Ted Turner made television news a pervasive presence. Before he started the first 24-hour cable news channel, the Cable News Network, in 1980, Americans got their news from the three major networks’ 6:30 p.m. broadcasts. By 7 p.m., Turner said, “the news was over.” CNN upended that model, and it was just one of Turner’s achievements. He built the Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting System into a juggernaut incorporating seven cable networks. A ferocious competitor, he owned three sports teams, including the Atlanta Braves, and skippered his yacht to a win in the 1977 America’s Cup. Along the way he piled up billions of dollars but later gave much of it to charity, and bought and conserved nearly 2 million acres of wildland.
Turner did none of this quietly. Headstrong and an incorrigible womanizer whose three wives included actress Jane Fonda, the “Mouth of the South” challenged rival Rupert Murdoch to a fistfight, called Christianity “a religion for losers,” and compared himself to Winston Churchill and Alexander the Great. “If only I had a little humility,” he once said, “I’d be perfect.”
Raised in Savannah, Ga., Robert Edward Turner III was shaped by his “complicated relationship with his father,” an abusive drunk who ran a billboard company, said The Wall Street Journal. Turner both feared him and sought his approval. After military school he attended Brown University, but he was suspended for bedding a woman in his dorm room; he left Brown and returned to work for his dad. When the elder Turner shot himself dead in the bathtub, Turner inherited the business at 24. He “buried his shock and grief in work,” said CNN.com. He bought up radio stations, then a struggling Atlanta TV station. He turned it around by acquiring the rights to Braves games, and as it became profitable “he started to think bigger.” Beaming the TV signal up to a satellite, he created what became TBS, “cable TV’s first superstation,” reaching 2 million subscribers with a lineup of sports, movies, and sitcoms.
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Turner’s move into 24-hour news was seen as a “major gamble,” said The Washington Post, and CNN, which went live on June 1, 1980, had a rocky start. “Initially laughed off” due to its “lowbudget look” and technical snafus, it bled tens of millions of dollars in its first five years. But gradually it “upended the way news was consumed, riveting audiences” by covering stories such as the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as they unfolded. CNN’s fortunes took a leap during the 1991 Gulf War, said the Associated Press. While most TV journalists fled Baghdad, CNN correspondents stayed put and captured vivid scenes, including anti-aircraft tracers lighting up the sky and reporters “flinching from the concussion of bombs.” CNN’s coverage won a Peabody Award, and in 1991 Turner was named Time’s man of the year.
As he notched business wins, Turner earned a reputation “for philandering, drunkenness, and public misconduct,” said The New York Times. His marriages were “rocked by open displays of infidelity,” and he “further tarnished his image by uttering ethnic and racial slurs.” But he “could nonetheless be a man of great charm.” Fonda, his wife from 1991 to 2001, called him “a 3D-stereophonic, Shakespearean-level sound-and-light show” and the public saw him as a lovable rogue. Turner continued to expand TBS, buying the Hanna-Barbera catalog and the MGM film library to create the Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies. But by the mid-1990s, he “appeared to have reached the limit of his empire-building ambitions.” In a move he later termed a terrible mistake, he sold TBS to Time Warner, giving up an operational role. When Time Warner made what would prove a disastrous merger with AOL in 2001, he resigned amid reports he’d been forced aside, said NBCNews.com. That “effectively marked the end of his reign as a media industry chief.”
In the ensuing years Turner threw himself into philanthropy and conservation, said The Telegraph (U.K.). He donated $1 billion to U.N. charities and “supported a range of environmental initiatives.” Buying land in a dozen states, he acquired the nation’s largest herd of bison and started the bison-focused chain Ted’s Montana Grill. In 2018, Turner revealed he had Lewy body dementia, a degenerative brain disorder. Despite his regrets over the Time Warner debacle, he looked back fondly on a career he said was guided less by a profit motive than a spirit of adventure. “Hardly anybody wins all the time,” he said in 2008. “I’ve won more than most.”
