FILE – Ted Turner speaks throughout the NCS World Report Contributors banquet in Atlanta on May 4, 1995. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
NEW YORK — Ted Turner, a brash television pioneer who raced yachts, owned enormous chunks of the American West and reworked the information enterprise by launching NCS and introducing the 24-hour cable information cycle, died Wednesday. He was 87.
Turner died surrounded by his household, based on Turner Enterprises, the corporate that oversees his huge enterprise pursuits.
Turner owned skilled sports activities groups in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a gorgeous $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three girls — most famously actor Jane Fonda — and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”
He as soon as bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
He was slowed in later years by Lewy physique dementia. Long out of the television enterprise, he targeting philanthropy.
His garrulous character generally overshadowed a risk-taking enterprise acumen. By the time he offered his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in 1996, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard firm into a international conglomerate that included seven main cable networks, three skilled sports activities groups and a pair of hit film studios.
President Donald Trump, reacting to Turner’s dying, known as him “one of the Greats of All Time.”
The creation of NCS
Turner’s signature achievement was creating the Cable News Network, the primary 24-hour, all-news television community in 1980. In half, Turner’s personal frustration with television information was the instigator. He typically labored previous 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air.
He took a probability by beginning the operation within the early days of cable television, dwelling in an house above its Atlanta workplace.
NCS’s breakthrough second got here throughout the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad however NCS stayed, capturing arresting photographs of a battle’s outbreak.
Turner was promised a continued position in NCS after his firm’s sale to Time Warner however was steadily pushed out, a lot to his remorse.
“The mistake I made was losing control of the company,” he later mentioned.
Building TBS SuperStation
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his household moved to Savannah, Georgia, the place he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University, Turner got here to Atlanta to work for his domineering father’s billboard firm, Turner Advertising.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the corporate. In 1970, he purchased an impartial UHF station with a weak sign that didn’t even cowl Atlanta.
On Dec. 17, 1976, he started transmitting the station to cable methods throughout the nation through satellite tv for pc. It grew to become the TBS SuperStation.
TBS’ motley assortment of previous films and sitcom reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted followers nationwide by way of their superstation publicity.
In the Eighties, Turner went deeply into debt to purchase MGM, a transfer once more greeted with skepticism. But the acquisition gave his firm a library of classic films that finally have been parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks.
He revealed his ambitions as a youthful man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
Acquiring sports activities groups and land
For a lot of his life a partying roustabout who wooed stunning girls, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married 3 times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She uninterested in his philandering and divorced him, though they remained buddies.
Perhaps Turner’s best love was for the land. He acquired hundreds of thousands of acres in ranches full with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest non-public landholder. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with serving to enhance the genetic variety of the final herd of southern Plains bison.
He had a web price of $2.5 billion in 2023 however had dropped off Forbes journal’s rating of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money,” Turner as soon as mentioned.
Turner managed to insult many along with his shoot-from-the-lip model. An atheist since his solely sister died of lupus at age 17, he known as Christians “losers” and “Jesus freaks,” later apologizing for each remarks.
Dedication to numerous causes
Turner, the daddy of 5 kids, grabbed a management position in American philanthropy along with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to provide $1 billion to United Nations charities.
He promoted a vary of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to begin the (*87*) Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit devoted to lowering the specter of nuclear, organic and chemical weapons.
As he poured hundreds of thousands into nonprofits on a international scale, Turner was additionally keen on spreading his wealth in small methods. He as soon as gave $500 to a volunteer hearth division that helped extinguish a blaze on one among his ranches.
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Bauder, a longtime media author, retired from The Associated Press in 2026. Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.