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 world causes and land conservation, has died. He was 87.
Turner died Wednesday, NCS reported, citing a information launch from Turner Enterprises.
In 2018, he revealed he had been identified with Lewy physique dementia, a neurodegenerative illness.
The media enterprise is stuffed with big-talking executives. But Turner’s outsized public persona — some known as him the “Mouth from the South” for his free-wheeling trash speak — really matched the Georgian’s affect on information, politics, sports activities and leisure in the late twentieth century. Over and over once more, Turner shook up established industries by invading rapidly and increasing choices for customers, whereas railing in opposition to monolithic rivals who had been much less daring or nimble than his maverick Turner Broadcasting System.
Turner created the cable stations TBS and Turner Classic Movies; he owned the Atlanta Braves baseball group, the Atlanta Hawks basketball group, and revitalized skilled wrestling with World Championship Wrestling.
Turner was certainly one of the 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, Turner was the first particular person to convey them attention-grabbing TV.
He continuously 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 into certainly one of the largest non-public landowners and wealthiest philanthropists in the U.S.
July 1990 picture of Ted Turner with Jane Fonda.
(Tony Duffy/Getty Images)
His crowning cultural achievement was the creation of the Cable News Network in 1980, which created the mannequin for right now’s cable information titans. The 24-hour information channel was not broadly anticipated to be a hit. All-night broadcasting had not been confirmed as a enterprise mannequin in an trade dominated nationally by company monoliths like 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 like New York or Los Angeles, however Atlanta.
But Turner believed that “over-the-air networks would decline as audiences turned to videos and other outlets for entertainment on demand,” journalist Daniel Schorr, whom Turner courted to hitch NCS, recalled of Turner’s pitch 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,” Schorr wrote.
Within two years, NCS had greater than 9 million subscribers; many thousands and thousands extra had been to return. By the 2000s, Turner’s as soon as far-flung concept for an around-the-clock information service had turn into so profitable that it had attracted imitators like MSNBC 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 said 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.”
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 19, 1938, and raised in Georgia. A mischievous baby — who later grew to become a mischievous grownup regardless of attending the Georgia Military Academy — he had a troublesome 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 stated 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 closing days on campus, he was suspended for bringing a girl to his dorm room, in line with his memoir.
He quickly joined his father’s increasing billboard promoting firm, Turner Advertising, the place he had been working on and off for years since childhood and which had since turn into certainly one of the largest promoting firms in the South.
He inherited the enterprise at the age of 24 after his father died by suicide. By then, Turner had already had years of expertise serving to run the firm, and he labored furiously to reverse his father’s current sale of a part of the firm to a competitor and paid down its daunting debt, an act of company savvy that presaged the empire-building to return.
While rising the enterprise, Turner was additionally pursuing his ardour for aggressive crusing, which is how he met his first spouse, Judy Nye, in school. 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 first of three divorces for Turner, who was higher at crusing and at enterprise than protecting marriages collectively. “My problem is I love every woman I meet,” Turner has said. He would go on to win the America’s Cup in 1977 whereas increasing his father’s firm into a contemporary multimedia conglomerate.
Using the billboard enterprise as a springboard into new industries, Turner began shopping for native radio stations throughout the South in the late Sixties. In 1970, he purchased the Channel 17 tv station in Atlanta, competing with native community associates by airing outdated films whose rights had been reasonably priced and choosing up programming dropped by the much less nimble competitors. He didn’t like placing information on prime time again then — too adverse — and shortly picked up broadcast rights for the Braves, Hawks and different native sports activities.
Oct. 1998 picture of former President Jimmy Carter, proper, and Atlanta Braves group proprietor Ted Turner, throughout Game 6 of the National League Championship Series in Atlanta.
(PAT SULLIVAN/AP)
The Braves had been a rankings hit, and when the group flailed and went up on the market, Turner’s firm grew to become its proprietor in 1976. The group 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 as the group’s batboy and supervisor, to the league’s disdain. Turner purchased the Hawks shortly after.
With his ambitions for TV restricted by entrenched native community associates, Turner expanded his impartial station’s attain throughout the South after which the U.S. by embracing the new applied sciences of cable and satellite tv for pc broadcasting. Channel 17 grew to become nationally often called 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 into 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 broadcast titans ABC, NBC and CBS — and their gargantuan budgets — might beat him to it.
There had 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 just a little skinny at instances. “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 6-year-old channel as an “institution.” “It’s not always good, but it’s always there.”
In 1986, NCS was the solely broadcaster operating dwell protection when the Challenger shuttle liftoff led to catastrophe. In 1991, the community gave Americans a dwell and uninterrupted look at the invasion of Iraq. American officers held information conferences understanding that Iraqi chief Saddam Hussein was watching them on NCS.
Americans had seen pictures of struggle earlier than, however not broadcast nonstop into their properties.
“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 surprise whether or not a “NCS effect” was influencing authorities coverage. (*87*) discovered that they now needed to reply far more rapidly to crises unfolding on dwell tv.
Turner was not adversarial to communist international locations 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 in the 1989s. All on tv, in fact.
Turner additionally noticed skilled wrestling as a part of his sports activities portfolio, at one level making an attempt to pit his World Championship Wrestling program in opposition to 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.”
The moralism was a Turner hallmark. Turner had began his life as a conservative — Turner had met his second spouse, Jane Smith, at a 1964 fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater — and turned towards extra liberal-leaning causes, reminiscent of world peace, nuclear nonproliferation and combating local weather change, later in life.
At the 1990 American Humanist Assn.’s annual conference, Turner offered 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.” (Turner had 5 youngsters — Rhett Turner, Laura Turner Seydel, Jennie Turner Garlington, Robert E. “Teddy” Turner IV and Beau Turner.) He would turn into a serious non-public donor to the United Nations, pledging $1 billion and launching the United Nations Foundation nonprofit.
In 1991, a yr marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first U.S. struggle in opposition to 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 dwell. He additionally married Fonda that yr (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 dad or mum firm, Time Warner, owned about 20% of Turner Broadcasting System inventory.
Adversaries thought that Turner’s ventures may very well be reckless and impulsive. Far-seeing accomplishments in nationwide broadcasting and the creation of NCS had 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 yr after shopping for it, although he held onto one helpful asset: The studio’s movie library, which grew to become the basis of the Turner Classic Movies channel.
In 1996, Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner to type the world’s largest media firm, marking the starting of the finish of Turner’s apex in company media. Time Warner’s 2000 merger with budding web large AOL, then the largest-ever company merger, led to catastrophe. Turner, who had not been a key participant in the negotiations, was fired as an government.
As the firm’s largest shareholder, his wealth plummet with its inventory worth. Turner resigned from the board in 2003, and in 2007, introduced he had bought his shares in the firm. In his later days, certainly one of his best-known ventures was his Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain. The headlines stopped coming as typically.
“I’ve often considered and joked about what I might want written on my tombstone,” Turner stated 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.’”
Pearce is a former Times reporter.