Ted Turner, the brash media mogul who created NCS and revolutionized how Americans watched tv, and who wielded his media empire and wealth to pursue liberal international causes and land conservation, has died. He was 87.
Turner died Wednesday, in keeping with his household.
In 2018, he revealed he had been identified with Lewy physique dementia, a neurodegenerative illness, which had been progressing lately.
Turner’s outsize public persona — some known as him the “Mouth from the South” for his freewheeling trash discuss — matched the Georgian’s affect on information, politics, sports activities and leisure within the late twentieth century. Turner repeatedly shook up established industries by invading rapidly and increasing choices for shoppers, whereas railing towards monolithic rivals who have been much less daring or nimble than his maverick Turner Broadcasting System.
Turner created the cable stations TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies; he owned the Atlanta Braves baseball crew, the Atlanta Hawks basketball crew and revitalized skilled wrestling with World Championship Wrestling.
Turner was one of many first adopters of cable and satellite tv for pc broadcasting know-how, and for a lot of rural Americans residing past the tower alerts of main cities, he was the primary individual to convey them fascinating TV.
The media baron continually generated headlines. He had a Clark Gable pencil mustache, raced sailboats, cavorted with the late communist chief Fidel Castro in Cuba, and at one level married Academy Award-winning actress and activist Jane Fonda. His wealth enabled him to turn out to be one of many largest non-public landowners and wealthiest philanthropists within the United States.
His crowning cultural achievement was the creation of the Cable News Network in 1980, which created the mannequin for at this time’s cable information titans. The 24-hour information channel was not extensively anticipated to be successful. All-night broadcasting had not been confirmed as a enterprise mannequin in an business dominated nationally by company monoliths ABC, NBC and CBS, the place information programming was one thing that occurred on a set schedule. And NCS’s headquarters weren’t in media facilities reminiscent of New York or Los Angeles, however in Atlanta.
Turner believed that “over-the-air networks would decline as audiences turned to videos and other outlets for entertainment on demand,” wrote the late journalist Daniel Schorr in a 2001 memoir.
“The network future belonged to whoever would deliver what was happening now — live news and live sports. That was why he wanted to be the first to deliver all news, all sports, all the time,” wrote Schorr, whom Turner courted to affix NCS.
Within two years, NCS had greater than 9 million subscribers. By the 2000s, Turner’s as soon as far-flung thought for an around-the-clock information service had turn out to be so profitable that it had attracted imitators reminiscent of MSNBC (now known as MS NOW) and Fox News.
“We not only became profitable, but also changed the nature of news — from watching something that happened to watching it as it happened,” Turner mentioned of NCS in 2004. “If we needed more money for (broadcasting from) Kosovo or Baghdad, we’d find it. If we had to bust the budget, we busted the budget. We put journalism first, and that’s how we built NCS into something the world wanted to watch.”
Fox Corp. Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, who was each a rival and pal of Turner’s, mentioned his “vision for 24-hour cable news transformed the media industry and gave viewers everywhere a front seat to witness history unfold. His impact as a trailblazer has left an indelible mark on our cultural landscape.”
Turner acknowledged the worth of world distribution lengthy earlier than his rivals, launching NCS’s worldwide enterprise within the mid-Eighties. He purchased his first western property, the Bar None Ranch in Montana, and would ultimately turn out to be one of many nation’s largest particular person landowners with practically 2 million acres, which give habitat for threatened species and his beloved American bison.
“Ted’s entrepreneurial spirit, creative ambition and willingness to take risks changed the media industry forever,” David Zaslav, chief government of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns NCS, mentioned Wednesday in a observe to staff. “He believed deeply in the power of ideas, in doing things differently and in building platforms that could inform, inspire and connect people around the world.”
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 19, 1938, and raised in Georgia. A mischievous little one — who turned a mischievous grownup regardless of attending the Georgia Military Academy (later renamed Woodward Academy) close to Atlanta — he had a tricky childhood at the arms of his alcoholic father, Ed.
“Ninety percent of the arguments I had with Ed were over his beating Ted too hard,” Ted’s mom, Florence Turner, recalled later.
“My dad ran an old-fashioned household and he insisted that pretty much everything had to be his way,” Ted Turner mentioned in a 2008 memoir. “My father and I had a complex relationship, but I loved him.”
The youthful Turner attended Brown University however dropped out earlier than graduating. His financial savings had run out, his father had stopped financially supporting his tuition, and in his ultimate days on campus, he was suspended for bringing a girl to his dorm room, in keeping with his memoir.
He quickly joined his father’s increasing billboard firm, Turner Advertising, the place he had been working on and off for years since childhood.
He inherited the enterprise at the age of 24 after his father died by suicide. By then, Turner had already had years of expertise, and he labored furiously to reverse his father’s latest sale of a part of the corporate to a competitor and paid down its daunting debt, an act that presaged the empire-building to return.
While rising the enterprise, Turner additionally pursued his ardour for aggressive crusing, which is how he met his first spouse, Judy Nye, in faculty. It’s additionally how their marriage ended. Turner deliberately hit his spouse’s boat throughout a 1963 race to maintain her from passing him, and the pair, who had two youngsters, break up instantly afterward.
It was to be the primary of three divorces. “My problem is I love every woman I meet,” Turner mentioned. He would go on to win the America’s Cup in 1977 whereas increasing his father’s firm into a contemporary multimedia conglomerate.
Leveraging the billboard enterprise, Turner began shopping for native radio stations throughout the South within the late Nineteen Sixties. In 1970, he purchased the Channel 17 tv station in Atlanta, competing with native community associates by airing outdated films whose rights have been inexpensive and choosing up programming dropped by the much less nimble competitors. He did not like placing information on prime time again then — too detrimental — and shortly picked up broadcast rights for the Braves, Hawks and different native sports activities.
The Braves have been a rankings hit, and when the crew flailed and went up on the market, Turner’s firm turned its proprietor in 1976. The crew continued to flail however Turner boosted its profile with gimmicks reminiscent of stitching “Channel 17” on the again of a pitcher’s jersey and dressing up because the crew’s batboy and supervisor, to the league’s disdain. Turner purchased the Hawks shortly after.
Facing entrenched native community associates, Turner expanded his impartial station’s attain throughout the South after which the U.S. by embracing the brand new applied sciences of cable and satellite tv for pc broadcasting. Channel 17 turned nationally often known as the “SuperStation,” with name letters WTBS, later shortened to TBS.
The quirky Atlanta station’s native broadcasts of outdated films and sports activities video games had turn out to be nationwide broadcasts.
Still hungry for extra, Turner lastly turned his consideration to information programming. He launched NCS in 1980 in a determined bid to create a nationwide 24-hour information channel earlier than the published titans ABC, NBC and CBS — and their gargantuan budgets — might beat him to it.
“The 24/7 genre started with Ted Turner,” veteran NCS journalist Christiane Amanpour mentioned Wednesday on NCS. “He was the original, and he made us all proud, and he made us all hopeful, and he made us all strive for his vision of a better world.”
There have been some lean early years. But the nascent channel fended off an try by ABC to create a competitor, and critics might see the worth of an ever-present information channel, even when high quality was a little bit skinny at occasions.
“Non-viewers of NCS are missing a lot. There are so many reasons to watch,” Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg wrote in 1986, hailing the six-year-old channel as an “institution.” “It’s not always good, but it’s always there.”
In 1986, NCS was the one broadcaster operating reside protection when the Challenger shuttle liftoff resulted in catastrophe. In 1991, the community gave Americans a reside and uninterrupted look at the invasion of Iraq. American officers held information conferences realizing that Iraqi chief Saddam Hussein was watching them on NCS.
Americans had seen photographs of warfare earlier than, however not broadcast nonstop into their houses.
“NCS seeks to be a stethoscope attached to the hypothetical heart of the war, and to present us with its hypothetical pulse,” the French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote, critiquing the battle as a media spectacle. Media students started to wonder if a “NCS effect” was influencing authorities coverage. Officials discovered that they now needed to reply way more rapidly to crises unfolding on reside tv.
Turner was not adversarial to communist nations of the period and even tried his personal model of the Olympics, known as the Goodwill Games, a little bit of private-sector peace-craft that introduced the Soviet Union and the U.S. out of their respective Olympic boycotts and again into direct competitors within the Eighties. All on tv, after all.
Turner additionally noticed skilled wrestling as a part of his sports activities portfolio, at one level attempting to pit his World Championship Wrestling program towards competitor Vince McMahon’s wrestling empire, then known as the World Wrestling Federation. Turner equally tried to take a chunk out of MTV with the Cable Music Channel, with a promise “to stay away from the excessive, violent or degrading clips to women that MTV is so fond of putting on.”
Moralism was a Turner hallmark. Turner had began his life as a conservative — he had met his second spouse, Jane Smith, at a 1964 fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater — however later turned towards extra liberal-leaning causes, reminiscent of world peace, nuclear nonproliferation and combating local weather change.
At the 1990 American Humanist Assn.’s annual conference, Turner introduced his “Ten Voluntary Initiatives” — his atheistic model of the Ten Commandments — which included pledges to world peace, environmentalism, nonviolence and “to have no more than two children, or no more than my nation suggests.” He would turn out to be a significant non-public donor to the United Nations, pledging $1 billion and launching the United Nations Foundation.
In 1991, a 12 months marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the primary U.S. warfare towards Iraq and the affirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Time journal named Turner its “Man of the Year” for his “visionary” creation of NCS, which coated these occasions reside. He additionally married Fonda that 12 months (the ceremony was reported by NCS) and his Braves narrowly misplaced the World Series.
Time’s honorific was additionally a pleasant little bit of company synergy. The journal’s guardian firm, Time Warner, owned about 20 % of Turner Broadcasting System inventory.
Turner launched the Cartoon Network in 1992, which helped introduce his then-newly-acquired Hanna-Barbera characters — together with Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear and Scooby-Doo — to a brand new technology of viewers.
Adversaries thought that Turner’s ventures may very well be reckless and impulsive. Far-seeing accomplishments in nationwide broadcasting and the creation of NCS have been additionally paired with a number of costly misadventures, together with a failed try to purchase CBS.
Turner needed to unwind a purchase order of the MGM movie studio lower than a 12 months after shopping for it, although he held on to 1 invaluable asset: the studio’s movie library, which turned the inspiration of the Turner Classic Movies channel and, later, jewels within the Burbank-based Warner Bros. studio vault.
In 1996, Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner to kind the world’s largest media firm, marking the start of the tip of Turner’s apex in company media. Time Warner’s 2000 merger with budding web big AOL, then the largest-ever company merger, resulted in catastrophe. Turner, who had not been a key participant within the negotiations and had made no secret of his disdain for that deal, was fired as an government.
“Ted Turner was one of the rare leaders who truly changed the trajectory of an industry,” Versant Media Chief Executive Mark Lazarus, a former Turner underling, mentioned in an announcement. “I saw firsthand his willingness to take risks and his belief that media could be something bigger and more impactful.”
NCS (*87*) Chairman Mark Thompson added: “He was and always will be the presiding spirit of NCS. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand.”
Turner resigned from the AOL Time Warner board in 2003, and in 2007, introduced he had offered his firm shares. In his later days, one in every of his best-known ventures was his Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain. His philanthropy and land conservation efforts and safety of the American bison turned guideposts throughout his retirement years.
While NCS maintains affect within the U.S. and overseas, its TV rankings have declined lately — a casualty of adjusting shopper habits, the rise of social media, derision from President Donald Trump — and several other possession adjustments.
During the final decade, NCS has had three totally different company house owners. The firm is poised to be offered once more, this time to billionaire David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance. That proposed merger would convey NCS underneath the identical roof as CBS News.
“I’ve often considered and joked about what I might want written on my tombstone,” Turner mentioned in a 2008 memoir. “At one point, when I felt like I could get out of the way of the press, ‘You Can’t Interview Me Here’ was a leading candidate. … These days, I’m leaning toward, ‘I Have Nothing More to Say.'”
Turner is survived by his 5 youngsters — Laura Turner Seydel (Rutherford), Robert Edward “Teddy” Turner IV (Blair), Rhett Turner, Beau Turner, Jennie Turner Garlington (Peek) — 14 grandchildren and an ideal granddaughter. The household plans a non-public service and a public memorial at a later date.
