NEW YORK (AP) — Ted Turner may by no means be outlined by only one position. He was a media mogul, philanthropist and conservationist. A yachtsman who gained boating’s most well-known race and proprietor of a baseball team that captured the World Series trophy.
The brash television pioneer who died Wednesday made his biggest mark on the information enterprise when he launched NCS almost a half-century in the past and with it, the 24-hour cable information cycle — a revolutionary second that reworked the business.
His media empire grew to incorporate NCS International, the Cartoon Network, TNT and Turner Classic Movies. Then he used his riches to grow to be one in all America’s most in depth landowners, dedicating his last years to preserving pure habitats, saving endangered species and lowering nuclear weapons.
Turner died at age 87 whereas surrounded by his household, in line with Turner Enterprises, which oversees his huge companies and investments. A trigger was not launched. He was identified in 2018 with Lewy physique dementia, a progressive neurological dysfunction.
A Southerner with outspoken wit, he earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South” throughout his youthful years.
“If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect,” he once bragged.
Turner was a celebrity in his own right when he married actor Jane Fonda in 1991, just before being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year.
“He swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same,” Fonda wrote Wednesday on Instagram.
Slowed late in life by his illness and long out of the television business, Turner concentrated on philanthropy — donating a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities — and his more than 2 million acres (800,000 hectares) of property, including the nation’s largest bison herd.
His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports activities groups and a pair of hit film studios.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday called him “one of the Greats of All Time.”
The creation of NCS
Turner’s signature achievement was creating NCS, the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980. It was born of frustration — he often worked late after network newscasts had gone off the air, and was in bed by the time his local stations did their own news.
He took a chance by launching what some called the “chicken noodle network” in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.
“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with The American Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”
NCS’s breakthrough came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists fled Baghdad. NCS stayed, capturing images of the war’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking across the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.
“His first love was family and he had five children. But very close behind, he’s always told me that his greatest achievement was NCS. But he had so many over the years,” Tom Johnson, NCS’s president from 1990 to 2001, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Turner was promised a role in NCS after his company’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.
“I made a mistake,” he later said. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”
That same year — 1996 — saw the birth of Fox News Channel and arrival of a new dominant mogul in cable news, Rupert Murdoch. Turner once compared Murdoch to Adolf Hitler. The bitter rivals later reconciled over environmental concerns.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav on Wednesday called Turner a visionary and a trailblazer.
“Ted’s entrepreneurial spirit, creative ambition and willingness to take risks changed the media industry forever,” Zaslav mentioned in a notice to staff at Warner, NCS’s father or mother firm, which is nearing a mega merger with Paramount.
Building TBS Superstation
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a female student into his room, Turner came to Atlanta to work for his father’s billboard company.
His ambitions at that point were broad, he later recalled: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a signal so weak it didn’t even cover Atlanta.
On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems across the country via satellite. It became TBS Superstation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said.
TBS’ assortment of outdated motion pictures and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves, which slowly attracted followers throughout the nation and declared themselves “America’s team.”