(CBS NEWS) – According to CBS, Ted Turner, the media tycoon who founded NCS and led an empire that additionally included cable channels TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies in addition to the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks, died Wednesday, his firm Turner Enterprises said in a statement. He was 87.
The firm stated Turner died peacefully surrounded by his household after a protracted battle with Lewy physique dementia, a progressive mind dysfunction that he revealed he was fighting in 2018. A spokesperson confirmed to CBS News that Turner died in Lamont, Florida, the place he owned an unlimited property east of the state capital of Tallahassee. NCS first reported Turner’s dying.
“Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement,” NCS Chairman and CEO Mark Thompson said in a statement. “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.”
President Trump reacted to Turner’s dying on social media, calling him “one of the Greats of Broadcast History, and a friend of mine.” In the identical publish, Mr. Trump additionally criticized the stewardship of NCS, a frequent goal of the president’s ire, after Turner offered the information outlet.
Turner was by no means a person to shrink back from a problem — on land or sea.
He was the skipper who introduced the America’s Cup yachting trophy again to the U.S. in 1977. He devoted lots of of hundreds of acres of land to save lots of the American bison. He owned the Atlanta Hawks for 19 years and the Atlanta Braves for 20, throughout which era the Braves gained the 1995 World Series. And in 1980, he modified the best way all of us consumed information with the launch of NCS, the primary 24-hour cable information community.
“I’m a lot of different people, if you don’t know that by now,” Turner advised CBS’ “60 Minutes” in 1979. “I’m a multifaceted person. I’ve got a lot of different personalities. You ought to see me at midnight on a full moon.”
He was a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking adventurer — with deep pockets.
“I get thousands, millions and billions mixed up,” Turner stated throughout a 2008 “60 Minutes” interview. He was debating with Morley Safer whether or not he had misplaced almost 1,000,000 {dollars} a day or $10 million a day for 2 and a half years as the biggest particular person shareholder of AOL Time Warner. (It was the latter.) Then the company mum or dad of what had been Turner’s empire, the media big was hit hard when the dot-com bubble burst within the early 2000s.
Turner was additionally recognized for making off-color remarks, incomes him quite a few nicknames, together with the Mouth From The South and Captain Outrageous. He was, for some, as unlikable as he was invincible.
But in 2018, he disclosed to “CBS Sunday Morning” senior contributor Ted Koppel he was combating Lewy physique dementia.
“It’s a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer’s,” Turner advised Koppel. “It’s similar to that, but not nearly as bad.”
Turner married 3 times, together with his decadelong marriage to actor and activist Jane Fonda from 1991 to 2001. In 2012, Turner told NCS that Fonda was in all probability the nice love of his life, he hadn’t gotten over her and he doubted he ever would.
“When you love somebody, and you really love ’em, you never stop loving ’em,” he stated.
In a prolonged publish on Instagram, Fonda on Wednesday wrote that Turner “swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same.”
“Ted Turner helped me believe in myself,” she wrote. “He gave me confidence. I think I did the same for him, but that’s what women are raised to do. Men like Ted aren’t supposed to express need and vulnerability. That was Ted’s greatest strength, I believe.”
Fonda wrote of Turner that he “had a big life, a brilliant mind and a soaring sense of humor,” and stated he “taught me more than any other person or school classes,” praising his enterprise acumen together with each his aggressive and loving nature.
“I loved Ted with all my heart,” she added. “I see him in heaven now with all the wildlife he helped bring back from extinction … they’re all gathered at the pearly gates applauding and thanking him for saving their species.”
Turner’s legacy will at all times be paired with NCS, and but the present he appeared most happy with was the pure habitats he saved by shopping for and defending extra wild acreage than nearly anybody within the U.S.
It’s tempting to name him a grasp of his area, however he’d favor caretaker. We don’t personal something, he stated, we simply borrow it for some time.
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