Ted Turner, the media maverick and philanthropist who based NCS, a pioneering 24-hour community that revolutionized tv information, died peacefully Wednesday, surrounded by his household, in keeping with a information launch from Turner Enterprises. He was 87.
The Ohio-born Atlanta businessman, nicknamed “The Mouth of the South” for his outspoken nature, constructed a media empire that encompassed cable’s first superstation and in style channels for films and cartoons, plus skilled sports activities groups just like the Atlanta Braves.
Turner was additionally an internationally identified yachtsman; a philanthropist who based the United Nations Foundation; an activist who sought the worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons; and a conservationist who grew to become one of many foremost landowners within the United States. He performed a vital position in reintroducing bison to the American west. He even created the Captain Planet cartoon to coach youngsters concerning the atmosphere.
But it was his audacious imaginative and prescient to ship information from around the globe in actual time, at all hours, that actually made him well-known – as soon as his thought lastly took off.
Ted Turner’s life in footage
In 1991, Turner was named Time journal’s Man of the Year for “influencing the dynamic of events and turning viewers in 150 countries into instant witnesses of history.”
Turner ultimately bought his networks to Time Warner and later exited the enterprise, however continued to specific delight in NCS, calling it the “greatest achievement” of his life.
“Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement,” Mark Thompson, Chairman and CEO of NCS Worldwide, mentioned in an announcement. “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.”
Turner was “a legend, he revolutionized the television business by creating the first 24-hour news channel right here at NCS,” Wolf Blitzer mentioned Wednesday morning as he introduced Turner’s demise on-air.
Ted Turner speaks on NCS Newsroom in 1995
“We’re all here doing this because of Ted,” Blitzer’s co-anchor Pamela Brown mentioned.
“He was the original,” Christiane Amanpour mentioned. “He made us all proud, he made us all hopeful, and he made us all strive for his vision of a better world.”
Just over a month earlier than his eightieth birthday in 2018, Turner revealed that he had Lewy physique dementia, a progressive mind dysfunction. In early 2025, Turner was hospitalized with a gentle case of pneumonia earlier than recovering at a rehabilitation facility.
Turner is survived by his 5 youngsters, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Turner started his media profession at the age of 24 when he took over his father’s billboard firm, Turner Outdoor Advertising, within the wake of the elder Turner’s suicide. He buried his shock and grief in work — however Turner wasn’t content material to push different folks’s merchandise perpetually.
He purchased up radio stations, then branched into tv in 1970 by buying a struggling station in Atlanta often known as Channel 17. He tried to spice up the scores by airing outdated sitcoms and traditional movies, at one level even internet hosting “Academy Award Theatre” himself.
Turner wasn’t involved in information but. He determined to spend money on sports activities as a substitute, buying the rights to Atlanta Braves baseball video games. Viewers and advertisers flocked to the channel, and as Turner turned a revenue, he began to assume larger about TV.
In 1976 he beamed Channel 17’s sign as much as a satellite tv for pc and it grew to become cable TV’s first superstation, reaching cable subscribers throughout the nation.
Turner purchased the Braves, after which the Atlanta Hawks basketball workforce, partly to maintain the long-term rights to the TV programming, and partly as a result of it was simply plain enjoyable.
As he constructed the Superstation WTBS, he set his sights even larger – a 24-hour information channel.
Turner was harshly important of broadcast TV and institution information judgments. “Part of the reason America had so many problems, he believed, was because his fellow Americans were so ill-informed,” former NCS journalist Lisa Napoli wrote in “Up All Night,” a ebook concerning the creation of NCS. Turner acknowledged “there was no better place to promote a variety of opinions than on allmighty television. With a news channel, he could quite possibly help save the world.”
Lots of people thought Turner’s thought was loopy. But he noticed an enormous opening within the market.
“I worked until 7 o’clock, and when I got home the news was over,” he as soon as mentioned, referencing the 6:30 night newscasts on the massive networks. “So I missed television news completely. And I figured there were lots of people like me.”
Turner needed to dramatically widen the aperture of tv information, envisioning reveals about enterprise, well being, sports activities and different material. He admitted he knew “diddley-squat” concerning the information enterprise, however he recruited the correct folks who did, like Reese Schonfeld, NCS’s founding president.
On June 1, 1980, NCS, the primary 24-hour information channel, went stay and has been on the air ever since.
Turner rapidly expanded, including a second 24-hour information community NCS2 (later renamed Headline News, then HLN) in 1982 and NCS International, which broadcast around the globe, in 1985. He later added non-news cable channels together with Turner Network Television (TNT), Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and the Cartoon Network.
In the mid-Eighties, he acquired MGM’s library of greater than 4,000 outdated movies and stirred up controversy in the film community for colorizing many black-and-white films, together with “Casablanca.”
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Out of all his networks, NCS was all the time his “baby,” however the community’s early years have been marked by technical snafus throughout its lengthy stretches of stay broadcasting. Some critics dubbed it “Chicken Noodle News.”
Yet, Turner and his deputies knew they have been creating one thing revolutionary.
“I lived for 20 years in my office,” Turner mentioned. His workplace was inside NCS’s broadcast constructing in Atlanta. “I lived on a couch in my office the first 10 years.”
Longtime workers recall Turner sauntering into the newsroom carrying a bathrobe.
“He was one of us,” former NCS president Tom Johnson recalled. “He would be in his housecoat down having breakfast in the Hard News Café (the company’s cafeteria).”
When the Persian Gulf War broke out in 1990, the significance of a 24-hour information channel grew to become clear. It was the primary time a battle was broadcast stay – and it was solely on NCS.
“What Ted made happen was just as important as the Internet revolution,” mentioned former Turner Broadcasting CEO Terry McGuirk.
Turner was hailed as a visionary and earned TIME Magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1991.
In 1996, Turner bought his networks to Time Warner for almost $7.5 billion. He stayed on as a vice-chairman of Time Warner, heading up the corporate’s cable TV networks.
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 19, 1938. At the age of 4, shortly after his sister’s delivery, his mother and father despatched younger Ted to a boarding college, which he didn’t like.
“I wanted to be home,” he mentioned.
Turner had a tough relationship together with his father, who had a weak point for alcohol and disciplined his son with a leather-based strap or a wire coat hanger.
“It wasn’t dangerous or anything like that,” Turner as soon as recalled. “It just hurt like the devil.”
The household later moved to Savannah, Georgia, and his sister Mary Jean contracted a uncommon type of lupus when she was 12. The sickness left her with mind harm and in extreme ache for years till her demise.
“She was sick for five years before she passed away. And it just seemed so unfair, because she hadn’t done anything wrong,” Turner mentioned. “What had she done wrong? And I couldn’t get any answers. Christianity couldn’t give me any answers to that. So my faith got shaken somewhat.”
Turner was despatched to a number of strict Southern navy colleges and his father had hopes of him getting accepted to Harvard. He attended one other Ivy League college — Brown University — however his father minimize off his tuition as a result of he disapproved of his main, as he made clear in a letter he wrote to his son.
“My dear son, I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major,” the elder Turner wrote. “I’m a sensible man, and for the lifetime of me I can not probably perceive why you must want to communicate Greek. With whom will you talk in Greek?
“I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me.”
Before lengthy, the cash ran out and he dropped out, returning to Georgia to work for his father’s billboard firm in Macon.
Turner was simply 24 when his father shot himself and died within the upstairs lavatory at the household’s residence close to Savannah. It was March 5, 1963, and the elder Turner was inebriated and capsules, battling despair and apprehensive he had overextended himself with a $4 million buy that expanded his firm, Turner Outdoor Advertising, into the South’s largest billboard firm.
“He went against everything he taught me: ‘Be courageous and hang in there,’” Turner mentioned.
At the height of his profession, Ted Turner — twice divorced with 5 grown youngsters — started courting actress Jane Fonda in 1989. The two would marry in 1991 and turn out to be one of many nation’s most storied {couples}.
“At first they didn’t get along at all,” recalled good friend and former President Jimmy Carter. “In fact, they didn’t like each other. I heard this from both of them. It was months later before they decided to try again. And they evolved into one of the nicest romances that I’ve ever known about.”
Ted and Jane stayed collectively for 10 years and, after they cut up, his anger at her conversion to Christianity was blamed, however the fact was extra nuanced. She merely may now not take a again seat to his larger-than-life persona or maintain his want for her fixed companionship as they shuttled between his 28 properties. She was pushing 60 and now not involved in residing out of a suitcase.
“I would never love anyone like I love him,” she mentioned. “But I just couldn’t keep moving in his world, along the surface for the rest of my life. I knew that I would get to the end of my life and regret not doing the things that I also needed to do for me.”
He was devastated when she left him and, as his marriage ended, Turner’s media empire started slipping away.
Time Warner had agreed to be bought by Internet supplier AOL in 2000 with the hopes that the merger would assist the legacy media firm survive and prosper throughout the dot-com increase.
But the Internet bubble burst in 2001 and the next yr the brand new AOL-Time Warner sustained a file $99 billion loss, leading to numerous job cuts. It quickly grew to become often known as the most important mergers and acquisitions failure in company historical past.
Turner resigned as AOL Time Warner’s vice-chairman in 2003, and three years later introduced he wouldn’t search reelection to its board of administrators.
He misplaced management of Turner Broadcasting, NCS, the Atlanta Braves, the Hawks – and his fortune, consisting largely of firm inventory, was hemorrhaging – greater than $7 billion in three years.
“I lost Jane. I lost my job here. I lost my fortune, most of it. Got a billion or two left. You can get by on that if you economize,” he informed NCS’s Piers Morgan in May 2012. He mentioned he was “brokenhearted.” He tried to win her again, nevertheless it was apparent the connection was past restore. “We were so far apart philosophically, we couldn’t do it.”
Despite the breakup, Fonda and Turner all the time maintained a detailed friendship, talking on the cellphone commonly and exhibiting up at one another’s charity occasions.
“Just because people get divorced doesn’t mean they stop loving each other,” she mentioned. “It may be hard for two people to live together, but I can’t ever forget the reasons that made me fall in love with him.”
Turner defined that he had “loved many people” however solely been “in love” twice – as soon as with Fonda and as soon as with somebody he wouldn’t identify. Being “in love” implies permanence, he mentioned – one thing he hadn’t skilled in all of his relationships.
Turner all the time had a philanthropic streak, nevertheless it started to maneuver to the forefront in 1997, the yr after he bought Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner. That’s when he pledged $1 billion to the United Nations. Making good on that pledge took some time longer than he had anticipated – he made his ultimate fee to the UN in 2015 – due to the beating his fortune took after the 2001 merger with AOL.
When it was over, he was nonetheless a billionaire, however simply barely.
Turner didn’t do something in a small method, together with reinventing himself. He was the second greatest landowner in North America, with 2 million acres unfold over 28 properties, together with 19 ranches in Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota, in addition to in Argentina. The first of his Ted’s Montana Grill eating places opened in 2002, and now there are greater than 40 in 16 states. He managed to convey bison again from the brink of extinction; he had the world’s largest non-public bison herd, with roughly 51,000 head.
His 5 youngsters – Rhett Turner, Laura Turner Seydel, Jennie Turner Garlington, Teddy Turner and Beau Turner – serve on the board of the Turner Foundation. His different foundations embody his United Nations Foundation, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Captain Planet Foundation and the Turner Endangered Species Fund.
Half a century in the past, his father’s suicide thrust a $1 million billboard firm into his fingers. He usually mentioned that his father, who was 54 at the time he died, ran out of issues to work towards. As a outcome, Turner was pushed – relentlessly transferring ahead, by no means trying again.
Yet irrespective of how profitable he grew to become, Turner was usually nonetheless attempting to show himself.
Fonda recalled how she cried when Turner informed her about his childhood on their second date. They have been driving round his 60,000-acre ranch in Montana, and he was passing the time, speaking as he drove. Tears ran down her face.
“He literally couldn’t understand why I was crying when he told me stories about what his father did to him,” she mentioned. “Children can’t blame their parents. ‘It’s always my fault; it’s being done for my own good. I must not be good enough.’”
“Given his childhood,” Fonda mentioned, “he should’ve become a dictator. He should’ve become a not nice person. The miracle is that he became what he is. A man who will go to heaven, and there’ll be a lot of animals up there welcoming him, animals that have been brought back from the edge of extinction because of Ted. He’s turned out to be a good guy. And he says he’s not religious. But he, the whole time I was with him, every speech — and he likes to give speeches — he always ends his speech with ‘God bless.’ And he’ll get into heaven. He’s a miracle.”
This story has been up to date with extra info.
NCS’s Elise Zeiger, Kimberly Arp Babbit, Liam Reilly and Dan Q. Tham contributed to this story.