Ted Turner, billionaire media mogul and CNN founder, dies at 87
He conquered the broadcasting industry and reshaped the television landscape with CNN, the first 24-hour cable news network in the U.S.
He was number 358 on the list.
Ted Turner, the high-flying media tycoon, entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded CNN and revolutionized American cable television, died on Wednesday.
He was 87.
Turner’s death was first reported by CNN, citing a Turner Enterprises news release.
"Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgment," CNN chairman and CEO Mark Thompson said in a statement. "He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN."
In his prime, Turner was one of the kings of broadcasting, a brash but savvy visionary. He turned the Turner Broadcasting System into a behemoth, establishing the “superstation” concept and launching channels such as TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies.
He transformed culture and politics with Cable News Network, the first 24-hour news channel in the country. CNN helped to fundamentally change the format and speed of TV news, laying the path for competitors such as Fox News and MSNBC, now known as MS Now.
Turner, with his wily grin and thin mustache, jumped into
other ventures with the zeal of an Old West prospector. He once owned the
Atlanta Braves, marketing the baseball franchise as “America’s Team.” He
created Ted’s Montana Grill, a restaurant chain that serves bison meat.
He was a staple of magazine covers and newspaper business sections, cultivating a reputation for keen instincts and a no-filter style. He sometimes ran into trouble for injudicious comments about world affairs or religion, earning the nickname “Captain Outrageous.”
“I don’t have any idea what I’m going to say. I say what comes to my mind,” he told The New Yorker for a profile published in 2001.
He was also a prolific philanthropist, environmentalist and
self-described “do-gooder.” He famously gave $1 billion to the United Nations
and co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit advocacy
organization.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati to Robert Edward Turner Jr. and Florence Turner. Turner’s father was a wealthy billboard advertising magnate who owned his own firm, Turner Advertising.
The young Turner enrolled at Brown University in 1956, but
he was kicked out three years later, reportedly for having a woman in his dorm
room. Turner then joined his father at the family business, headquartered in
Atlanta, becoming general manager of a branch office in 1960.
The elder Turner, struggling with financial hardships and mental health issues, died by suicide in 1963; his son took over the advertising company, taking on the roles of president and CEO.
Turner Advertising was renamed Turner Communications with the acquisition of several radio stations. Turner branched out into other media, purchasing a beleaguered UHF television station in Atlanta, as well as the rights to old movies and sitcom reruns.
In the mid-1970s, Turner made one of the most consequential
decisions of his career. He was one of the first media company owners to use
satellite technology to broadcast his station to a national cable television
viewing audience, widening his reach and boosting revenues.
Turner filled the “Super Station” lineup with a combination of vintage Hollywood titles, throwback sitcoms and baseball games.
In 1979, the company rebranded once again, becoming Turner Broadcasting System Inc. and establishing itself as one of the key enterprises of the cable television revolution.
Turner leveraged his media success in sports, buying the Atlanta Braves in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks in 1977. The Braves won the World Series in 1995 under his ownership.
In the late 1970s, Turner came up with the idea for a 24-hour cable news channel — a significant shift in an era when the “Big Three” network news programs still reigned supreme and many viewers did not conceive of news consumption as a minute-to-minute activity.
CNN aired its first broadcast on June 1, 1980, anchored by
the husband-and-wife duo of David Walker and Lois Hart.
In the mid-1980s, as CNN emerged as a cornerstone of the cable lineup and a household name, Turner bought MGM/UA Entertainment Co., which included Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s sprawling library of more than 4,000 movies.
He offended cinephiles and much of the Hollywood establishment with his plans to “colorize” black-and-white films from the MGM library. In a 1989 article, the Los Angeles Times called him “The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate.”
The critic Roger Ebert wrote that Turner’s airing of a colorized version of “Casablanca” was “one of the saddest days in the history of the movies.”
“It is sad because it demonstrates that there is no movie that Turner will spare, no classic however great that is safe from the vulgarity of his computerized graffiti gangs,” Ebert wrote.
Turner eventually backed down, deciding the colorization process was not cost-efficient. He soon sold off MGM/UA, but he retained ownership of the MGM movie library, which later formed the backbone of programming on Turner Classic Movies, or TCM, launched in 1994.
Turner married for a third and final time in 1991, partnering with the Oscar-winning actor and activist Jane Fonda.
The union between an avatar of American capitalism and an outspoken progressive who railed against the status quo raised eyebrows, but the two were smitten from the start and bonded over their shared curiosity about the world.
“In his heart, Ted is not a wealthy, powerful, privileged person,” Fonda told interviewers for “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” an HBO documentary released in 2018. “He’s a little boy who likes to play, and who has wild brilliance, and that’s what I was attracted to.”
“We were both children of suicide, so we understood each
other,” Fonda added.
The couple, by all accounts, savored their years together, spending countless hours in nature — hiking, fly-fishing, horse riding and other “adventures,” Fonda said. But the marriage ultimately ran aground, and they divorced in 2001.
“It was very difficult,” Turner told the HBO documentarians. “I’ve survived, and so has she, but I feel like I was happier when I was with her than subsequently.”
In 1996, Time Warner Inc. acquired Turner Broadcasting System for $7.5 billion. Turner was named vice chairman of Time Warner and presided over the new company’s cable TV brands.
Time Warner then merged with the former Internet giant AOL in 2001, with Turner becoming vice chairman and senior adviser of the newly formed AOL Time Warner Inc. Two years later, he resigned as vice chairman.
It was widely reported that Turner was forced out, and his departure effectively marked the end of his reign as a media industry chief. But in recent decades, he remained productive as a philanthropist and environmentalist.
He donated a staggering $1 billion to the United Nations in 1998; the funds were used to create the United Nations Foundation, a charitable group that supports the goals of the U.N.
He co-founded, with former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization that seeks to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction and advocates for global nonproliferation.
He supported various conservation projects and environmental causes. He was also one of the top landowners in the U.S., and he used the extensive acreage under his care to promote sustainability and ecotourism.
He was particularly invested in growing the country’s bison herd, and in 2002 he co-founded Ted’s Montana Grill, a restaurant chain that purportedly offered the “largest bison menu” on the planet.
In his later years, Turner made comments suggesting he was
uncomfortable with the wave of corporate media consolidation he once
symbolized.
“In the media, as in any industry, big corporations play a vital role, but so do small, emerging ones. When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas,” he wrote in a 2004 essay for Washington Monthly.
Turner published an autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” in 2008. Ten years later, he announced that he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia.
“It’s a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer’s. It’s similar to that. But not nearly as bad. Alzheimer’s is fatal,” Turner told journalist Ted Koppel in the fall of 2018 from his Montana ranch.
Turner was married and divorced three times. He had five children — two from his first marriage, to Judy Gale Nye, and three from his second marriage, to Jane Shirley Smith.
Turner has been regarded as one of the entrepreneurs who transformed the cable industry and has been referred to as "the Alexander the Great of broadcasting" by Slate magazine:
While Turner has been described as a "valiant liberator" and cast the networks as oppressive scoundrels, in content his programming fell short of inspiring. His network was built on sitcom reruns, old movies, cartoons, and Atlanta Braves games. He found an audience for classics of a bygone time, along with slightly down-market content like professional wrestling. Nonetheless, he would find glorious terms even for retreads and junk, claiming to be pulling America back to television's golden age: "I want to get it back to the principles" he once said, "that made us good." Nostalgic, Manichean, and boot-strappy: like programmer, like programming
The cable industry boomed in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
as nearly a dozen cable networks launched based on the Turner model. They
include much of what we now consider the staples of cable TV, including ESPN,
MTV, Bravo, Showtime, BET, the Discovery Channel, and the Weather Channel.
Those are the better-known channels only by virtue of having survived; others,
such as ARTS, CBS Cable, and the Satellite News Channel, folded or were
acquired by other companies.
Professional wrestling promoter and former Senior Vice President of WCW second in charge after Turner, Eric Bischoff praised Turner claiming "He was an inspirational leader, he was a risk taker, he appreciated people who took risks, he was not afraid of failure while most people are. Ted was not afraid to fail, he was more afraid of not trying and not conquering that next horizon."
On June 24, 1999, Vince McMahon stated on Late Night with
Conan O'Brien: "All I'll say about Ted is he's a son-of-a-bitch, other
than that, he's probably not a bad guy, but I don't like him at all".
Later in 2021, when asked about the upstart AEW in comparison to Turner's WCW,
McMahon dismissed AEW, stating that "it certainly is not a situation where
'rising tides' because that was when Ted Turner was coming after us with all of
Time Warner's assets as well"
When Turner was 26, he entered sailing competitions at the Savannah Yacht Club and competed in Olympic trials in 1964. He first attempted to win the America's Cup in 1974, losing in the defender's trials, aboard 12 Metre class yacht US–25 Mariner. Turner was defeated by Ted Hood aboard US–26 Courageous.
Turner was asked to join the 1977 America's Cup defense syndicate formed by Hood and Lee Loomis for the New York Yacht Club. That group still owned the Courageous but decided to design and construct a new 12 Metre – US–28 Independence – to defend the 1974 America's Cup victory. However, in the trials, with Turner as skipper aboard the 3-year-old Courageous proved to be the faster than Hood and Independence and was selected to race in the 1977 races.
From 13 to 18 September 1977 Courageous, with Turner in
command, defeated the challenger Australia, skippered by Noel Robins, in a
four-race sweep. Courageous' greatest winning margin out of all four races was
2 minutes and 23 seconds.
Awards and honors
Emmy Awards
Lifetime Achievement – Sports (2014)
Lifetime Achievement – News & Documentary (2015)
Sports
1995: World Series champion (as owner of the Atlanta Braves)
1996: Atlanta Braves home ballpark (1996–2016) named Turner
Field
2004: Commemorative banner at State Farm Arena honoring his
tenure as owner of the Atlanta Hawks
Media
1984: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of
Achievement
1989: Paul White Award, Radio Television Digital News
Association
1990: Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.
1991: Time magazine's Man of the Year.
1997: Peabody Award winner
1999: Edison Achievement Award for his commitment to
innovation throughout his career
2000: Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in
Communication
Halls of Fame
1991: Television Hall of Fame inductee
2004: Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
Organizational
1991: Audubon medal from the National Audubon Society
2001: Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal for Humanitarianism
2010: Georgia Trustee, an honor given by the Georgia
Historical Society, in conjunction with the Governor of Georgia[78]
2013: Lone Sailor Award, which recognizes Navy, Marine and
Coast Guard veterans who have distinguished themselves in their civilian
careers (Turner is a Coast Guard veteran)
