
Turner grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his 1997 pledge to give $US1 billion to UN charities. He joined former US Senator Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a US-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
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