Many are describing Ted Turner, who died Wednesday at 87, as a “visionary.” That’s probably not correct. His imaginative and prescient was restricted by the truth that he knew little or no concerning the two areas of media that he helped revolutionize: broadcasting and journalism.
What Turner had was intuition and perseverance — sufficient to alter tv and to make him very wealthy.
What Turner had was intuition and perseverance — sufficient to alter tv and to make him very wealthy.
I was residing out my very own media dream, having launched On Cable Magazine in 1980, the identical yr Turner gave the nation NCS. I interviewed him many instances at his workplace in Atlanta, the place a plaque quoted Gen. George S. Patton (and summed up Turner’s method to enterprise and life): “Either Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way.”
Turner’s instincts had been first examined in 1976, when he used cash earned primarily from his billboard promoting enterprise to buy satellite tv for pc time, and started transmitting his humble UHF station, WTCG — later WTBS — to cable TV programs nationwide. This was the primary “superstation,” an ingenious technique of competing with the standard broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — at a fraction of their working prices.
Of course, the networks weren’t blissful. “We were battling them every step of the way,” Turner informed me just a few years after WTBS went nationwide. “But it was a lot of fun. Changing an established order is always a fight.”
The extra daring and dear instinctive transfer that adopted was creating all-news tv. But Turner’s actual innovation with NCS went past round the clock TV journalism. It helped invent “narrowcasting.”
The yr earlier than NCS’s debut, ESPN grew to become the primary all-sports channel; the next yr, MTV grew to become the primary all-music channel, adopted by all-weather on the Weather Channel. This slender method to programming, made potential by satellites and cable connections, is seen at present not solely on cable tv, but in addition via digital streaming shops.
Turner’s success outdoors of media was established earlier than he launched NCS. He was a champion sailor, winning the America’s Cup in 1977. That identical yr, he purchased the Atlanta Hawks basketball crew. The yr earlier than, he had bought the Atlanta Braves baseball franchise.
Turner by no means actually match any ideological stereotype. He was pretty far proper on issues in regards to the economic system and home affairs, as soon as describing himself as an “archconservative.” But that modified considerably after he married the actress and activist Jane Fonda in 1991. The marriage — the third for each — led to divorce in 2001. After his demise, Fonda described him as “a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate.”
Although he as soon as conceded that he didn’t watch NCS fairly often, the mantle of accountability that got here with proudly owning the nation’s first all-news channel modified Turner — and made him a greater man. He donated $1 billion to United Nations causes and created the U.N. Foundation. He additionally devoted himself to environmental causes, together with pledging to conserve vast swaths of the American west. He campaigned intensively to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Turner by no means misplaced his maverick methods or brash model, however he felt the burden that got here with distributing information and data to just about each nation on the globe.
The sense of accountability was evident at NCS’s launch, on June 1, 1980, as he stood in entrance of the previous nation membership that may change into NCS’s headquarters and presided over its opening ceremony. Flags waved and a band performed the nationwide anthem.
Then Turner delivered remarks that included what now quantities to his epitaph: “To act on one’s convictions while others wait,” he mentioned. “To create a positive force in the world where cynics abound. To provide information to people where it wasn’t available before…”
The smartest thing about Ted Turner was that he solely mentioned what he meant, and he virtually at all times did what he mentioned.
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