NEW YORK — Ted Turner, the brash and outspoken tv pioneer who created a media empire and remodeled the information enterprise by creating NCS and introducing the 24-hour cable information cycle, died Wednesday. He was 87.
He died surrounded by his household, in keeping with Turner Enterprises, the corporate that oversees his huge enterprise pursuits and investments.
Turner’s empire expanded far past media — proudly owning skilled sports activities groups in Atlanta and large chunks of the American West. He raced yachts too, defending the America’s Cup in 1977.
He donated a surprising $1 billion to United Nations charities and fueled conservation efforts by habitat restoration and endangered species work on his sprawling ranches within the West. Turner married three ladies — 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 since out of the tv enterprise, he focused on philanthropy and his greater than 2 million acres of property, together with the nation’s largest bison herd.
His garrulous persona typically overshadowed a pushed, risk-taking enterprise acumen. By the time he offered his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard firm into a worldwide 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 demise, referred to as him “one of the Greats of All Time.”
“Whenever I needed him, he was there, always willing to fight for a good cause!” Trump posted on social media.
The creation of NCS
Turner’s signature achievement was creating NCS, the primary 24-hour, all-news tv community in 1980. At a time when information is immediately obtainable, it is onerous to recall that the concept of letting customers resolve after they select to study what is going on on on the earth was as soon as revolutionary.
In half, Turner’s personal frustration with tv information was the instigator. He usually labored late after the community newscasts had gone off the air, and was in mattress by the point his native stations did their very own information.
He took an opportunity by beginning the operation typically derided because the “chicken noodle network” within the early days of cable tv, dwelling in an condominium above its Atlanta workplace.
“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 Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”
NCS’s breakthrough second got here through the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most tv journalists had fled Baghdad. NCS stayed, capturing arresting photographs of a conflict’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking throughout the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.
Turner was promised a continued function in NCS after his firm’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in inventory, however was regularly pushed out, a lot to his remorse.
“I made a mistake,” he later mentioned. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”
That identical 12 months — 1996 — noticed the start of Fox News Channel and arrival of a brand new dominant mogul in cable information, Rupert Murdoch.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav referred to as Turner a visionary and a trailblazer Wednesday.
“Ted’s entrepreneurial spirit, creative ambition and willingness to take risks changed the media industry forever,” Zaslav mentioned in a word to workers.
Building TBS SuperStation
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his household moved to Savannah, Georgia. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a feminine scholar into his room, Turner got here to Atlanta to work for his father’s billboard firm.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the corporate. In 1970, he purchased an unbiased UHF station with a weak sign that did not 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. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner mentioned in 1996.
TBS’ assortment of previous films and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted followers throughout the nation and within the Nineteen Eighties started declaring themselves “America’s team.”
In the Nineteen Eighties, Turner went deeply into debt to purchase MGM, a transfer once more greeted with skepticism.
But the acquisition gave his firm an enormous library of classic films that ultimately have been parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older films earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was additionally criticized for including shade to traditional films like “Casablanca,” which he mentioned he did to attraction to a youthful viewers.
TBS additionally acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the launch of the Cartoon Network.
“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, instructed The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”
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.”
Asked to share the key to his success, he mentioned: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”
Acquiring sports activities groups and land
For a lot of his life a partying roustabout who wooed lovely ladies with a roguish attraction, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married 3 times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She give up performing whereas married to Turner, however uninterested in his philandering and divorced him, though they remained buddies.
“He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had 2 million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay,” Fonda as soon as mentioned of her relationship with Turner.
Turner had an sudden friendship with Cuban chief Fidel Castro, bonding over searching and arguments about politics over rum and cigars. A as soon as bitter rival who in contrast Fox’s Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, they later reconciled over their concern for the surroundings.
Turner constructed a sports activities empire, at one level proudly owning skilled baseball, basketball and hockey groups in Atlanta. He was finest remembered at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, turning the group into champions within the Nineties. Their former stadium, constructed for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field.
Perhaps Turner’s best love was for the land. He acquired tens of millions of acres in ranches full with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest non-public landholder. He spoke usually of reviving the West’s bison herds, and in 2002 began a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill.
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. During a inventory market bust, Turner’s web price went from practically $10 billion to about $2 billion in two-and-a-half years.
He had sufficient time, and cash, to commit to such lofty objectives as selling world peace and defending the surroundings.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money. Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it,” Turner as soon as mentioned. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There’s no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction.”
‘The Mouth of the South’
Through the years, Turner’s antics sometimes overshadowed his enterprise actions.
Fresh from skippering his boat “Courageous” to the 1977 America’s Cup title, a really inebriated Turner was captured by TV cameras stretched out on the ground at the victory celebration.
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 referred to as Christians “losers” and “Jesus freaks,” later apologizing.
He as soon as steered in a speech that unemployed Black individuals be used to haul cellular missiles with ropes “like the Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he mentioned he was simply joking.
Other occasions, his humor saved him from probably awkward conditions, like when he talked to an viewers in Berlin in 1999. “You know, you Germans had a bad century,” Turner mentioned, in keeping with The New Yorker. “You were on the wrong side of two wars. You were the losers. I know what that’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win, either. You guys can turn it around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves could do it, then Germany can do it.”
Dedication to varied causes
Turner, a father of 5 youngsters, grabbed a management function in American philanthropy along with his 1997 pledge to offer $1 billion, or $100 million a 12 months for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued giving cash to the U.N., calling it the most effective hope for peace.
He promoted a variety of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start out the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit devoted to lowering the specter of nuclear, organic and chemical weapons.
“If I had to predict, the way things are going, I’d say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years,” Turner mentioned in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.”
As he poured tens of millions into nonprofits, 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 certainly one of his ranches. Another time he lent private work for an exhibit at a Bozeman, Montana, museum.