In 2018, he revealed he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a neurodegenerative disease, which had been progressing in recent years.<\/p>\n
Turner\u2019s outsize public persona \u2014 some called him the \u201cMouth from the South\u201d for his freewheeling trash talk \u2014 matched the Georgian\u2019s influence on news, politics, sports and entertainment in the late 20th century. Turner repeatedly shook up established industries by invading quickly and expanding options for consumers, while railing against monolithic competitors who were less daring or nimble than his maverick Turner Broadcasting System.<\/p>\n
Turner created the cable stations TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies; he owned the Atlanta Braves baseball team, the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and revitalized professional wrestling with World Championship Wrestling. <\/p>\n
Turner was one of the first adopters of cable and satellite broadcasting technology, and for many rural Americans living beyond the tower signals of major cities, he was the first person to bring them interesting TV. <\/p>\n
The media baron constantly generated headlines. He had a Clark Gable pencil mustache, raced sailboats, cavorted with the late communist leader Fidel Castro in Cuba, and at one point married Academy Award-winning actress and activist Jane Fonda. His wealth enabled him to become one of the largest private landowners and wealthiest philanthropists in the United States. <\/p>\n
![\"Ted](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1778100132_136_.jpeg\")
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Ted Turner is shown in 1990 with actor Jane Fonda, whom he would marry the following year. The couple divorced in 2001.<\/p>\n
(Tony Duffy \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
His crowning cultural achievement was the creation of the Cable News Network in 1980, which created the model for today\u2019s cable news titans. The 24-hour news channel was not widely expected to be a success. All-night broadcasting had not been proven as a business model in an industry dominated nationally by corporate monoliths ABC, NBC and CBS, where news programming was something that happened on a set schedule. And CNN\u2019s headquarters weren\u2019t in media centers such as New York or Los Angeles, but in Atlanta.<\/p>\n
Turner believed that \u201cover-the-air networks would decline as audiences turned to videos and other outlets for entertainment on demand,\u201d wrote the late journalist Daniel Schorr in a 2001 memoir. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe network future belonged to whoever would deliver what was happening now \u2014 live news and live sports. That was why he wanted to be the first to deliver all news, all sports, all the time,\u201d wrote Schorr, whom Turner courted to join CNN.<\/p>\n
Within two years, CNN had more than 9 million subscribers. By the 2000s, Turner\u2019s once far-flung idea for an around-the-clock news service had become so successful that it had attracted imitators such as MSNBC (now called MS NOW) and Fox News.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe not only became profitable, but also changed the nature of news \u2014 from watching something that happened to watching it as it happened,\u201d Turner said of CNN in 2004<\/a>. \u201cIf we needed more money for [broadcasting from] Kosovo or Baghdad, we\u2019d find it. If we had to bust the budget, we busted the budget. We put journalism first, and that\u2019s how we built CNN into something the world wanted to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n Fox Corp. Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, who was both a rival and friend of Turner\u2019s, said his \u201cvision for 24-hour cable news transformed the media industry and gave viewers everywhere a front seat to witness history unfold. His impact as a trailblazer has left an indelible mark on our cultural landscape.\u201d <\/p>\n Turner recognized the value of global distribution long before his rivals, launching CNN\u2019s international business in the mid-1980s. He bought his first western property, the Bar None Ranch in Montana, and would eventually become one of the nation\u2019s largest individual landowners with nearly 2 million acres, which provide habitat for threatened species and his beloved American bison. <\/p>\n \u201cTed\u2019s entrepreneurial spirit, creative ambition and willingness to take risks changed the media industry forever,\u201d David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, said Wednesday in a note to employees. \u201cHe believed deeply in the power of ideas, in doing things differently and in building platforms that could inform, inspire and connect people around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 19, 1938, and raised in Georgia. A mischievous child \u2014 who became a mischievous adult despite attending the Georgia Military Academy (later renamed Woodward Academy) near Atlanta \u2014 he had a tough childhood at the hands of his alcoholic father, Ed. <\/p>\n \u201cNinety percent of the arguments I had with Ed were over his beating Ted too hard,\u201d Ted\u2019s mother, Florence Turner, recalled later.<\/p>\n \u201cMy dad ran an old-fashioned household and he insisted that pretty much everything had to be his way,\u201d Ted Turner said in a 2008 memoir. \u201cMy father and I had a complex relationship but I loved him.\u201d<\/p>\n The younger Turner attended Brown University but dropped out before graduating. His savings had run out, his father had stopped financially supporting his tuition, and in his final days on campus, he was suspended for bringing a woman to his dorm room, according to his memoir.<\/p>\n He soon joined his father\u2019s expanding billboard company, Turner Advertising, where he had been working off and on for years since childhood. <\/p>\n He inherited the business at the age of 24 after his father died by suicide. By then, Turner had already had years of experience, and he worked furiously to reverse his father\u2019s recent sale of part of the company to a competitor and paid down its daunting debt, an act that presaged the empire-building to come.<\/p>\n While growing the business, Turner also pursued his passion for competitive sailing, which is how he met his first wife, Judy Nye, in college. It\u2019s also how their marriage ended. Turner intentionally hit his wife\u2019s boat during a 1963 race to keep her from passing him, and the pair, who had two children, split immediately afterward.<\/p>\n It was to be the first of three divorces. . \u201cMy problem is I love every woman I meet,\u201d Turner said<\/a>. He would go on to win the America\u2019s Cup in 1977 while expanding his father\u2019s company into a modern multimedia conglomerate.<\/p>\n Leveraging the billboard business, Turner started buying local radio stations across the South in the late 1960s. In 1970, he bought the Channel 17 television station in Atlanta, competing with local network affiliates by airing old movies whose rights were affordable and picking up programming dropped by the less nimble competition. He didn\u2019t like putting news on prime time back then \u2014 too negative \u2014 and soon picked up broadcast rights for the Braves, Hawks and other local sports. <\/p>\n Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner, left, and former President Jimmy Carter attend Game 6 of the National League Championship Series in Atlanta in October 1998.<\/p>\n (Pat Sullivan \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n The Braves were a ratings hit, and when the team flailed and went up for sale, Turner\u2019s company became its owner in 1976. The team continued to flail but Turner boosted its profile with gimmicks such as sewing \u201cChannel 17\u201d on the back of a pitcher\u2019s jersey and dressing up as the team\u2019s batboy and manager, to the league\u2019s disdain. Turner bought the Hawks shortly after.<\/p>\n Facing entrenched local network affiliates, Turner expanded his independent station\u2019s reach across the South and then the U.S. by embracing the new technologies of cable and satellite broadcasting. Channel 17 became nationally known as the \u201cSuperStation,\u201d with call letters WTBS, later shortened to TBS. <\/p>\n The quirky Atlanta station\u2019s local broadcasts of old movies and sports games had become national broadcasts.<\/p>\n Still hungry for more, Turner finally turned his attention to news programming. He launched CNN in 1980 in a desperate bid to create a national 24-hour news channel before the broadcast titans ABC, NBC and CBS \u2014 and their gargantuan budgets \u2014 could beat him to it.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 24\/7 genre started with Ted Turner,\u201d veteran CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour said Wednesday on CNN. \u201cHe was the original, and he made us all proud, and he made us all hopeful, and he made us all strive for his vision of a better world.\u201d <\/p>\n There were some lean early years. But the nascent channel fended off an attempt by ABC to create a competitor, and critics could see the value of an ever-present news channel, even if quality was a little thin at times. <\/p>\n \u201cNon-viewers of CNN are missing a lot. There are so many reasons to watch,\u201d Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg wrote in 1986<\/a>, hailing the six-year-old channel as an \u201cinstitution.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not always good, but it\u2019s always there.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1986, CNN was the only broadcaster running live coverage when the Challenger shuttle liftoff ended in disaster. In 1991, the network gave Americans a live and uninterrupted look at the invasion of Iraq. American officials held news conferences knowing that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was watching them on CNN.<\/p>\n Americans had seen images of war before, but not broadcast nonstop into their homes.<\/p>\n \u201cCNN seeks to be a stethoscope attached to the hypothetical heart of the war, and to present us with its hypothetical pulse,\u201d the French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote, critiquing the conflict as a media spectacle. Media scholars began to wonder whether a \u201cCNN effect<\/a>\u201d was influencing government policy. Officials found that they now had to respond much more quickly to crises unfolding on live television. <\/p>\n Turner was not adversarial to communist countries of the era and even tried his own version of the Olympics, called the Goodwill Games, a bit of private-sector peace-craft that brought the Soviet Union and the U.S. out of their respective Olympic boycotts and back into direct competition in the 1980s. All on television, of course.<\/p>\n Turner also saw professional wrestling as part of his sports portfolio, at one point trying to pit his World Championship Wrestling program against competitor Vince McMahon\u2019s wrestling empire, then called the World Wrestling Federation. Turner similarly tried to take a bite out of MTV with the Cable Music Channel, with a promise \u201cto stay away from the excessive, violent or degrading clips to women that MTV is so fond of putting on.\u201d <\/p>\n Moralism was a Turner hallmark. Turner had started his life as a conservative \u2014 he had met his second wife, Jane Smith, at a 1964 fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater \u2014 but later turned toward more liberal-leaning causes, such as world peace, nuclear nonproliferation and fighting climate change.<\/p>\n At the 1990 American Humanist Assn.\u2019s annual convention, Turner presented his \u201cTen Voluntary Initiatives\u201d \u2014 his atheistic version of the Ten Commandments \u2014 which included pledges to world peace, environmentalism, nonviolence and \u201cto have no more than two children, or no more than my nation suggests.\u201d He would become a major private donor to the United Nations, pledging $1 billion and launching the United Nations Foundation. <\/p>\n In 1991, a year marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first U.S. war against Iraq and the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Time magazine named Turner its \u201cMan of the Year\u201d for his \u201cvisionary\u201d creation of CNN, which covered those events live. He also married Fonda that year (the ceremony was reported by CNN) and his Braves narrowly lost the World Series.<\/p>\n Time\u2019s honorific was also a nice bit of corporate synergy. The magazine\u2019s parent company, Time Warner, owned about 20% of Turner Broadcasting System stock.<\/p>\n Turner launched the Cartoon Network in 1992<\/a>, which helped introduce his then-newly-acquired Hanna-Barbera characters \u2014 including Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear and Scooby-Doo \u2014 to a new generation of viewers.<\/p>\n Adversaries thought that Turner\u2019s ventures could be reckless and impulsive. Far-seeing accomplishments in national broadcasting and the creation of CNN were also paired with several expensive misadventures, including a failed attempt to buy CBS. <\/p>\n Turner had to unwind a purchase of the MGM film studio less than a year after buying it, though he held on to one valuable asset: the studio\u2019s film library, which became the foundation of the Turner Classic Movies channel and, later, jewels in the Burbank-based Warner Bros. studio vault. <\/p>\n In 1996, Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner to form the world\u2019s largest media company, marking the beginning of the end of Turner\u2019s apex in corporate media. Time Warner\u2019s 2000 merger with budding internet giant AOL, then the largest-ever corporate merger, ended in disaster. Turner, who had not been a key player in the negotiations and had made no secret of his disdain for that deal, was fired as an executive. <\/p>\n \u201cTed Turner was one of the rare leaders who truly changed the trajectory of an industry,\u201d Versant Media Chief Executive Mark Lazarus, a former Turner underling, said in a statement. \u201cI saw firsthand his willingness to take risks and his belief that media could be something bigger and more impactful.\u201d <\/p>\n CNN Worldwide Chairman Mark Thompson added: \u201cHe was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand.\u201d<\/p>\n Turner resigned from the AOL Time Warner board<\/a> in 2003, and in 2007, announced he had sold his company shares<\/a>. In his later days, one of his best-known ventures was his Ted\u2019s Montana Grill restaurant chain. His philanthropy and land conservation efforts and protection of the American bison became guideposts during his retirement years.<\/p>\n While CNN maintains influence in the U.S. and abroad, its TV ratings have declined in recent years, a casualty of changing consumer behavior, the rise of social media, derision from President Trump and several ownership changes. <\/p>\n During the last decade, CNN has had three different corporate owners. The company is poised to be sold again, this time to billionaire David Ellison\u2019s Paramount Skydance. That proposed merger would bring CNN under the same roof as CBS News. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve often considered and joked about what I might want written on my tombstone,\u201d Turner said in his 2008 memoir. \u201cAt one point, when I felt like I could get out of the way of the press, \u2018You Can\u2019t Interview Me Here\u2019 was a leading candidate. … These days, I\u2019m leaning toward, \u2018I Have Nothing More to Say.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Turner is survived by his five children \u2014 Laura Turner Seydel, Robert Edward \u201cTeddy\u201d Turner IV , Rhett Turner, Beau Turner and Jennie Turner Garlington \u2014 14 grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. The family plans a private service and a public memorial at a later date.<\/p>\n Pearce is a former Times reporter. Times staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ted Turner, the brash media mogul who created CNN and revolutionized how Americans watched television, and who wielded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[15574,11950,112,15575,1707,5153,8,5282,15577,9,15578,15576,3032,7,15471,1186,2091],"class_list":{"0":"post-25413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-alcoholic-father","9":"tag-americans","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-channel","12":"tag-cnn","13":"tag-company","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-industry","16":"tag-mischievous-child","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-news-channel","19":"tag-south","20":"tag-sport","21":"tag-top-stories","22":"tag-turner","23":"tag-u-s","24":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116529577579269253","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1778100132_778_.jpeg\")
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