Ted Turner, the media maverick and philanthropist who based NCS, a pioneering 24-hour community that revolutionized tv information, died peacefully Wednesday, surrounded by his household, in accordance with a information launch from Turner Enterprises. He was 87.
The Ohio-born Atlanta businessman, nicknamed “The Mouth of the South” for his outspoken nature, constructed a media empire that encompassed cable’s first superstation and fashionable channels for motion pictures and cartoons, plus skilled sports activities groups just like the Atlanta Braves.
Turner was additionally an internationally identified yachtsman; a philanthropist who based the United Nations Foundation; an activist who sought the worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons; and a conservationist who grew to become one of the foremost landowners within the United States. He performed a essential position in reintroducing bison to the American west. He even created the Captain Planet cartoon to coach children in regards to the surroundings.
But it was his audacious imaginative and prescient to ship information from all over the world in actual time, at all hours, that basically made him well-known – as soon as his thought lastly took off.
In 1991, Turner was named Time journal’s Man of the Year for “influencing the dynamic of events and turning viewers in 150 countries into instant witnesses of history.”
Turner ultimately offered his networks to Time Warner and later exited the enterprise, however continued to specific delight in NCS, calling it the “greatest achievement” of his life.
“Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement,” Mark Thompson, Chairman and CEO of NCS Worldwide, mentioned in a assertion. “He was and always will be the presiding spirit of NCS. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand, and we will all take a moment today to recognize him and his impact on our lives and the world.”
Just over a month earlier than his eightieth birthday in 2018, Turner revealed that he had Lewy physique dementia, a progressive mind dysfunction. In early 2025, Turner was hospitalized with a gentle case of pneumonia earlier than recovering at a rehabilitation facility.
Turner is survived by his 5 kids, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Launching a TV information revolution
Turner started his media profession at the age of 24 when he took over his father’s billboard firm, Turner Outdoor Advertising, within the wake of the elder Turner’s suicide. He buried his shock and grief in work – however Turner wasn’t content material to push different individuals’s merchandise perpetually.
He purchased up radio stations, then branched into tv in 1970 by buying a struggling station in Atlanta generally known as Channel 17. He tried to spice up the scores by airing outdated sitcoms and traditional movies, at one level even internet hosting “Academy Award Theatre” himself.
Turner wasn’t thinking about information but. He determined to spend money on sports activities as a substitute, buying the rights to Atlanta Braves baseball video games. Viewers and advertisers flocked to the channel, and as Turner turned a revenue, he began to assume greater about TV.
In 1976 he beamed Channel 17’s sign as much as a satellite tv for pc and it grew to become cable TV’s first superstation, reaching cable subscribers throughout the nation.
Turner purchased the Braves, after which the Atlanta Hawks basketball crew, partly to maintain the long-term rights to the TV programming, and partly as a result of it was simply plain enjoyable.
As he constructed the Superstation WTBS, he set his sights even increased – a 24-hour information channel.
Turner was harshly vital of broadcast TV and institution information judgments. “Part of the reason America had so many problems, he believed, was because his fellow Americans were so ill-informed,” former NCS journalist Lisa Napoli wrote in “Up All Night,” a e-book in regards to the creation of NCS. Turner acknowledged “there was no better place to promote a variety of opinions than on allmighty television. With a news channel, he could quite possibly help save the world.”
Lots of individuals thought Turner’s thought was loopy. But he noticed a enormous opening within the market.
“I worked until 7 o’clock, and when I got home the news was over,” he as soon as mentioned, referencing the 6:30 night newscasts on the large networks. “So I missed television news completely. And I figured there were lots of people like me.”
Turner wished to dramatically widen the aperture of tv information, envisioning reveals about enterprise, well being, sports activities and different material. He admitted he knew “diddley-squat” in regards to the information enterprise, however he recruited the proper individuals who did, like Reese Schonfeld, NCS’s founding president.
On June 1, 1980, NCS – the primary 24-hour information channel – went dwell and has been on the air ever since.
Turner rapidly expanded, including a second 24-hour information community NCS2 (later renamed Headline News, then HLN) in 1982 and NCS International, which broadcast all over the world, in 1985. He later added non-news cable channels together with Turner Network Television (TNT), Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and the Cartoon Network.
In the mid-Nineteen Eighties, he acquired MGM’s library of greater than 4,000 outdated movies and stirred up controversy within the movie group for colorizing many black-and-white motion pictures, together with “Casablanca.”
Out of all his networks, NCS was all the time his “baby,” however the community’s early years had been marked by technical snafus throughout its lengthy stretches of dwell broadcasting. Some critics dubbed it “Chicken Noodle News.”
Yet, Turner and his deputies knew they had been creating one thing revolutionary.
“I lived for 20 years in my office,” Turner mentioned. His workplace was inside NCS’s broadcast constructing in Atlanta. “I lived on a couch in my office the first 10 years.”
Longtime staff recall Turner sauntering into the newsroom sporting a bathrobe.
“He was one of us,” former NCS president Tom Johnson recalled. “He would be in his housecoat down having breakfast in the Hard News Café (the company’s cafeteria).”
When the Persian Gulf War broke out in 1990, the significance of a 24-hour information channel grew to become clear. It was the primary time a struggle was broadcast dwell – and it was solely on NCS.
“What Ted made happen was just as important as the Internet revolution,” mentioned former Turner Broadcasting CEO Terry McGuirk.
Turner was hailed as a visionary and earned TIME Magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1991.
In 1996, Turner offered his networks to Time Warner for practically $7.5 billion. He stayed on as a vice-chairman of Time Warner, heading up the corporate’s cable TV networks.
Shaped by household tragedies
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 19, 1938. At the age of 4, shortly after his sister’s beginning, his mother and father despatched younger Ted to a boarding college, which he did not like.
“I wanted to be home,” he mentioned.
Turner had a tough relationship along with his father, who had a weak point for alcohol and disciplined his son with a leather-based strap or a wire coat hanger.
“It wasn’t dangerous or anything like that,” Turner as soon as recalled. “It just hurt like the devil.”
The household later moved to Savannah, Georgia, and his sister Mary Jean contracted a uncommon type of lupus when she was 12. The sickness left her with mind injury and in extreme ache for years till her dying.
“She was sick for five years before she passed away. And it just seemed so unfair, because she hadn’t done anything wrong,” Turner mentioned. “What had she done wrong? And I couldn’t get any answers. Christianity couldn’t give me any answers to that. So my faith got shaken somewhat.”
Turner was despatched to a number of strict Southern army faculties and his father had hopes of him getting accepted to Harvard. He attended one other Ivy League college – Brown University – however his father reduce off his tuition as a result of he disapproved of his main, as he made clear in a letter he wrote to his son.
“My dear son, I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major,” the elder Turner wrote. “I am a practical man, and for the life of me I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek. With whom will you communicate in Greek?
“I believe you’re quickly turning into a jackass, and the earlier you get out of that filthy ambiance, the higher it is going to swimsuit me.”
Before long, the money ran out and he dropped out, returning to Georgia to work for his father’s billboard company in Macon.
Turner was just 24 when his father shot himself and died in the upstairs bathroom at the family’s home near Savannah. It was March 5, 1963, and the elder Turner was under the influence of alcohol and pills, battling depression and worried he had overextended himself with a $4 million purchase that expanded his company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, into the South’s largest billboard company.
“He went in opposition to every little thing he taught me: ‘Be brave and dangle in there,'” Turner mentioned.
Ted meets Jane
At the peak of his career, Ted Turner – twice divorced with five grown children – began dating actress Jane Fonda in 1989. The two would marry in 1991 and become one of the nation’s most storied couples.
“At first they did not get alongside at all,” recalled friend and former President Jimmy Carter. “In reality, they did not like one another. I heard this from each of them. It was months later earlier than they determined to attempt once more. And they developed into one of the nicest romances that I’ve ever identified about.”
Ted and Jane stayed together for 10 years and, when they split, his anger at her conversion to Christianity was blamed, but the truth was more nuanced. She simply could no longer take a back seat to his larger-than-life personality or sustain his need for her constant companionship as they shuttled between his 28 properties. She was pushing 60 and no longer interested in living out of a suitcase.
“I might by no means love anybody like I like him,” she said. “But I simply could not hold shifting in his world, alongside the floor for the remainder of my life. I knew that I might get to the top of my life and remorse not doing the issues that I additionally wanted to do for me.”
He was devastated when she left him and, as his marriage ended, Turner’s media empire began slipping away.
Time Warner had agreed to be purchased by Internet provider AOL in 2000 with the hopes that the merger would help the legacy media company survive and prosper during the dot-com boom.
But the Internet bubble burst in 2001 and the following year the new AOL-Time Warner sustained a record $99 billion loss, resulting in countless job cuts. It soon became known as the biggest mergers and acquisitions failure in corporate history.
Turner resigned as AOL Time Warner’s vice-chairman in 2003, and three years later announced he would not seek reelection to its board of directors.
He lost control of Turner Broadcasting, NCS, the Atlanta Braves, the Hawks – and his fortune, consisting mostly of company stock, was hemorrhaging – more than $7 billion in three years.
“I misplaced Jane. I misplaced my job right here. I misplaced my fortune, most of it. Got a billion or two left. You can get by on that should you economize,” he told NCS’s Piers Morgan in May 2012. He said he was “brokenhearted.” He tried to win her back, but it was obvious the relationship was beyond repair. “We had been up to now aside philosophically, we could not do it.”
Despite the breakup, Fonda and Turner always maintained a close friendship, speaking on the phone regularly and showing up at each other’s charity events.
“Just as a result of individuals get divorced does not imply they cease loving one another,” she said. “It could also be laborious for 2 individuals to dwell collectively, however I can not ever overlook the explanations that made me fall in love with him.”
Turner defined that he had “beloved many individuals” but only been “in love” twice – once with Fonda and once with someone he wouldn’t name. Being “in love” implies permanence, he said – something he hadn’t experienced in all of his relationships.
A media mogul turned philanthropist
Turner always had a philanthropic streak, but it began to move to the forefront in 1997, the year after he sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner. That’s when he pledged $1 billion to the United Nations. Making good on that pledge took a while longer than he had anticipated – he made his final payment to the UN in 2015 – thanks to the beating his fortune took after the 2001 merger with AOL.
When it was over, he was still a billionaire, but just barely.
Turner didn’t do anything in a small way, including reinventing himself. He was the second biggest landowner in North America, with 2 million acres spread over 28 properties, including 19 ranches in Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota, as well as in Argentina. The first of his Ted’s Montana Grill restaurants opened in 2002, and now there are more than 40 in 16 states. He managed to bring bison back from the brink of extinction; he had the world’s largest private bison herd, with approximately 51,000 head.
His five children – Rhett Turner, Laura Turner Seydel, Jennie Turner Garlington, Teddy Turner and Beau Turner – serve on the board of the Turner Foundation. His other foundations include his United Nations Foundation, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Captain Planet Foundation and the Turner Endangered Species Fund.
Half a century ago, his father’s suicide thrust a $1 million billboard company into his hands. He often said that his father, who was 54 at the time he died, ran out of things to work toward. As a result, Turner was driven – relentlessly moving forward, never looking back.
Yet no matter how successful he became, Turner was often still trying to prove himself.
Fonda recalled how she cried when Turner told her about his childhood on their second date. They were driving around his 60,000-acre ranch in Montana, and he was passing the time, talking as he drove. Tears ran down her face.
“He actually could not perceive why I used to be crying when he advised me tales about what his father did to him,” she said. “Children cannot blame their mother and father. ‘It’s all the time my fault; it is being achieved for my very own good. I need to not be adequate.'”
“Given his childhood,” Fonda said, “he ought to’ve turn out to be a dictator. He ought to’ve turn out to be a not good particular person. The miracle is that he grew to become what he’s. A person who will go to heaven, and there will be a lot of animals up there welcoming him, animals which were introduced again from the sting of extinction as a result of of Ted. He’s turned out to be a good man. And he says he is not non secular. But he, the entire time I used to be with him, each speech – and he likes to offer speeches – he all the time ends his speech with ‘God bless.’ And he’ll get into heaven. He’s a miracle.”
NCS’s Elise Zeiger, Kimberly Arp Babbit and Dan Q. Tham contributed to this story.
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