News Broadcasting
Obituary: Ted Turner – The man who put news first
He founded CNN, won the America’s Cup, brought bison back from the brink and once challenged Rupert Murdoch to a fist fight
FLORIDA: Ted Turner never did anything by halves. When he took over his late father’s billboard company at 24, he didn’t stop at billboards. He bought radio stations, then a struggling Atlanta television channel, then a baseball team, then a basketball team. Then, in 1980, he did something everyone told him was mad: he launched a television channel that broadcast news 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They called it the Chicken Noodle Network. He called it the greatest achievement of his life.
He was right, and they were wrong.
CNN went on to cover the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, the Challenger disaster and, most memorably, the Gulf War of 1991, the first conflict broadcast live into living rooms as it actually happened. President George Bush admitted he learned more from CNN than from the CIA. By the end of that year, Time magazine had named Turner its Man of the Year. Not bad for a college dropout from Savannah, Georgia.
Born in Cincinnati in 1938, Turner had a childhood grim enough to break most men. His father, a bully and a drinker, disciplined young Ted with a leather strap and a wire coat hanger. His sister died young after years of agonising illness. His father, in the grip of depression and debt, shot himself in 1963. Turner buried his grief in work, the only therapy he ever really trusted. His nicknames told you everything: “The Mouth of the South” and “Captain Outrageous.” He was brash, fearless and permanently combustible. When a Rupert Murdoch-sponsored yacht rammed his boat during a race in Australia in 1983, Turner challenged his great rival to settle it with fists. Murdoch declined. Turner had to content himself with launching CNN International in 1985, just as Murdoch was preparing Fox News, the right-wing juggernaut that would eventually dwarf CNN in the ratings wars.
Off the water, Turner was a world-class yachtsman, winning the America’s Cup in 1977. On land, he accumulated nearly 2m acres of ranch across the American west and became the world’s largest private bison rancher, with some 51,000 head. He even created a cartoon, Captain Planet, to teach children about the environment, just in case the bison weren’t making the point loudly enough.
His personal life was equally outsized. He married actress Jane Fonda in 1991, and for a decade they were one of America’s most glamorous couples. When she left him, he was brokenhearted. “I lost Jane. I lost my job. I lost my fortune, most of it,” he told CNN’s Piers Morgan in 2012. “Got a billion or two left. You can get by on that if you economise.” The AOL-Time Warner merger, which consumed his empire in 2000 and went on to become the most catastrophic deal in corporate history, had seen to the rest.
He responded, as ever, by giving money away. In 1997 he pledged $1bn to the United Nations, a cheque he finally finished writing in 2015. He funded nuclear disarmament, endangered species protection and the Goodwill Games, staged in Moscow when the rest of the world was too busy being geopolitically huffy to show up.
In 2018, Turner revealed he had Lewy body dementia. He died peacefully on Wednesday, surrounded by family. He was 87.
His father ran out of things to work towards at 54 and took his own life. Ted Turner never stopped moving forward, and the world is considerably louder and better informed for it.
Pictures courtesy: Turner Enterprises, Inc.
