Wednesday, May 6, 2026

A02045 - Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle

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Ted Turner
Turner in 1985
Born
Robert Edward Turner III

November 19, 1938
Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
DiedMay 6, 2026 (aged 87)
Lamont, Florida, U.S.
EducationBrown University (attended)
Years active1960–2018
Known forTurner Broadcasting System
Spouses
  • Julia Nye
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1960; div. 1964)​
  • Jane Smith
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1965; div. 1988)​
  • ​
    ​
    (m. 1991; div. 2001)​
Children5
WebsiteOfficial website

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Ted Turner (born November 19, 1938, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died May 6, 2026, near Tallahassee, Florida) was an American broadcasting entrepreneur, philanthropist, sportsman, and environmentalist who founded a media empire that included several television channels that he created, notably CNN.

(Read Ted Turner’s Britannica entry on the U.N. Foundation.)

Early life

Turner grew up in an affluent family; his father owned a successful billboard-advertising company. In 1956 Turner enrolled at Brown University but was expelled three years later, reportedly for having a woman in his dormitory room. Turner joined the family business, which was based in Atlanta, and became the general manager of one of the company’s branch offices in 1960. Following his father’s suicide in 1963, Turner took over the ailing business and restored it to profitability.

Media empire

In 1970 Turner purchased a financially troubled UHF television station in Atlanta, and within three years he made it one of the few truly profitable independent stations in the United States. In 1975 Turner’s company was one of the first to use a new communications satellite to broadcast his station (later renamed WTBS, or TBS, the Turner Broadcasting System) to a nationwide cable television audience, thereby greatly increasing revenues. To reflect the business’s shift from billboards, Turner renamed it Turner Communications Company, and in 1979 the venture became known as Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

Turner went on to create two other highly successful and innovative cable television networks: CNN (Cable News Network; 1980), the first 24-hour news channel, and TNT (Turner Network Television; 1988). Through the Turner Broadcasting System, he also purchased the Atlanta Braves major league baseball team in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks professional basketball team in 1977. In 1986 he bought the MGM/UA Entertainment Company, which included Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s library of more than 4,000 films. Turner set off a storm of protest when he authorized the “colorizing” of some of the library’s black-and-white motion pictures.

The large debt burden sustained from these purchases compelled Turner to almost immediately sell off not only MGM/UA but also a share of the Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., though he retained control of it. He also kept ownership of the MGM movie library, which included many Hollywood classics. In 1991 he married actress-activist Jane Fonda; they divorced in 2001.

Hollywood, backlash, and the spotlight

Turner’s move into Hollywood came with an agenda. After acquiring the MGM film library, he pushed to colorize black-and-white classics, arguing it would broaden their appeal. The industry pushed back hard, turning the effort into one of his most public missteps.

His 1991 marriage to Jane Fonda placed him at the center of a different kind of spotlight, linking his growing media influence with celebrity and political activism. By the time they divorced in 2001, Turner’s business empire was also entering a period of upheaval following the AOL Time Warner merger—an inflection point that marked the start of his declining influence within the company he built.

Turner resumed the expansion of his media empire in the 1990s with the creation of the Cartoon Network (1992) and Turner Movie Classics (1994). He also oversaw the purchase (1993) of two motion-picture production companies, New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment. In 1996 the media giant Time Warner Inc. acquired the Turner Broadcasting System for $7.5 billion. As part of the agreement, Turner became a vice-chairman of Time Warner and headed all of the merged company’s cable television networks. When Time Warner merged with Internet company AOL in 2001, Turner became vice-chairman and senior adviser of AOL Time Warner Inc. In 2003 he resigned as vice-chairman of that company, and three years later Turner announced that he would not seek reelection to its board of directors.

Philanthropist, conservationist, and sportsman

Turner was a noted philanthropist and environmentalist. He donated some $1 billion to establish (1998) the United Nations Foundation, and he created (2001) the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which sought to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction. He provided extensive funding to conservation efforts through his Turner Foundation (created 1990). Turner was one of the largest landowners in the United States, and many of his ranches were involved in sustainability and ecotourism. He oversaw efforts to rebuild and promote the country’s bison herd, and in 2002 he cofounded Ted’s Montana Grill, a restaurant chain that reportedly had the world’s “largest bison menu.” He also cocreated and cowrote the animated children’s series Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–96), which centers on teenaged environmental activists.

In addition, Turner was an avid sportsman, especially known as a yachtsman. He piloted Courageous to win the America’s Cup in 1977. He also founded and sponsored the Goodwill Games (1986–2001), citing his hope of easing Cold War tensions through friendly athletic competition.

Turner was the recipient of numerous honors, including a Peabody Award in 1997. In 2006 he received the Bower Award for Business Leadership from the Franklin Institute—a premier science and technology education and development center in Philadelphia. In April 2007 Junior Achievement—a nonprofit educational organization that provides hands-on business training programs to youths throughout the world—inducted Turner into its U.S. Business Hall of Fame. In 2008 Turner released his autobiography, Call Me Ted.

In 2018 Turner announced that he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica


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Robert Edward Turner III (November 19, 1938 – May 6, 2026) was an American businessman, television producer, media proprietor and philanthropist. He founded CNN, the first 24-hour cable news channel. In addition, he founded WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television, as well as television network TNT.

As a philanthropist, he gave $1 billion to create the United Nations Foundation, a public charity to broaden U.S. support for the United Nations. Turner served as chairman of the United Nations Foundation board of directors.[1] Additionally, in 2001, Turner co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative with U.S. senator Sam Nunn (D-GA). NTI is a non-partisan organization dedicated to reducing global reliance on, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. He served as co-chairman of the board of directors.

Turner's media empire began with his father's billboard business, Turner Outdoor Advertising, which he took over in March 1963, after his father's suicide at the age of 53.[2][3] It was worth $1 million. His purchase of an Atlanta UHF station in 1970 began the Turner Broadcasting System. In 1980, he founded CNN, one of the most prominent news networks in the world. Turner turned the Atlanta Braves baseball team into a nationally popular franchise (including winning the 1995 World Series under his ownership), and launched the charitable Goodwill Games. He helped revive interest in professional wrestling by purchasing Jim Crockett Promotions which was then rebranded as World Championship Wrestling (WCW).

Turner's penchant for controversial statements earned him the nicknames "The Mouth of the South" and "Captain Outrageous".[4][5] He also devoted his assets to environmental causes. He was the largest private landowner in the United States until John C. Malone surpassed him in 2011.[6][7] He used much of his land for ranches to re-popularize bison meat (for his Ted's Montana Grill chain) and amassed the largest herd in the world. He also created the environmental-themed animated series Captain Planet and the Planeteers.[8]

Early life

Robert Edward Turner III was born on November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Ohio,[9] the son of Florence (née Rooney) and Robert Edward Turner II, a billboard magnate.[10][11] When he was nine, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he was raised as an Episcopalian.[12] He attended The McCallie School, a private boys' preparatory school in Chattanooga, Tennessee.[13]

Turner attended Brown University and was vice-president of the Brown Debating Union and captain of the sailing team. He became a member of Kappa Sigma. Turner initially majored in classics. His father wrote that this choice made him "appalled, even horrified", and that he "almost puked".[14] Turner later changed his major to economics, but before receiving a degree, he was expelled for having a female student in his dormitory room.[15] He was awarded an honorary B.A. from Brown University in November 1989 when he returned to campus to give the keynote address for the National Association of College Broadcasters' second annual conference.[16]

Turner joined the United States Coast Guard Reserve in order to fulfill his service obligation before he ended up getting drafted. Honored by the United States Navy Memorial with its Lone Sailor Award in 2013, Turner told The Washington Post, "I liked boats", and ended up getting "deployed to some pretty sweet places — Charleston and Fort Lauderdale."[17]

Business career

WTBS

After leaving Brown University, Turner returned to the South in late 1960 to become general manager of the Macon, Georgia, branch of his father's business. Following his father's suicide in March 1963, Turner became president and chief executive of Turner Advertising Company when he was 24 and turned the firm into a global enterprise. He joined the Young Republicans, saying he "felt at ease among these budding conservatives and was merely following in [his father]'s far-right footsteps", according to It Ain't as Easy as It Looks.[2]

During the Vietnam War era, Turner's business prospered; it had "virtual monopolies in Savannah, Macon, Columbus, and Charleston" and was the "largest outdoor advertising company in the Southeast", according to It Ain't as Easy as It Looks. The book observed that Turner "discovered his father had sheltered a substantial amount of taxable income over the years by personally lending it back to the company" and "discovered that the billboard business could be a gold mine, a tax-depreciable revenue stream that threw off enormous amounts of cash with almost no capital investment".[18]

In the late 1960s Turner began buying several Southern radio stations.[12] In 1969, he sold his radio stations to buy a struggling television station in Atlanta, UHF channel 17 WJRJ-TV.[19] At the time, UHF stations did well only in markets without VHF stations, like Fresno, California, or in markets with only one station on VHF. Independent UHF stations were not ratings winners or that profitable even in larger markets, but Turner concluded that this would change as people wanted more than several choices. He changed the call sign to WTCG, representing Turner Communications Group,[20] but promoted as "Watch This Channel Grow".[21] Initially, the station ran old movies from prior decades, along with theatrical cartoons and bygone sitcoms and drama programs. As better syndicated product fell off the VHF stations, Turner would acquire it for his station at a very low price. WTCG ran mostly second- and even third-hand programming of the time, including fare such as Gilligan's Island, I Love Lucy, Star Trek, Hazel, and Bugs Bunny. Other low-cost content included humorist Bill Tush reading the news at 3 a.m., prompting Turner to jokingly comment that, "we have a 100% share at this time". Tush once delivered the news with his "co-anchor" Rex, a German Shepherd. The dog (who belonged to an associate) was shown next to Tush on set, wearing a shirt and tie while eating a peanut butter sandwich. Rex appeared only on one episode, but a myth grew where many people thought the dog was a nightly guest.[22] In 1972, WTCG acquired the rights to telecast Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks games.[23] In addition to the Atlanta station, Turner bought and ran the former WCTU in Charlotte, North Carolina, which became WRET-TV after his initials.[24] The station initially flailed to the point that, in 1972, Turner appeared on the station to appeal for contributions from viewers;[25][26] by 1975, the station was profitable and one of the most-watched independent stations in the country.[27] In 1976, each of the contributors to the station four years prior received checks returning their money—with interest.[28][29] WRET became Charlotte's NBC affiliate in 1978.[30]

refer to caption
Turner c. 1976

In 1976, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed WTCG to use a satellite to transmit content to local cable television providers around the nation. On December 17, 1976, the rechristened WTCG-TV Super-Station began to broadcast old movies, situation comedy reruns, cartoons, and sports nationwide to cable-television subscribers.[31] As cable systems developed, many carried his station to free their schedules, which increased his viewers and advertising. The number of subscribers eventually reached 2 million, and Turner's net worth rose to $100 million. He bought a 5,000-acre (2,000 ha) plantation in Jacksonboro, South Carolina, for $2 million.[32]

In 1976, Turner bought the Atlanta Braves, and in 1977, he bought the Atlanta Hawks, partially to provide programming for WTCG.[33][34] Using the rechristened WTBS superstation's status to broadcast Braves games into nearly every home in North America, Turner turned the Braves into a household name even before their run of success in the 1990s and early 2000s.[35] At one point, he suggested to pitcher Andy Messersmith, who wore number 17, that he change his surname to "Channel" to promote the television station.[36]

In 1978, Turner struck a deal with a student-operated radio station at MIT, Technology Broadcasting System (now WMBR), to obtain the rights to the WTBS call sign for $50,000. Such a move allowed Turner to strengthen the branding of his "Super-Station" using the initials TBS. Turner Communications Group was renamed Turner Broadcasting System and WTCG was renamed WTBS.[37]

In 1986, Turner founded the Goodwill Games with the goal of easing tensions between capitalist and communist countries. Broadcasting the events of these games also provided his superstation the ability to provide Olympic-style sports programming.[38]

Turner Field, first used for the 1996 Summer Olympics as Centennial Olympic Stadium and then converted into a baseball-only facility for the Braves, was named after him.[39]

CNN

Turner in 1981

In 1978, Turner contacted media executive Reese Schonfeld about his plans to launch a 24-hour news channel (Schonfeld had previously approached Turner with the proposition in 1977 but was rebuffed). Schonfeld responded that it could be done with a staff of 300 if they used an all electronic newsroom and satellites for all transmissions. It would require an initial investment of $15 million–$20 million and several million dollars per month to operate.[40]

In 1979, Turner sold WRET-TV in Charlotte for $20 million, then a record price for a UHF television station, to fund the transaction[41][42] and established its headquarters in lower-cost, non-union Atlanta. Schonfeld was appointed first president and chief executive of the then-named Cable News Network (CNN). CNN hired Jim Kitchell, former general manager of news at NBC as vice president of production and operations; Sam Zelman as vice president of news and executive producer; Bill MacPhail as head of sports, Ted Kavanau as director of personnel, and Burt Reinhardt as vice president of the network.[40] In 1982, Schonfeld was succeeded as CEO by Turner after a dispute over Schonfeld's firing of Sandi Freeman; and was succeeded as president by CNN's executive vice president, Burt Reinhardt.[43]

Turner Doomsday Video

Main article: Turner Doomsday Video

Turner famously stated before CNN debuted: "We won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event ... we'll play the National Anthem only one time, on the 1st of June [the network's debut on June 1, 1980], and when the end of the world comes, we'll play 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' before we sign off." To this end, he commissioned a video recording of a military marching band playing the hymn. Turner sometimes played the tape for reporters, noting the reason he made it. In 2015, the video was found in CNN's database and leaked. The video was tagged in the database as "[Hold for release] till end of world confirmed".[44]

Other ventures

In 1981, Turner Broadcasting System acquired Brut Productions from Fabergé Cosmetics.[45]

After a failed attempt to acquire CBS, Turner purchased the film studio MGM/UA Entertainment Co. from Kirk Kerkorian in 1986 for $1.5 billion.[46] Following the acquisition, Turner had amassed enormous debt and sold parts of the acquisition; Kerkorian bought back MGM/UA Entertainment. The MGM/UA Studio lot in Culver City was sold to Lorimar/Telepictures. Turner kept MGM's pre-May 1986 and pre-merger film and television library.[47][48] Turner Entertainment Co. was established in August 1986 to oversee film and television properties owned by Turner thanks to the deal with Kerkorian.[49]

Having acquired MGM's library of 2,200 films that were made before 1986, Turner syndicated them to television stations across the country.[46] When broadcasting some older films originally filmed in black-and-white, he aired colorized versions of them.[50] Opposition to Turner's colorization arose among cinephiles, film critics, actors, and directors. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that broadcasting a colorized Casablanca "will be one of the saddest days in the history of the movies. It is sad because it demonstrates that there is no movie that Turner will spare, no classic however great that is safe from the vulgarity of his computerized graffiti gangs."[51] Due in part to Turner's colorization, the Library of Congress established the National Film Registry with the aim to preserve American films in their original formats.[52]

In 1988, Turner purchased Jim Crockett Promotions. He renamed it World Championship Wrestling (WCW), which became the main competitor to Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation (WWF). This rivalry became known as the Monday Night War, and would last throughout the 1990s. In 2001, under AOL Time Warner, WCW was sold to the WWF.[53]

Also in 1988, Turner introduced Turner Network Television (TNT) with Gone with the Wind.[54] TNT, initially showing older movies and television shows, added original programs and newer reruns. Turner would later create Turner Classic Movies (TCM) in 1994, airing Turner's library of pre-1986 MGM films, Warner Bros. films made before 1948, and all RKO films, as well as license to 1,000 other films.[55][56]

In 1989, Turner created the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship for fiction offering positive solutions to global problems. The winner, from 2500 entries worldwide, was Daniel Quinn's Ishmael.[57]

External videos
video icon Ted Turner: Captain Planet – a 2019 documentary hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta highlighting the personal life, career, and the environmental work of Ted Turner (CNN Philippines, full episode)

In 1990, he created the Turner Foundation, which focuses on philanthropic grants concerning issues pertaining to the environment and overpopulation. In the same year he created Captain Planet, an environmental superhero. Turner produced the television series Captain Planet and the Planeteers and its later sequel series with Captain Planet as the featured character.[58]

Turner's companies purchased Hanna-Barbera Productions from Great American Broadcasting in 1991.[59] Together with other Turner animation holdings, including the pre-May 1986 MGM library and pre-1949 Warner Bros. properties including early Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies,[60] the Hanna-Barbera library formed the core of Cartoon Network, which launched October 1, 1992.[61]

In 1993, Turner and Russian journalist Eduard Sagalajev founded the Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corporation (MIBC). This corporation operated the sixth frequency in Russian television and founded the Russian channel TV-6.[62] Turner pulled out in 1994, at the insistence of local executives.[63] He considered re-entering the market in 2001, during a challenging period of independent NTV.[64]

In 1993, Turner also considered acquiring Paramount Pictures, but withdrew from this endeavor following a meeting with then-QVC head Barry Diller.[65]

Turner was also behind the Atlanta Thrashers, an ice hockey team that joined the National Hockey League in 1999. He sold the team in 2004, and they moved in 2011 to become the Winnipeg Jets.[66]

Time Warner merger

Turner speaking at an industry event in 2000

Turner Broadcasting System merged with Time Warner on October 10, 1996, with Turner as vice chairman and head of Time Warner and Turner's cable networks division.[67] Turner was dropped as head of cable networks by CEO Gerald Levin but remained as Vice Chairman of Time Warner. He would be succeeded in March 2001 as head of Turner Broadcasting by Jamie Kellner, who was also greatly responsible for cancelling WCW's television contracts on networks which Turner previously ran.[68][69][70] He resigned as AOL Time Warner vice chairman in 2003 and then from the Time Warner board of directors in 2006.[71][72]

On January 11, 2001, Time Warner was purchased by America Online (AOL) to become AOL Time Warner,[73] a merger which Turner initially supported.[74] However, the burst of the dot-com bubble hurt the growth and profitability of the AOL division, which in turn dragged down AOL Time Warner's performance and stock price. At a board meeting in fall 2001, Turner's outburst against AOL Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin eventually led to Levin's announced resignation effective in early 2002, being replaced by Richard Parsons.[75] In contrast to Levin, who as CEO isolated Turner from important company matters, Parsons invited Turner back to provide strategic advice, although Turner never received an operational role that he sought.[76] Time Warner dropped "AOL" from its name in October 2003.[77] In December 2009, AOL was spun off from the Time Warner conglomerate as a separate company.[78]

Turner was Time Warner's biggest individual shareholder.[75] It is estimated he lost as much as $7 billion when the stock collapsed in the wake of the merger.[79] When asked about buying back his former assets, he replied that he "can't afford them now".[80] In June 2014, Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox made a bid for Time Warner valuing it at $80 billion. The Time Warner board rejected the offer and it was formally withdrawn on August 5, 2014.[81]

Rivalry with Rupert Murdoch

Turner had a long-running feud with fellow cable magnate Rupert Murdoch which lasted for years. This originated in 1983 when a Murdoch-sponsored yacht collided with the yacht skippered by Turner, Condor, during the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, causing it to run aground 6.2 miles (10.0 km) from the finish line. At the post-race dinner, a drunken Turner verbally assaulted Murdoch, afterward challenging him to a televised fistfight in Las Vegas.[82]

Murdoch's Fox News, established in 1996, became a rival to Turner's CNN, a channel that Murdoch regarded with disdain for its "liberal slant" in news coverage. Time Warner declined to carry it on their New York City cable network in response, who in the midst of a merger, Turner said would "squash Rupert Murdoch like a bug."[83][clarification needed]

In 2003, Turner challenged Murdoch to another fistfight, and later on accused Murdoch of being a "warmonger" for his support and backing of President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.[84][85]

However, in an interview with Variety in 2019, Turner said he and Murdoch had since made amends.[86]

Atlanta Braves

Ted Turner
Atlanta Braves – No. 27
Manager
MLB debut
May 11, 1977, for the Atlanta Braves
Last MLB appearance
May 11, 1977, for the Atlanta Braves
MLB statistics
Games1
Win–loss record0–1
Winning %.000
Managerial record at Baseball Reference Edit this at Wikidata
Teams

Turner was suspended for one year by Commissioner of Baseball Bowie Kuhn on January 3, 1977, for his actions while pursuing the signing of free agent outfielder Gary Matthews from the San Francisco Giants. Matthews signed a five-year, $1.875 million contract with the Braves on November 18, 1976. Kuhn's actions stemmed from remarks made by Turner to then-Giants owner Bob Lurie during the 1976 World Series. In addition, the Braves were also stripped of their first-round selections in the June 1978 draft of high school and college players.[87] Turner, however, successfully appealed the suspension and Kuhn relented and reinstated the draft selections, one of which would turn out to be Bob Horner from Arizona State University.[88]

On May 11, 1977, with the team mired in a 16-game losing streak, Turner sent manager Dave Bristol on a 10-day "scouting trip" and Turner himself took over as interim manager – the first owner/manager in the majors since Connie Mack. He ran the team for one game (a loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates)[89] before National League president Chub Feeney ordered him to stop running the team. Feeney cited major league rules which bar managers and players from owning stock in their clubs. Turner appealed to Commissioner of Baseball Bowie Kuhn, and showed up to manage the Braves when they returned home. However, Kuhn turned down the appeal, citing Turner's "lack of familiarity with game operations."[90]

In the mid-1980s, Turner began leaving day-to-day operations to the baseball operations staff, and the team—still under Turner's ownership—won the 1995 World Series. In 1996, Turner admitted, "For the 10 years I ran [the team], it was a disaster. ... As I relinquished control of the Braves and gave somebody else the responsibility, it did well."[91]

The Atlanta Braves were sold by Time Warner (which had assumed control after the merger with Turner Broadcasting System) to Liberty Media in 2007.[92]

Politics

Ted Turner calling on the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh, in New Delhi, 2005
Turner and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in December 2015

On September 19, 2006, in a Reuters Newsmaker conference, Turner said of Iran's nuclear position: "They're a sovereign state. We have 28,000. Why can't they have 10? We don't say anything about Israel‍—‌they've got 100 of them approximately‍—‌or India or Pakistan or Russia."[93]

Turner was a proponent of healthcare reform bills, and said: "We're the only first-world country that doesn't have universal healthcare and it's a disgrace."[94]

In 2010, during the wake of both the devastating Deepwater Horizon environmental disaster and the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster that killed 29 miners in West Virginia, Turner stated on CNN that "I'm just wondering if God is telling us he doesn't want to drill offshore. And right before that, we had that coal mine disaster in West Virginia where we lost 29 miners ... Maybe the Lord's tired of having the mountains of West Virginia, the tops knocked off of them so they may get more coal. I think maybe we ought to just leave the coal in the ground and go with solar and wind power and geothermals ..."[95]

Turner endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up for the 2016 U.S. presidential election.[96] In 2018 he revealed he had once considered a run for president when he was married to Jane Fonda, who told him she would leave him if he ran.[97]

Curbing population growth

Along with advocating for clean water and improved stewardship of the land, he established the Turner Foundation to address ways to curb population growth.[98] Turner put $125 million of his own money into the foundation and set aside $6 million per year to address population growth rates. Addressing the issue at a Montana gathering in 1996 he said "I'm not talking about getting rid of anybody here, I've got 5 children myself." He went on to discuss hunger and poverty and ways to address those issues.[99]

In 2009 Turner met with other business moguls including Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, George Soros, and David Rockefeller to address issues ranging from the environment to healthcare. The group also addressed population growth with discussion of vaccines and immunization efforts being criticized due to the perception that decision making and public policy could be directed by a handful of elites. Although no formal statement was released, the event was covered by Paul Harris for The Guardian.[100]

Controversial comments and other controversies

With wife Jane Fonda in 1992

His penchant for controversial statements earned him the nicknames "The Mouth of the South" and "Captain Outrageous".[4][5] These nicknames were attributed due to his outspoken nature.[101] Turner was said to have leaned into the “Captain Outrageous” behavior and name, which was noted to have influenced similar moguls to act in the same manner.[102]

Turner once called observers of Ash Wednesday "Jesus freaks", though he apologized, and dubbed opponents of abortion "bozos".[103] In 1999, Turner made a joke about Polish mine detectors when asked about Pope John Paul II. After a harsh response from the Polish deputy foreign minister Radek Sikorski, Turner apologized.[104]

In 2002, Turner accused Israel of terror: "The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that's all they have. The Israelis ... they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism." He apologized, but also defended himself: "Look, I'm a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word ... I mean, I don't type my speeches, then sit up there and read them off the teleprompter, you know. I wing it."[105]

Also in 2008, Turner asserted on PBS's Charlie Rose that if steps are not taken to address global warming, most people would die and "the rest of us will be cannibals". Turner also said in the interview that he advocated Americans having no more than two children. In 2010, he stated that the People's Republic of China's one-child policy should be implemented.[93]

In 1991 after Turner and his then wife Jane Fonda were shown on national television doing the "Tomahawk Chop" cheer gesture during the World Series there was an uproar from Native American groups and Native American advocacy groups. Subsequently, Fonda pledged to not do it again, while Turner remained silent on the subject and continued to enthusiastically "Tomahawk".[106]

Turner Enterprises

Turner Building Solar Array

Turner Enterprises, Inc. (TEI) is a private U.S. company that was founded in 1976 and manages the business interests, land holdings, and investments of Ted Turner and now his estate,[107] including the oversight of Turner's 24 properties across the United States and Argentina. At two million acres of personal and ranch land, Turner was the second-largest landowner in North America. He owned 19 ranches – 16 in the western U.S. and three in Argentina.[108] In January 2016, the Osage Nation bought Turner's 43,000 acre (170 km2) Bluestem Ranch in Osage County, Oklahoma. Turner had purchased the property in 2001 primarily to raise bison.[109]

Through Turner Enterprises, he owned ranches in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and South Dakota.[110][108] Totaling 1,910,585 acres (7,731.86 km2), his land-holdings across the United States made Turner one of the largest individual landowners in North America (by acreage).[108] According to the Flatwater Free Press, a Nebraska non-profit newspaper, Turner was the largest owner of Nebraska farmland.[111]

TEI ranches are primarily used for bison ranching. His bison herd, approximately 51,000 animals on 15 ranches, is the largest private herd in the world. The company's mission statement is "To manage Turner lands in an economically sustainable and ecologically sensitive manner while promoting the conservation of native species."[108] Other important wildlife species on the property include whitetail Deer, wild turkey and bobwhite quail.[112] In addition to bison ranching, TEI ranches are also used for commercial fishing and hunting, as well as limited sustainable timber harvesting, as well as eco-tourism on the New Mexico ranches.[108] His biggest ranch is Vermejo Reserve in New Mexico. At 920 square miles (2,400 km2), it is the largest privately owned, contiguous tract of land in the United States.[113] Turner purchased the 363.000-acre Armendaris Ranch, an old Spanish land grant, in 1994. It is used for eco-tourism and raising of bison. It is located in the Chihuahuan Desert adjoining White Sands Missile Range. [114][115]

TEI works closely with Turner's philanthropic and charitable interests, including the founding and ongoing operations of the United Nations Foundation, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Turner Foundation,[98] Captain Planet Foundation,[116] and the Turner Endangered Species Fund.[107] Turner Enterprises is headquartered in the Turner Building (formerly the Bona Allen Office Building) in Atlanta, Georgia, also home to the Ted's Montana Grill restaurant chain, Ted Turner Reserves[117], and Turner Renewable Energy.[118][119] In 2011, Ted Turner and TEI completed construction of a 25-panel solar array in the company's parking lot, which provides solar power to the Turner Building and its businesses[118]

Chaired by Turner, TEI's executive leadership also includes CEO and President S. Taylor Glover.[120]

Personal life

Turner and his third wife, Jane Fonda, in Washington, D.C., 2002

Turner was married and divorced three times: to Judy Nye (1960–1964), Jane Shirley Smith (1965–1988), and actress Jane Fonda (1991–2001). The latter marriage took place on December 21, 1991, on Fonda's birthday, and the divorce was filed on 22 May 2001.[121][122]

He had five children:[123] Laura Turner Seydel and Robert Edward Turner IV by his first wife, and Beau Turner, Rhett Turner and Jennie Turner Garlington by his second wife. Generally, his children have followed in Ted's philanthropic and conservationist goals.[124]

One of Turner's children, Robert Edward "Teddy" Turner IV, announced on January 23, 2013, that he intended to run in the South Carolina Republican primary for the open Congressional seat vacated by Tim Scott who had been appointed to the United States Senate.[125] The junior Turner finished fourth, receiving 7.90% of the vote.[126]

In 2010, Turner joined Warren Buffett's and Bill Gates's The Giving Pledge, vowing to donate the majority of his fortune to charity upon his death.[127]

In the 1993 biography It Ain't As Easy as It Looks by Porter Bibb, Turner discussed his use of lithium and struggles with mental illness. An earlier 1981 biography, Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way by Christian Williams, chronicles Turner's founding of CNN.[128] In 2008, Turner wrote Call Me Ted, which documents his career and personal life.[129]

Health and death

In 2018, Turner revealed his diagnosis of Lewy body dementia.[130] In an interview with Atlanta, Ted's former wife Jane Fonda said that by Ted publicizing his management of this disease that it would give many more people the opportunity to learn about it.[131] His final public appearances were during a celebration of former President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalyn Carter’s 75th wedding anniversary in 2021 and his 85th birthday celebration in 2023.[132] In January 2025, Turner was hospitalized with pneumonia and later recuperated at a rehabilitation facility.[133]

Turner died peacefully surrounded by his family at his 29,000-acre (120 km2) Avalon Plantation home in Lamont, Florida,[134][135][136][137] on May 6, 2026, at the age of 87.[138][139][101]

Sailing

Ted Turner
Sport
Sailing career
Club Savannah Yacht Club
College team Brown University
Medal record

When Turner was 26, he entered sailing competitions at the Savannah Yacht Club and competed in Olympic trials in 1964.[140] He became the Southern Ocean Racing Conference champion in 1966 with his first cruising yacht, Vamp X.[141] He first attempted to win the America's Cup in 1974, losing in the defender's trials, aboard 12 Metre class yacht US–25 Mariner.[142][143][144] Turner was defeated by Ted Hood aboard US–26 Courageous.[145]

Turner was asked to join the 1977 America's Cup defense syndicate formed by Hood and Lee Loomis for the New York Yacht Club. That group still owned the Courageous but decided to design and construct a new 12 Metre – US–28 Independence – to defend the 1974 America's Cup victory. However, in the trials, with Turner as skipper aboard the 3-year-old Courageous proved to be the faster than Hood and Independence[146] and was selected to race in the 1977 races.

From September 13 to 18, 1977 Courageous, with Turner in command, defeated the challenger Australia, skippered by Noel Robins, in a four-race sweep.[147] Courageous' greatest winning margin out of all four races was 2 minutes and 23 seconds.[147][148]

In the 1979 Fastnet Race, in a storm that killed 15 participants, Turner skippered the S&S-designed[149] 61-footer Tenacious to a corrected-time victory.[150]

Turner appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated on July 4, 1977,[151] after winning the 1977 America's Cup.[152] Turner was inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame in 1993,[153] and the National Sailing Hall of Fame in 2011.[154]

Legacy

Turner in 1999

Turner is regarded as one of the entrepreneurs who transformed the cable industry and has been referred to as "the Alexander the Great of broadcasting" by Slate magazine:[155]

While Turner has been described as a "valiant liberator" and cast the networks as oppressive scoundrels, in content his programming fell short of inspiring. His network was built on sitcom reruns, old movies, cartoons, and Atlanta Braves games. He found an audience for classics of a bygone time, along with slightly down-market content like professional wrestling. Nonetheless, he would find glorious terms even for retreads and junk, claiming to be pulling America back to television's golden age: "I want to get it back to the principles," he once said, "that made us good." Nostalgic, Manichean, and boot-strappy: like programmer, like programming.

The cable industry boomed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as nearly a dozen cable networks launched based on the Turner model. They include much of what we now consider the staples of cable TV, including ESPN, MTV, Bravo, Showtime, BET, the Discovery Channel, and the Weather Channel. Those are the better-known channels only by virtue of having survived; others, such as ARTS, CBS Cable, and the Satellite News Channel, folded or were acquired by other companies.

Professional wrestling promoter and former Senior Vice President of WCW second in charge after Turner, Eric Bischoff praised Turner claiming "He was an inspirational leader, he was a risk taker, he appreciated people who took risks, he was not afraid of failure while most people are. Ted was not afraid to fail, he was more afraid of not trying and not conquering that next horizon."[156]

Turner being honored with the 2015 Lady Bird Johnson Environmental Award by Luci and Lynda Johnson at the LBJ Presidential Library

On June 24, 1999, Vince McMahon stated on Late Night with Conan O'Brien: "All I'll say about Ted is he's a son-of-a-bitch, other than that, he's probably not a bad guy, but I don't like him at all".[157] Later in 2021, when asked about the upstart AEW in comparison to Turner's WCW, McMahon dismissed AEW, stating that "it certainly is not a situation where 'rising tides' because that was when Ted Turner was coming after us with all of Time Warner's assets as well".[158]

In 2010, Turner was named a Georgia Trustee, an honor given by the Georgia Historical Society, in conjunction with the Governor of Georgia, to individuals whose accomplishments and community service reflect the ideals of the founding body of Trustees, which governed the Georgia colony from 1732 to 1752.[159]

In 2019, the Techwood Campus, which had been home to Turner Broadcasting System from 1980 to 2019 and has since been home to its various networks, was renamed the Ted Turner Campus, and a mural featuring Turner was presented.[160]

Following his death, Turner was eulogized by The New York Times as the creator of the "24-Hour News Cycle" while also regarding him as one of the most important figures in media history with his business career having had an impact on American culture.[139] In their obituary, CNN also called Turner a "pioneer" of cable television who revolutionized television news.[101] Aside from his impact on the media industry, Turner was also noted for his impact on the sports industry.[102] CNN mentioned how Turner had an impact in the baseball industry by "transforming" the Atlanta Braves into "America's Team".[161] He was also said to have helped make local sports teams such as in baseball more mainstream nationally.[102] The BBC noted that Turner's career was a "central part of the media landscape".[162] U.S. President Donald Trump paid tribute to him as "one of the greats of broadcast history".[162] The Hollywood Reporter published an article saying "there is no one in American history who has done more to change how the world gets its news, for better or for worse, than Ted Turner".[163]

Turner's former wife the academy award winning movie actress Jane Fonda said upon his passing ..."He swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same. He needed me. No one had ever let me know they needed me, and this wasn’t your average human being that needed me, this was the creator of CNN, and Turner Classic Movies, who had won the America’s Cup as the world’s greatest sailor"....[164][165]

Awards and honors

The Commissioner's Trophy given to the Atlanta Braves – owned at the time by Turner – for winning the 1995 World Series
Turner being honored as a Georgia Trustee by the Georgia Historical Society alongside with U.S. senator Johnny Isakson (left) and Georgia Historical Society president Todd Groce (right).
Turner being honored as a Georgia Trustee by the Georgia Historical Society alongside with U.S. senator Johnny Isakson (left) and Georgia Historical Society president Todd Groce (right)

Emmy Awards

  • 2014: Lifetime Achievement – Sports[166]
  • 2015: Lifetime Achievement – News & Documentary[167]

Sports

Media

Halls of Fame

Organizational

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Further reading

Biographies

External videos
video icon Presentation by Auletta on Media Man, November 4, 2004, C-SPAN
  • Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbable Empire by Ken Auletta (W. W. Norton, 2004) ISBN 0-393-05168-4
  • Clash of the Titans: How the Unbridled Ambition of Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch Has Created Global Empires that Control What We Read and Watch Each Day by Richard Hack (New Millennium Press, 2003) ISBN 1-893224-60-0
  • Me and Ted Against the World: The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN by Reese Schonfeld (HarperBusiness, 2001) 0060197463
  • Ted Turner Speaks: Insights from the World's Greatest Maverick by Janet Lowe (Wiley, 1999) ISBN 0-471-34563-6
  • Riding A White Horse: Ted Turner's Goodwill Games and Other Crusades by Althea Carlson (Episcopal Press, 1998) ISBN 0-9663743-0-4
  • Porter Bibb (1996). Ted Turner: It Ain't As Easy as It Looks: The Amazing Story of CNN. Virgin Books. ISBN 0-86369-892-1.
  • Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon by Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg (Harcourt, 1995) ISBN 0-15-118008-3
  • CNN: The Inside Story: How a Band of Mavericks Changed the Face of Television News by Hank Whittemore (Little Brown & Co, 1990) ISBN 0-316-93761-4
  • Lead Follow or Get Out of the Way: The Story of Ted Turner by Christian Williams (Times Books, 1981) ISBN 0-8129-1004-4
  • Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City 1946–1996 by Frederick Allen (Longstreet Press, 1996) ISBN 1-56352-296-9

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Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87

As one of the most important figures in media history, he oversaw a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels.

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Ted Turner: The News Never Stops
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Ted Turner, the visionary founder of CNN, introduced the 24-hour news cycle.CreditCredit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By Jonathan Kandell

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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 on Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Fla. He was 87.

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

Mr. Turner’s signature creation was CNN — the Cable News Network — which revolutionized television news in 1980 by presenting it all hours of the day and eventually inspiring other media operations to follow suit. But his portfolio of business ventures bulged with much more, and their impact on American culture was considerable.

As a spinoff of CNN, Mr. 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.

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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 the journalist Dale Van Atta in a Reader’s Digest article in 1998. “And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.”

Not even his staunchest admirers placed Mr. Turner on that high a pedestal. But even a bitter rival like the media magnate Rupert Murdoch — who once had his New York Post run the headline “Is Turner Insane?” — had to concede that he was one of the most influential figures in the history of mass media.

ImageA black-and-white photo of Ted Turner standing akimbo on a boat.
Mr. Turner on the deck of his boat, Courageous, in 1977. He learned to sail at his hometown Savannah Yacht Club, and it became a lifelong passion.Credit...Robert Child/Associated Press

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

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Against the advice of colleagues and the conventional wisdom of his industry peers, he poured millions of dollars into pioneering ventures that combined cable and satellite broadcasts. He warred against the big television networks. He almost lost his shirt in Hollywood but emerged from these gambles and brawls as a billionaire astride a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels.

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

Nicknamed “the Mouth of the South” for his self-aggrandizing claims and a reputation for dispensing gratuitous insults, Mr. Turner — tall and slim with a craggy, mustachioed face — could nonetheless be a man of great charm, whose gaffes were repeatedly forgiven by an indulgent public, which in large part considered him a living American legend.

Mr. Turner’s politics were contradictory and controversial. While claiming to be an archconservative Republican with warm ties to Christian evangelicals and far-right John Birch Society members, he also befriended the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and defended the repressive conduct of the Communist Chinese government.

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In an extraordinary act of philanthropy, he donated a billion dollars to the United Nations, an organization loathed by American conservatives. He adored hunting, yet he became a darling of environmentalists by buying more than a 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 two million acres, in addition to vast tracts he owned in Argentina and other countries.

Mr. 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.” Whether covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crushing of the Chinese student movement in Tiananmen Square or the Persian Gulf war of 1991, Mr. Turner’s CNN was the vehicle to view history in the making.

“I learn more from CNN than I do from the C.I.A.,” President George H.W. Bush was widely quoted as saying at the time of the war.

Mr. Turner himself professed not to be terribly interested in news or any other kind of business. It was the thrill of the hunt that drove him, not the quarry. As he told The New York Times, “I’ve always been more of an adventurer than a businessman.”

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Robert Edward Turner III — who was universally known as Ted — was born on Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. His father, Robert Jr., a native Mississippian whose family had grown cotton, moved to Ohio during the Depression and married Florence Rooney, the daughter of a Cincinnati grocery chain owner.

The elder Mr. Turner, known as Ed, later moved the family back south, to Georgia, where he started a billboard advertising company. In interviews and biographies, Ted Turner described him as an abusive alcoholic whom he nevertheless admired and sought to please.

As a youth, Ted Turner attended the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn., at the time an elite all-white military academy that emphasized conservative Christian values. During the summers, he worked for his father’s company, painting billboards. His father made him use his wages to pay for his room and meals at home in Savannah.

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.”

Mr. 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.

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Mr. Turner then joined his father’s company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, which became the largest of its kind in the South, sometimes working hard but often devoting more energy to parties and to sailing, which would become a lifelong passion.

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 in an upstairs bathroom at the Turner home outside Savannah.

Ted Turner, then 24, was devastated and left feeling “alone,” he told Time magazine, “because I had counted on him to make the judgment on whether or not I was a success.” In addition, he was still mourning the recent death of his younger sister, Mary Jean, from the autoimmune disease lupus and encephalitis. He described her death as the reason he lost his religious faith, but also as what galvanized him to become a “superachiever” in business.

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 hemorrhage red ink.

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His business advisers counseled him against the purchase.

“Turner didn’t listen,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 2010. “He was Captain Courageous, the man with nerves of steel who went on to win the America’s Cup, take on the networks, marry a movie star, and become a billionaire. He dressed like a cowboy. He gave the impression of signing contracts without looking at them. He was a drinker, a yeller, a man of unstoppable urges and impulses, the embodiment of the entrepreneur as risk-taker. He bought the station, and so began one of the great broadcasting empires of the 20th century.”

Image
A black-and-white photo of Mr. Turner with the Atlanta Braves.
Mr. Turner, left, borrowed money in 1976 to buy the Atlanta Braves, then a dismal baseball team. The franchise is now worth $3.35 billion, according to Forbes.Credit...Associated Press

Mr. 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 percent 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 huge 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.)

Rather than use the new money to pay down his debts, Mr. 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.

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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, the new company name he adopted for the nation’s first “superstation” — 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, Mr. Turner’s station was considered essential to cable’s growth and expansion.

At the same time, Mr. 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 Mr. 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.

Mr. Turner’s antics extended to the office. If he was displeased with a presentation, he might hurl its written text across the room and loudly denigrate his employees, according to his biographers the Goldbergs. To win more business, he sometimes resorted to histrionics.

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“Turner would do anything to sell his station to advertisers,” the authors wrote in “Citizen Turner.” “He’d jump up on chairs, on desks, on tables, on anything that didn’t move, and shout at the top of his larynx. If he met really serious resistance, he might even drop to the floor as if he’d been shot and cry, ‘You’re killing me!’”

In 1977, he was barred from baseball for almost a year by the commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, for tampering with another team’s player, Gary Matthews, a free-agent outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, and for ignoring edicts by Mr. Kuhn. Mr. Turner responded, “I’m thankful he didn’t have me shot.”

During these years of anxious debt concerns and explosive business expansion, Mr. Turner spent months at a time sailing and winning yachting accolades. In 1970 and again in 1973, he was named Yachtsman of the Year by the United States Sailing Association, having learned to sail at his hometown Savannah Yacht Club, and he set his sights on winning the prestigious America’s Cup.

He first had to overcome the initial objections of the tradition-bound New York Yacht Club. Membership in the club was required for any entrant in the America’s Cup competition, and the club’s officials were uneasy about Mr. Turner’s rowdy reputation.

In the end, however, he was simply too good a yachtsman to reject, and the objections were dropped. He fared poorly in his America’s Cup debut, in 1974, and subsequently purchased the yacht Courageous from Ted Hood, who had proved victorious with it in 1974.

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Mr. Turner put together a top-notch crew that helped him win the 1977 America’s Cup races off Newport, R.I. But he did so only after coming close to being thrown out of the races once he had been accepted. “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 behavior and turned Newport’s blue bloods positively purple.”

The Cup organizers forced Mr. Turner to apologize publicly to one elite club, the Spouting Rock Beach Association, for accosting female members. “I wish to apologize profusely because I certainly did have a couple drinks too many that Saturday night,” Mr. Turner wrote to the club president.

But on winning the Cup, he surrounded himself with young, attractive women and was too drunk to finish a victory speech at a nationally televised news conference.

He continued to serve as skipper in major open-sea races, notably in the catastrophic 1979 Fastnet Race, organized by the Royal Ocean Racing Club, in the Irish Sea. Unexpectedly fierce winds damaged and sank many boats, killing 15 sailors. Of about 300 starters, only 85 finished, and Mr. Turner’s yacht, Tenacious, was named the winner.

“Like any experience,” Mr. Turner said at the time, “whenever you come through it you feel better. We’re not talking about the other people who died, but to be able to face it all and come through it is exhilarating. Sailing in rough weather is what the sport is all about.”

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The triumphs on water turned Mr. Turner into an American hero, and he used his new popularity to his business advantage. On June 1, 1980, he launched CNN, the first 24-hour all-news channel, basing it in Atlanta, pointedly far from the traditional news capitals of New York and Washington. Less than two years later, he began broadcasting CNN Headline News, with updates every half-hour.

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Mr. Turner being carried off by his crew in the America’s Cup race.
Mr. Turner and his crew celebrated after he sailed Courageous to victory in the 1977 America’s Cup races off Newport, R.I.Credit...J. Walter Green/Associated Press

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 two million viewers, compared with the three big networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — whose news broadcasts collectively reached more than 50 million households. And Mr. Turner had to count on his audience’s patience with his inexperienced, underpaid news staff and repeated technical problems that left anchors without copy or footage.

Competitors derided CNN as the “Chicken Noodle Network,” and Mr. 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. Mr. 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. They built from scratch a sprawling international framework for the newsroom’s operations.

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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 from the city under attack from U.S. forces. 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.” Mr. Turner appeared on Time magazine’s cover as “Man of the Year” for 1991.

As CNN was building respectability, Mr. Turner was able to draw public sympathy in his efforts to portray himself as a patriotic underdog in the battle against the network giants for larger audiences. Claiming to represent conservative family values, he attacked the networks’ senior executives as a “bunch of pinkos.”

“In the race for ratings, their newscasts dig up the most sordid things human beings do,” Mr. Turner told Newsweek in 1980. “They make heroes of criminals and glamorize violence. They’ve polluted our minds and our children’s minds.”

Mr. Turner could stake out political positions far to the left of the major networks when it suited him, however. In 1982, for example, he returned from a visit to Cuba full of praise for Mr. Castro. When CNN executives upbraided him for declaring the Cuban leader “a great guy,” Mr. Turner was reported to have retorted: “Castro’s not a Communist. He’s like me, a dictator.” He even persuaded Mr. Castro to film a promotional ad for CNN.

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Nonetheless, in his battle against the networks, Mr. Turner counted among his allies prominent members of the John Birch Society and right-wing Christian evangelical ministers like the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Donald Wildmon. They overlooked Mr. Turner’s bawdy lifestyle while applauding his calls for more family values in broadcasting.

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

With CNN starting to be profitable and TBS earning a windfall, Mr. Turner was ready to roll the dice once again. In 1985, he announced a hostile bid for CBS, then the largest television network, for $5.4 billion in stock and junk bonds. The proposed deal shocked the media industry because Mr. Turner was proposing to have his company, TBS, with annual revenue of less than $300 million, take over a giant conglomerate with revenue of almost $5 billion.

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An anchorman and an anchorwoman stand on the set of CNN.
Reese Schonfeld, the president of CNN, with Reynelda Muse, a weekend anchor, at CNN’s broadcast center in Atlanta on May 31, 1980, the day before the 24-hour news network went live.Credit...Joe Holloway/Associated Press

CBS counterattacked by adopting a so-called poison pill, borrowing a billion dollars to buy back 21 percent of its stock. In effect, CBS was warning Mr. Turner that if his takeover bid were to succeed, he would be saddled with an impossibly large debt. Admitting defeat, he withdrew his bid in July 1985.

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A month later, Mr. Turner was back in the headlines with an agreement to buy the Hollywood film company MGM-UA Entertainment — itself a recent merger of MGM and United Artists — from the billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian for $1.5 billion. Under the terms of the deal, which was completed in March 1986, Mr. Turner took over the MGM studio and lot, and a library of 3,500 films, including “Gone With the Wind.” As part of the deal, he also took possession of the pre-1948 Warner Bros. catalog, which meant “Casablanca” and Looney Tunes cartoons.

The investment world reacted with sheer disbelief at the price tag, which left Mr. Turner’s businesses with almost $2 billion in debt. The new conglomerate was “one of the most debt-ridden companies of its time,” according to The Wall Street Journal in 1986.

Within months it was obvious even to Mr. Turner that he could not generate enough revenue to cover his debt payments. So, in June 1986, he agreed to sell everything but the film library for $490 million. In the end, Mr. Turner paid a whopping $1.2 billion for just the MGM library.

Still crushed by debt, Mr. Turner sought to squeeze profits from his MGM library by colorizing classic black-and-white movies in what turned out to be a misguided attempt to increase their appeal among younger viewers. He was attacked by the press, filmmakers, movie buffs and politicians as a cultural philistine. Stung, he ended up colorizing only a few films, among them the 1941 Humphrey Bogart detective movie “The Maltese Falcon,” before abandoning the plan amid condemnation by many actors and directors, including the filmmakers Billy Wilder and Woody Allen.

Mr. Turner further tarnished his image by uttering ethnic and racial slurs in public forums. In 1985, The Atlanta Constitution reported that Mr. 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.

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In “Ted Turner Speaks,” a collection of his public statements compiled in 1999 by Janet Lowe, Mr. Turner was quoted at a sports banquet as saying that he had other reasons to dislike the baseball agent Jerry Kapstein besides the fact that he “is a Jew.”

In his defense, Mr. Turner’s associates pointed out that he had placed Black employees, like Bill Lucas and the Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, to senior posts in the Atlanta Braves organization and had appointed Jews like Reese Schonfeld to top spots at CNN.

Mr. 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, Mr. Turner and his wife, Jane Smith, divorced.

Faced with mounting debts and almost certain bankruptcy, Mr. Turner agreed in 1987 to sell 37 percent of Turner Broadcasting to a group of 31 cable companies for $562 million and to cede to them seven of the 15 seats on the TBS board. Moreover, he agreed not to make any expenditure of more than $2 million unless he had the approval of 12 of the 15 board members. For the first time since his father’s death, Mr. 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 Mr. Turner. By 1989, his fortune had doubled to $5 billion. 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 after all, drawing millions of new viewers to Turner Network Television, or TNT, and then Turner Classic Movies.

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Mr. Turner added to his empire in 1991 by purchasing, for $320 million, 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 Mr. Turner had mellowed. Episodes of women-chasing and tantrums declined. In interviews, Mr. Turner said he had begun taking lithium, a drug often prescribed to counter manic-depressive behavior.

He could still startle with his public statements. In one speech, to the American Humanist Association convention, he described Christianity as “a religion for losers.” Barely a year after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of student dissidents, he shocked the foreign correspondents association in Beijing by suggesting that the Chinese government was not to blame.

“The students should have known better, don’t you think?” he said. “They had been warned.” Some of his critics suggested that his growing business deals with China might have colored his views.

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Mr. Turner tips his hat at a Braves game.
Mr. Turner and his wife at the time, Jane Fonda, at a National League Championship game between the Braves and the Cardinals in 1996. They married in 1991 and divorced in 2001.Credit...Dave Martin/Associated Press

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Still, he remained popular with many Americans, who saw him as an affable, successful rebel. Adding to his celebrity was his unlikely courtship of Ms. Fonda. Both were wealthy and famous, but they were opposites in many ways. He was a notorious womanizer; she, an ardent feminist. He had been a right-wing conservative in his youth; she had been called Hanoi Jane for speaking out on North Vietnamese radio against the American military effort during the Vietnam War. He loved to hunt; she was an environmentalist.

He wooed her — just after her divorce from the liberal activist and California state legislator Tom Hayden — by emphasizing their similarities, including as the children of a suicidal parent (in Ms. Fonda’s case, her mother) and their friendships with icons of the far left, like Mr. Castro. She later wrote in a memoir that she had been dazzled by his charisma, which she likened to “a 3-D stereophonic, Shakespearean-level, sound-and-light show.”

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

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

Mr. 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.

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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 chairman of the Turner Endangered Species Fund; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

By the mid-1990s, Mr. 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 $7.5 billion worth of Time Warner stock. Gerald M. Levin, the Time Warner boss, became chairman and chief executive of the new conglomerate, which kept the Time Warner name, while Mr. Turner accepted the post of vice chairman.

“I’ve been a C.E.O. for 33 years, and that’s a long time for anyone,” Mr. Turner told The New York Times in 1995, adding later, “I’m married to Jane Fonda, so I know what it’s like to be No. 2.” In 2001, when the internet company AOL bought Time Warner for $160 billion, creating the world’s biggest media enterprise, Mr. Turner moved further down the corporate hierarchy and resigned from the board two years later.

At times, Mr. Turner seemed more enthusiastic about charitable and environmental causes than business. In 1986, he delved back into the sports world, creating the Goodwill Games, athletic competitions among nations that were originally intended to ease Cold War tensions. A charitable effort, it disbanded after 15 years and five international events.

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Mr. Turner leans back in his desk chair.
Mr. Turner in 1998. In his later years, he seemed more enthusiastic about charitable and environmental causes than building an empire.Credit...Keith Meyers/The New York Times

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By 1996, he had amassed nearly 1.3 million acres of ranch land, roughly enough to fill the state of Delaware, on eight ranches 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, in an effort to create a market for the meat and therefore preserve the animal from extinction; and founded what is now Ted Turner Reserves, offering guided “eco-conscious” tours and luxury lodging at vast properties 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.

A $1 billion donation to the U.N. in 1997, dispensed over 10 years, was aimed at aiding refugees and children, clearing land mines and fighting disease.

With typical brashness, Mr. Turner said the billion-dollar donation represented just the increase in his net worth in the previous nine months, and he called on other wealthy businesspeople to follow his philanthropic example.

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“There’s a lot of people who are awash in money they don’t know what to do with,” Mr. Turner said in a CNN interview with Mr. King after the announcement. “It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t know what to do with it. I have learned the more good that I did, the more money comes in. You have to learn to give. You’re not born as a giver. You’re born selfish.”

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Ted Turner: The News Never Stops - The New York Times

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