The New York Times: Cable TV trailblazer Ted Turner, creator of CNN and the 24-hour news cycle, dies at 87

Ted Turner, the media mogul who cut a brash and vivid figure on the American scene of the late 20th century by dominating the cable television industry, creating the 24-hour news cycle with CNN, and extending his restless reach into professional sports, environmentalism and philanthropy, died Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Florida.

He was 87.

Phillip Evans, a spokesperson for the family, confirmed the death. Turner announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.

Turner’s signature creation was CNN — the Cable News Network — which revolutionised television news in 1980 by presenting all hours of the day.

But his portfolio of business ventures bulged with much more, and their impact on American culture was considerable.

As a spin-off of CNN, Turner created the channel CNN Headline News and CNN International. He founded the cable and satellite sports and entertainment “superstation” that became known as TBS and spawned a sister channel, TNT, both of which continue to reach millions of homes.

In 1985, he bought for $1.5 billion the MGM studio’s library of films and nine years later created the cable franchise Turner Classic Movies, or TCM. He made a similar purchase of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and, relying on them, created the Cartoon Network in 1992. And in 1996, he merged his conglomerate, Turner Broadcasting System, with Time Warner to create one of the world’s largest media companies.

Along the way, he found the time and energy to captain the winning yacht in the America’s Cup race in 1977 and to take an active role as owner of the Atlanta Braves, giving the team extended national exposure on Turner-owned television.

“I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,” he told journalist Dale Van Atta in a Reader’s Digest article in 1998.

An Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Turner took astounding risks in business, often teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and then roaring back to multiply his fortune.

His personal life, too, was turbulent. His three marriages — his last, ending in 2001, was to Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda — were often rocked by his open displays of infidelity, heavy drinking and otherwise boorish behaviour.

Turner’s politics were contradictory and controversial. While claiming to be an arch-conservative Republican with warm ties to Christian evangelicals, he also befriended Cuban leader Fidel Castro and defended the repressive conduct of the Communist Chinese government.

In an extraordinary act of philanthropy, he donated $1bi to the United Nations, an organisation loathed by American conservatives. He adored hunting, yet he became a darling of environmentalists by buying more than 1 million acres of wilderness and ranch land and then setting them aside as nature preserves. He became the fourth-largest private landowner in the United States, with 2 million acres, in addition to vast tracts he owned in Argentina and other countries.

Turner’s influence was most apparent in the way his CNN transformed television news by presenting it around the clock with constant updates, conveying a sense of immediacy.

“Today, news is available when it actually happens, not when it’s convenient for the three broadcast networks to carry it,” the father-and-son authors Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg wrote in their 1995 biography, Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon.

Robert Edward Turner III — who was universally known as Ted — was born November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. His father, Robert Jr, a native Mississippian, moved to Ohio during the Depression and married Florence Rooney.

The elder Turner, known as Ed, later moved the family back south, to Georgia, where he started a billboard advertising company.

As a youth, Ted Turner attended the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the time an elite all-white military academy that emphasised conservative Christian values. During the summers, he worked for his father’s company, painting billboards.

Ted graduated in 1956 with good enough grades to gain entrance to Brown University. But he was no model student. A former classmate, William Kennedy, who went on to become a Brown University official, was quoted in Citizen Turner as describing young Ted as “a bigot, as maybe all of us were in a sense at the time.”

Turner, he said, drank excessively, sang Nazi songs outside a Jewish fraternity house and put up Ku Klux Klan signs on the dormitory doors of black students. He was finally tossed out of Brown after being caught in bed with a woman in his dorm room.

Turner then joined his father’s company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, sometimes working hard but often devoting more energy to parties and to sailing.

In 1963, his 53-year-old father, after incurring steep debts to expand his billboard operations and struggling with alcohol and drug abuse and depression, shot himself to death at the Turner home outside Savannah, Georgia.

Spurning the counsel of his father’s friends and accountants to sell off the business, he insisted on running it intact.

His ambition did not end with billboards, however. In 1970, he went into debt to buy a small, failing Atlanta television station, which he renamed WTCG, for Turner Communications Group, the name he gave his father’s company in the late ’60s after he began buying radio stations.

He figured he would use billboards to advertise his new television business. Lacking enough programming and drawing little advertising revenue, the station continued to haemorrhage red ink.

Turner went further into debt in 1976 to buy the Atlanta Braves, then a dismal baseball team. The purchase price was $500,000 in cash and $8 million at 6 per cent annual interest over 10 years. (The Braves franchise is now worth $3.35 billion, according to Forbes.)

This time, his gamble paid off. By broadcasting all 162 Braves games on WTCG, he was able to fill a programming void for a pittance of what it would have cost to buy or produce other programs. Soon the station’s cash flow was on the rise. (He also bought the Atlanta Hawks basketball franchise, in 1977.)

Turner took on more loans to expand his television business through satellite broadcasting. He faced hefty fees for the use of an RCA satellite and had to purchase expensive new broadcasting equipment.

This, too, was a winning gamble. He correctly surmised that he could use the satellite to beam his Atlanta station’s signal and its substantial sports programming to cable systems throughout the country.

In this way, what would become known as TBS — for Turner Broadcasting System — was born in late 1976. In addition to sports, he featured a steady stream of old movies and reruns of Lassie and I Love Lucy at relatively little cost.

At a time when the nascent cable industry needed to prove its programming value to subscribers, Turner’s station was considered essential to cable’s growth and expansion.

At the same time, Turner was developing a damaging reputation for philandering, drunkenness and public misconduct. His tumultuous first marriage, to Julia Nye (with whom he had two children, Laura and Teddy Jr), ended in the early 1960s shortly after Turner competed against his wife in a yacht race. Seeing she was on the verge of winning, he rammed her boat with his.

Later, he publicly humiliated his second wife, Jane Smith, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant with whom he had two sons, Beauregard and Rhett, and a daughter, Jennie, by taking his girlfriends to Braves games.

During these years of anxious debt concerns and explosive business expansion, Turner spent months at a time sailing and winning yachting accolades.

Turner put together a top-notch crew that helped him win the 1977 America’s Cup races off Newport, Rhode Island. But he did so only after coming close to being thrown out of the races. “During the Cup eliminations,” Time magazine reported, “he flirted with every girl in sight, crawled pubs with his crew, got tossed out of chic clubs and restaurants for boozy behaviour and turned Newport’s blue bloods positively purple.”

On June 1, 1980, he launched CNN, the first 24-hour all-news channel, basing it in Atlanta. Less than two years later, he began broadcasting CNN Headline News, with updates every half-hour.

CNN struggled initially, losing up to $2 million a month in its first two years. When the network first went on the air, it had fewer than 2 million viewers, compared with the three big networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — whose news broadcasts collectively reached more than 50 million households. And Turner had to count on his audience’s patience with his inexperienced, underpaid news staff and repeated technical problems.

Competitors derided CNN as the Chicken Noodle Network, and Turner’s network had to sue the Reagan administration and the three rival networks to gain inclusion in the White House press pool.

The need to fill 24 hours of coverage was daunting. Turner and his top executives went on a hiring binge, recruiting pundits such as Robert Novak and finding anchors and hosts like Lou Dobbs and Larry King from local TV stations and the world of radio, respectively.

Ahead of the ground operations in the Persian Gulf War, CNN found itself with a major advantage.

The network’s correspondent Peter Arnett was among the only Western reporters in Baghdad, providing robust on-the-ground reporting. By contrast, competitors were outside the country, and their dispatches were far more dependent on official U.S. government statements.

CNN’s coverage from Iraq brought it a prestigious Peabody Award, which noted that it had “matured from a cable curiosity to become an international service of inestimable importance.” Turner appeared on Time magazine’s cover as “Man of the Year” for 1991.

Cable station operators saw the strident Turner as their champion against the networks, and signed up to receive his CNN and TBS superstation.

Turner tarnished his image by uttering ethnic and racial slurs in public forums. In 1985, The Atlanta Constitution reported that Turner had said that the MX mobile missile program and the unemployment rate could be tackled together by hiring jobless African Americans to carry missiles on their backs from one silo to another.

Turner’s second marriage did not survive this troubled period. He made no attempt to hide his liaison with a former Playboy magazine cover model, Liz Wickersham, whom he tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into an anchor for a CNN program. In the late 1980s, Turner and his wife, Jane Smith, divorced.

Turner agreed in 1987 to sell 37 per cent of Turner Broadcasting to a group of 31 cable companies for $562m and to cede to them seven of the 15 seats on the TBS board. For the first time since his father’s death, Turner had to share control of his business.

With the days of wild gambles over, a new era of steady, spectacular prosperity was beginning for Turner. By 1989, his fortune had doubled to $5b. CNN and CNN Headline News reached more than 50 million households worldwide. His MGM film library, which included The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane, evolved into a lucrative investment, drawing millions of new viewers to Turner Network Television, or TNT, and then Turner Classic Movies.

Turner added to his empire in 1991 by purchasing, for $320m, Hanna-Barbera Productions, whose library included such characters as the Flintstones, the Jetsons and Yogi Bear. A year later, he introduced the Cartoon Network, a 24-hour all-cartoon channel that proved immensely popular. And in 1993, he acquired the film production companies New Line Cinema and Castle Rock.

His colleagues and employees began to report that Turner had mellowed. Episodes of women-chasing and tantrums declined. In interviews, Turner said he had begun taking lithium, a drug often prescribed to counter manic-depressive behaviour.

He remained popular with many Americans, who saw him as an affable, successful rebel. Adding to his celebrity was his unlikely courtship of Fonda. Both were wealthy and famous, but they were opposites in many ways.

He wooed her by emphasising their similarities, including as the children of a suicidal parent (in Fonda’s case, her mother) and their friendships with icons of the far left, like Castro.

The couple married in 1991 — the third marriage for each — and in subsequent years, Turner devoted more of his time to environmentalism and global peace, while Fonda virtually retired from Hollywood to devote herself to Turner and his new causes.

Their marriage lasted 10 years, with Fonda saying his insatiable need for other women and her own deepening spirituality, including an embrace of Christianity, were underlying causes.

Turner’s survivors include two daughters, Laura Turner Seydel, who is chair emeritus of the Captain Planet Foundation, a Turner environmental group, and Sara Jean Turner Garlington, who goes by Jennie, an environmentalist and trustee of the Turner Foundation.

He is also survived by three sons, Robert E Turner IV, known as Teddy, who has been an executive with Turner television interests; Rhett Lee Turner, a filmmaker and photographer; and Reed Beauregard Turner, known as Beau, who is board chair of the Turner Endangered Species Fund; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

By the mid-1990s, Turner appeared to have reached the limit of his empire-building ambitions. In 1995, he reached a deal to merge his Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner by agreeing to exchange all his company shares for $7.5b worth of Time Warner stock. Gerald . Levin, the Time Warner boss, became chair and CEO of the new conglomerate, which kept the Time Warner name, while Turner accepted the post of vice chair.

In 2001, when the internet company AOL bought Time Warner for $160 billion, creating the world’s biggest media enterprise, Turner moved further down the corporate hierarchy and resigned from the board two years later.

By 1996, he had amassed nearly 1.3 million acres of ranchland in Montana, New Mexico and Nebraska. His herd of 12,000 buffalo was one of the largest in the nation. And he announced that his land would be kept undeveloped and later set aside for nature preserves.

He started renewable energy ventures; opened a chain of restaurants that serve bison, Ted’s Montana Grill; and founded what is now Ted Turner Reserves, offering guided “eco-conscious” tours and luxury lodging in New Mexico.

He also became a major philanthropist, creating foundations devoted to protecting the environment, supporting the United Nations and reducing the threat of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare.