Ted Turner, who has died aged 87, will be remembered primarily as “one of the great innovators of television”. And if Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane had been made 60 years later, there's a chance that the inspiration for Kane – newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst – would have been updated to Turner, the flamboyant, maverick founder of CNN who had an emotional hinterland every bit as complicated as Hearst's, says The Guardian.
In life, Ted Turner was arguably luckier than Hearst was. He was a master yachtsman who successfully defended the America's Cup in 1977 with an amateur crew and a second-hand boat – and, in later life, he was a pioneering champion of “global understanding” and environmentalism. Not the least of his achievements, says the FT, was helping to save the American bison from extinction.
Ted Turner launched CNN, the world's first round-the-clock news service, in 1980
A man of “restless reach”, who oversaw a vast empire of news, sports and entertainment channels, Ted Turner “cut a brash and vivid figure”, says The New York Times. To his chagrin, he was nicknamed “The Mouth of the South” and, in the early days at least, was often underestimated. When he launched CNN (Cable News Network) in Atlanta in 1980 as the world's first round-the-clock news service, the venture met with predictions it would “crash in flames”, says the FT.
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But Ted Turner was convinced there was an opening in the market, partly because he was fed up with returning from work at 7pm and finding he had missed the evening bulletin, notes his CNN obituary. CNN proved a ground-breaker, says Porter Bibb, Turner's biographer. It redefined news and served as the benchmark for all who followed.
Ted Turner was born Robert Edward Turner III, in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1938. His father, Ed, was “a man of violent mood swings and ruinously heavy drinking habits” who shot himself in the family home when Ted was 24. Already by this time a playboy, Ted Turner might have blown his inheritance. Instead, he set about building an empire.
A key move came in 1970, when he took over the heavily loss-making Atlanta TV station WJRJ and slowly built it up with cartoons, old movies and extensive coverage of the Atlanta Braves baseball team.
Ted Turner speaking at UNICEF's Evening for Children First in 2016
Ted Turner was “the first media mogul to buy into sports as programme fodder for his network”, notes The Guardian, buying the team in 1976 to protect his TV franchise.
Eventually, the combination of sport and movies drove the ratings of his “super-station” through the roof – paving the way for CNN. From the start, CNN was deliberately international. Its impact soared during the Gulf War of 1990-1991 when it was the only Western TV station allowed to stay in Baghdad, says the FT. The channel set new standards for its coverage of breaking conflicts and crises – and was cited by some as a key factor in the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
Ted Turner the philanthropist
Ted Turner with Jane Fonda in 1991
In 1996, Turner sold CNN to Time Warner, remaining an active member of the board. It left him more time to spend with actress Jane Fonda – the love of his life, third wife and fellow campaigner – on their Montana ranch. But within a few years disaster struck after Time Warner was acquired by AOL in 2001 in what came to be regarded as “one of the most value-destroying takeovers of all time”, says The Telegraph. Turner “lost upwards of $8 billion”. The same year, Fonda divorced him.
Still, he had “a billion or two left”, as he put it, and threw himself into ranching and ecology – in 2011, he was estimated to be the largest landowner in America – and in 2015 made good on an earlier pledge to donate $1 billion to the UN. He was diagnosed with dementia in 2018 and withdrew from public life: his five children serve on the board of the Turner Foundation. “Given his childhood,” Fonda told CNN, “he should've become a dictator… The miracle is that he became what he is. A man who will go to heaven.”
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