Ted Turner, the media maverick and philanthropist who founded CNN, died peacefully on Wednesday, surrounded by his family, according to a statement from Turner Enterprises. He was 87.
The announcement confirmed what the media world had long prepared itself for the departure of one of the most consequential figures in the history of broadcasting. But the weight of it landed no less heavily. Wolf Blitzer, the veteran CNN anchor who broke the news on air, called Turner “a legend” who “revolutionised the television business by creating the first 24-hour news channel.” Christiane Amanpour, who began her career at CNN as a desk assistant and rose to become one of the world’s most recognised journalists, put it even more simply: “He was the original.”
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on November 19, 1938. Few could have predicted that the son of a billboard advertising magnate, who was reportedly expelled from Brown University for having a woman in his dormitory room, would one day reshape the global information landscape. But that is precisely what he did.
Turner launched the Cable News Network the nation’s first continuous all-news television station on June 1, 1980, at a converted Jewish country club in Atlanta. The concept was audacious, many said absurd. In an era dominated by the three major American broadcast networks, the idea of news running around the clock seemed to most industry observers like an expensive gamble with no logical audience. Former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan recalls that Turner remained genuinely baffled by the resistance. “To him it was just the most logical thing in the world and he couldn’t understand why nobody else was doing it,” Jordan says. “So he was going to do it.”
CNN quickly made its mark covering major news events as they happened, including the 1982 Lebanon War and the 1986 Challenger explosion. In 1991, during the first US-led war against Iraq, CNN’s coverage garnered one billion viewers worldwide the largest audience of a non-sporting or concert event in television history. Its reporters also brought live images of the student uprising at Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall into homes across the globe. The “Chicken Noodle News” that critics had once dismissed had quietly become the world’s most important newsroom.
CNN’s chairman and CEO, Mark Thompson, described Turner in a statement as an “intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement,” adding: “He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand.”
CNN was only the centrepiece of an empire Turner constructed largely through sheer willpower and an appetite for risk that unnerved even his closest allies. He turned the Turner Broadcasting System into a behemoth, establishing the “superstation” concept and launching channels including TBS, TNT, the Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies. His companies also acquired Hanna-Barbera Productions, helping establish the foundation for Cartoon Network, which debuted in 1992. In the mid-1980s, he acquired MGM’s library of more than 4,000 old films, giving him one of the most valuable content archives in history.
Beyond television, his endeavours included owning the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks, racing boats and winning the America’s Cup, broadcasting wrestling, and creating the Goodwill Games. In 1986, Turner launched the Goodwill Games, an international competition designed to bypass the Cold War tensions that had fractured the Olympics. The Games lasted until 2001. He even created the Captain Planet animated series to teach children about environmental responsibility a project as earnest as it was unconventional.
His nickname, “The Mouth of the South,” was both a tribute and a caution. He was outspoken to a fault, drawing criticism and admiration in equal measure for comments on politics, religion, and world affairs that he delivered, as those who knew him recall, entirely without a script.
In 1996, Turner sold CNN and the rest of his company, Turner Broadcasting System, to Time Warner for approximately $7.34 billion a move he deeply regretted. His influence over the empire he had built began to erode. A few years later, Time Warner sold itself to AOL against Turner’s wishes. The AOL merger is considered one of the worst in US corporate history, and Turner’s fortune consisting mostly of company stock haemorrhaged more than $7 billion in three years. He resigned as AOL Time Warner’s vice-chairman in 2003.
Yet even in retreat, Turner remained a force.
In 1997, as Turner was being honoured at the United Nations, he pledged to donate a billion dollars to it and then he did. The funds were used to create the United Nations Foundation, a charitable group that supports the goals of the UN. It remains one of the largest individual donations to an international institution in history. He also co-founded, with former US Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the Nuclear Threat Initiative a non-partisan organisation dedicated to preventing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Turner also signed the Giving Pledge and became one of North America’s largest private landowners, controlling roughly two million acres of ranchland and environmental preserves. He owned the largest private bison herd in the world, managing approximately 45,000 animals across 13 ranches in six states. His commitment to restoring the American bison population was not a hobby it was, by most accounts, a personal mission rooted in genuine ecological conviction.
In later years, as CNN competed not just with cable rivals but with digital platforms and social media, Turner withdrew from public life following his dementia diagnosis.
Just over a month before his 80th birthday in 2018, Turner revealed that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder. His disclosure was characteristic of the man direct, unguarded, and with none of the euphemisms that power tends to prefer. He died on Wednesday, May 6, after a brief time in hospice care, survived by his five children Laura, Teddy, Rhett, Jennie, and Beau as well as his grandchildren, a great-grandchild, and former wife Jane Fonda.
Turner married and divorced three times. His third marriage, to Hollywood star and activist Jane Fonda in 1991, raised eyebrows a union between an avatar of American capitalism and one of the most outspoken progressive voices of her generation. By all accounts, they were genuinely devoted to each other.
The television landscape Turner found was one of rigid schedules and nightly broadcasts. The one he left behind runs on the logic he invented continuous, immediate, global. CNN helped fundamentally change the format and speed of television news, laying the path for competitors such as Fox News and MSNBC. Nearly every network that followed whether cable or streaming built itself, consciously or not, on the architecture Turner assembled in Atlanta in 1980.
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In 2023, reflecting on CNN’s story, Turner wrote: “The doubters said we couldn’t pull it off. But with grit, tenacity and perseverance, we endured. Our experiences and stories can be a spark to usher in innovation and integrity to the future of journalism.”
He was, in the truest sense of the word, a builder. The question his passing now leaves for the industry he transformed is whether those who inherited his creation will honour not just the format, but the conviction that animated it the belief that news, delivered without fear or favour and without ever signing off, could make the world a little less dangerous and a little more knowable.
