International- Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87-INA NEWS

Ted Turner, the media mogul who cut a brash and vivid figure on the American scene of the late 20th century by dominating the cable television industry, creating the 24-hour news cycle with CNN, and extending his restless reach into professional sports, environmentalism and philanthropy, died on Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Fla. He was 87.

Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. Mr. Turner announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.

Mr. Turner’s signature creation was CNN — the Cable News Network — which revolutionized television news in 1980 by presenting it 24 hours a day and eventually inspiring other media operations to follow suit. But his portfolio of business ventures bulged with much more, and their impact on American culture was considerable.

As a spinoff of CNN, Mr. Turner created the channel CNN Headline News and CNN International. He founded the cable and satellite sports and entertainment “superstation” that became known as TBS and spawned a sister channel, TNT, both of which continue to reach millions of homes.

In 1985, he bought for $1.5 billion the MGM studio’s library of films and nine years later created the cable franchise Turner Classic Movies, or TCM. He made a similar purchase of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and, relying on them, created the Cartoon Network in 1992. And in 1996, he merged his conglomerate, Turner Broadcasting System, with Time Warner to create one of the world’s largest media companies.

Along the way, he found the time and energy to captain the winning yacht in the America’s Cup race in 1977 and to take an active role as owner of the Atlanta Braves, giving the team extended national exposure on Turner-owned television.

“I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,” he told the journalist Dale Van Atta in a Reader’s Digest article in 1998. “And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.”

Not even his staunchest admirers placed Mr. Turner on that high a pedestal. But even a bitter rival like the media magnate Rupert Murdoch — who once had his New York Post run the headline “Is Turner Insane?” — had to concede that he was one of the most influential figures in the history of mass media.

An Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Mr. Turner took astounding risks in business, often teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and then roaring back to multiply his fortune.

Against the advice of colleagues and the conventional wisdom of his industry peers, he poured millions of dollars into pioneering ventures that combined cable and satellite broadcasts. He warred against the big television networks. He almost lost his shirt in Hollywood but emerged from these gambles and brawls as a billionaire astride a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels.

His personal life, too, was turbulent. His three marriages — his last, ending in 2001, was to the Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda — were often rocked by his open displays of infidelity, heavy drinking and otherwise boorish behavior.

Nicknamed “the Mouth of the South” for his self-aggrandizing claims and a reputation for dispensing gratuitous insults, Mr. Turner — tall and slim with a craggy, mustachioed face — could nonetheless be a man of great charm, whose gaffes were repeatedly forgiven by an indulgent public, which in large part considered him a living American legend.

Mr. Turner’s politics were contradictory and controversial. While claiming to be an archconservative Republican with warm ties to Christian evangelicals and far-right John Birch Society members, he also befriended the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and defended the repressive conduct of the Communist Chinese government.

In an extraordinary act of philanthropy, he donated a billion dollars to the United Nations, an organization loathed by American conservatives. He adored hunting, yet he became a darling of environmentalists by buying more than a million acres of wilderness and ranch land and then setting them aside as nature preserves. He became the fourth-largest private landowner in the United States, with two million acres, in addition to vast tracts he owned in Argentina and other countries.

Mr. Turner’s influence was most apparent in the way his CNN transformed television news by presenting it around the clock with constant updates, conveying a sense of immediacy.

“Today, news is available when it actually happens, not when it’s convenient for the three broadcast networks to carry it,” the father-and-son authors Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg wrote in their 1995 biography, “Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon.” Whether covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crushing of the Chinese student movement in Tiananmen Square or the Persian Gulf war of 1991, Mr. Turner’s CNN was the vehicle to view history in the making.

“I learn more from CNN than I do from the C.I.A.,” President George H.W. Bush was widely quoted as saying at the time of the war.

Mr. Turner himself professed not to be terribly interested in news or any other kind of business. It was the thrill of the hunt that drove him, not the quarry. As he told The New York Times, “I’ve always been more of an adventurer than a businessman.”

‘Captain Courageous’

Robert Edward Turner III — who was universally known as Ted — was born on Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. His father, Robert Jr., a native Mississippian whose family had grown cotton, moved to Ohio during the Depression and married Florence Rooney, the daughter of a Cincinnati grocery chain owner.

The elder Mr. Turner, known as Ed, later moved the family back south, to Georgia, where he started a billboard advertising company. In interviews and biographies, Ted Turner described him as an abusive alcoholic whom he nevertheless admired and sought to please.

As a youth, Ted Turner attended the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn., at the time an elite all-white military academy that emphasized conservative Christian values. During the summers, he worked for his father’s company, painting billboards. His father made him use his wages to pay for his room and meals at home in Savannah.

Ted graduated in 1956 with good enough grades to gain entrance to Brown University. But he was no model student. A former classmate, William Kennedy, who went on to become a Brown University official, was quoted in “Citizen Turner” as describing young Ted as “a bigot, as maybe all of us were in a sense at the time.”

Mr. Turner, he said, drank excessively, sang Nazi songs outside a Jewish fraternity house and put up Ku Klux Klan signs on the dormitory doors of Black students. He was finally tossed out of Brown after being caught in bed with a woman in his dorm room.

Mr. Turner then joined his father’s company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, which became the largest of its kind in the South, sometimes working hard but often devoting more energy to parties and to sailing, which would become a lifelong passion.

In 1963, his 53-year-old father, after incurring steep debts to expand his billboard operations and struggling with alcohol and drug abuse and depression, shot himself to death in an upstairs bathroom at the Turner home outside Savannah.

Ted Turner, then 24, was devastated and left feeling “alone,” he told Time magazine, “because I had counted on him to make the judgment on whether or not I was a success.” In addition, he was still mourning the recent death of his younger sister, Mary Jean, from the autoimmune disease lupus and encephalitis. He described her death as the reason he lost his religious faith, but also as what galvanized him to become a “superachiever” in business.

Spurning the counsel of his father’s friends and accountants to sell off the business, he insisted on running it intact.

His ambition did not end with billboards, however. In 1970, he went into debt to buy a small, failing Atlanta television station, which he renamed WTCG, for Turner Communications Group, the name he gave his father’s company in the late ’60s after he began buying radio stations. He figured he would use billboards to advertise his new television business. Lacking enough programming and drawing little advertising revenue, the station continued to hemorrhage red ink.

His business advisers counseled him against the purchase.

“Turner didn’t listen,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 2010. “He was Captain Courageous, the man with nerves of steel who went on to win the America’s Cup, take on the networks, marry a movie star, and become a billionaire. He dressed like a cowboy. He gave the impression of signing contracts without looking at them. He was a drinker, a yeller, a man of unstoppable urges and impulses, the embodiment of the entrepreneur as risk-taker. He bought the station, and so began one of the great broadcasting empires of the 20th century.”

An Explosive Expansion

Mr. Turner went further into debt in 1976 to buy the Atlanta Braves, then a dismal baseball team. The purchase price was $500,000 in cash and $8 million at 6 percent annual interest over 10 years. (Forty years later, the Braves franchise was worth $1.175 billion, according to Forbes.)

This time, his gamble paid off. By broadcasting all 162 Braves games on WTCG, he was able to fill a huge programming void for a pittance of what it would have cost to buy or produce other programs. Soon the station’s cash flow was on the rise. (He also bought the Atlanta Hawks basketball franchise, in 1977.)

Rather than use the new money to pay down his debts, Mr. Turner took on more loans to expand his television business through satellite broadcasting. He faced hefty fees for the use of an RCA satellite and had to purchase expensive new broadcasting equipment.

This, too, was a winning gamble. He correctly surmised that he could use the satellite to beam his Atlanta station’s signal and its substantial sports programming to cable systems throughout the country. In this way, what would become known as TBS — for Turner Broadcasting System, the new company name he adopted for the nation’s first “superstation” — was born in late 1976. In addition to sports, he featured a steady stream of old movies and reruns of “Lassie” and “I Love Lucy” at relatively little cost.

At a time when the nascent cable industry needed to prove its programming value to subscribers, Mr. Turner’s station was considered essential to cable’s growth and expansion.

At the same time, Mr. Turner was developing a damaging reputation for philandering, drunkenness and public misconduct. His tumultuous first marriage, to Julia Nye (with whom he had two children, Laura and Teddy Jr.), ended in the early 1960s shortly after Mr. Turner competed against his wife in a yacht race. Seeing she was on the verge of winning, he rammed her boat with his.

Later, he publicly humiliated his second wife, Jane Smith, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant with whom he had two sons, Beauregard and Rhett, and a daughter, Jennie, by taking his girlfriends to Braves games.

Mr. Turner’s antics extended to the office. If he were displeased with a presentation, he might hurl its written text across the room and loudly denigrate his employees, according to his biographers the Goldbergs. To win more business, he sometimes resorted to histrionics.

“Turner would do anything to sell his station to advertisers,” the authors wrote in “Citizen Turner.” “He’d jump up on chairs, on desks, on tables, on anything that didn’t move, and shout at the top of his larynx. If he met really serious resistance, he might even drop to the floor as if he’d been shot and cry, ‘You’re killing me!’”

In 1977, he was barred from baseball for almost a year by the commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, for tampering with another team’s player, Gary Matthews, a free-agent outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, and for ignoring edicts by Mr. Kuhn. Mr. Turner responded, “I’m thankful he didn’t have me shot.”

During these years of anxious debt concerns and explosive business expansion, Mr. Turner spent months at a time sailing and winning yachting accolades. In 1970 and again in 1973, he was named Yachtsman of the Year by the United States Sailing Association, having learned to sail at his hometown Savannah Yacht Club, and he set his sights on winning the prestigious America’s Cup.

He first had to overcome the initial objections of the tradition-bound New York Yacht Club. Membership in the club was required for any entrant in the America’s Cup competition, and the club’s officials were uneasy about Mr. Turner’s rowdy reputation.

In the end, however, he was simply too good a yachtsman to reject, and the objections were dropped. He fared poorly in his America’s Cup debut, in 1974, and subsequently purchased the yacht Courageous from Ted Hood, who had proved victorious with it in 1974.

Mr. Turner put together a top-notch crew that helped him win the 1977 America’s Cup races off Newport, R.I. But he did so only after coming close to being thrown out of the races once he had been accepted. “During the Cup eliminations,” Time magazine reported, “he flirted with every girl in sight, crawled pubs with his crew, got tossed out of chic clubs and restaurants for boozy behavior and turned Newport’s blue bloods positively purple.”

The Cup organizers forced Mr. Turner to apologize publicly to one elite club, the Spouting Rock Beach Association, for accosting female members. “I wish to apologize profusely because I certainly did have a couple drinks too many that Saturday night,” Mr. Turner wrote to the club president.

But on winning the Cup, he surrounded himself with young, attractive women and was too drunk to finish a victory speech at a nationally televised news conference.

He continued to serve as skipper in major open-sea races, notably in the catastrophic 1979 Fastnet Race, organized by the Royal Ocean Racing Club, in the Irish Sea. Unexpectedly fierce winds damaged and sank many boats, killing 15 sailors. Of about 300 starters, only 85 finished, and Mr. Turner’s yacht, Tenacious, was named the winner.

“Like any experience,” Mr. Turner said at the time, “whenever you come through it you feel better. We’re not talking about the other people who died, but to be able to face it all and come through it is exhilarating. Sailing in rough weather is what the sport is all about.”

The triumphs on water turned Mr. Turner into an American hero, and he used his new popularity to his business advantage. On June 1, 1980, he launched CNN, the first 24-hour all-news channel, basing it in Atlanta, pointedly far from the traditional news capitals of New York and Washington. Less than two years later, he began broadcasting CNN Headline News, with updates every half-hour.

CNN Is Born

CNN struggled initially, losing up to $2 million a month in its first two years. When the network first went on the air, it had fewer than two million viewers, compared with the three big networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — whose news broadcasts collectively reached more than 50 million households. And Mr. Turner had to count on his audience’s patience with his inexperienced, underpaid news staff and repeated technical problems that left anchors without copy or footage.

Competitors derided CNN as the “Chicken Noodle Network,” and Mr. Turner’s network had to sue the Reagan administration and the three rival networks to gain inclusion in the White House press pool.

The need to fill 24 hours of coverage was daunting. Mr. Turner and his top executives went on a hiring binge, recruiting pundits such as Robert Novak and finding anchors and hosts like Lou Dobbs and Larry King from local TV stations and the world of radio, respectively. They built from scratch a sprawling international framework for the newsroom’s operations.

Ahead of the ground operations in the Persian Gulf War, CNN found itself with a major advantage. The network’s correspondent Peter Arnett was among the only Western reporters in Baghdad, providing robust on-the-ground reporting from the city under attack from U.S. forces. By contrast, competitors were outside the country, and their dispatches were far more dependent on official U.S. government statements.

CNN’s coverage from Iraq brought it a prestigious Peabody Award, which noted that it had “matured from a cable curiosity to become an international service of inestimable importance.” Mr. Turner appeared on Time magazine’s cover as “Man of the Year” for 1991.

As CNN was building respectability, Mr. Turner was able to draw public sympathy in his efforts to portray himself as a patriotic underdog in the battle against the network giants for larger audiences. Claiming to represent conservative family values, he attacked the networks’ senior executives as a “bunch of pinkos.”

“In the race for ratings, their newscasts dig up the most sordid things human beings do,” Mr. Turner told Newsweek in 1980. “They make heroes of criminals and glamorize violence. They’ve polluted our minds and our children’s minds.”

Mr. Turner could stake out political positions far to the left of the major networks when it suited him, however. In 1982, for example, he returned from a visit to Cuba full of praise for Mr. Castro. When CNN executives upbraided him for declaring the Cuban leader “a great guy,” Mr. Turner was reported to have retorted: “Castro’s not a Communist. He’s like me, a dictator.” He even persuaded Mr. Castro to film a promotional ad for CNN.

Nonetheless, in his battle against the networks, Mr. Turner counted among his allies prominent members of the John Birch Society and right-wing Christian evangelical ministers like the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Donald Wildmon. They overlooked Mr. Turner’s bawdy lifestyle while applauding his calls for more family values in broadcasting.

Cable station operators saw the strident Mr. Turner as their champion against the networks, and signed up to receive his CNN and TBS superstation.

With CNN starting to be profitable and TBS earning a windfall, Mr. Turner was ready to roll the dice once again. In 1985, he announced a hostile bid for CBS, then the largest television network, for $5.4 billion in stock and junk bonds. The proposed deal shocked the media industry because Mr. Turner was proposing to have his company, TBS, with annual revenue of less than $300 million, take over a giant conglomerate with revenue of almost $5 billion.

CBS counterattacked by adopting a so-called poison pill, borrowing a billion dollars to buy back 21 percent of its stock. In effect, CBS was warning Mr. Turner that if his takeover bid were to succeed, he would be saddled with an impossibly large debt. Admitting defeat, he withdrew his bid in July 1985.

A month later, Mr. Turner was back in the headlines with an agreement to buy the Hollywood film company MGM-UA Entertainment — itself a recent merger of MGM and United Artists — from the billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian for $1.5 billion. Under the terms of the deal, which was completed in March 1986, Mr. Turner took over the MGM studio and lot, and a library of 3,500 films, including “Gone With the Wind.” As part of the deal, he also took possession of the pre-1948 Warner Bros. catalog, which meant “Casablanca” and Looney Tunes cartoons.

The investment world reacted with sheer disbelief at the price tag, which left Mr. Turner’s businesses with almost $2 billion in debt. The new conglomerate was “one of the most debt-ridden companies of its time,” according to The Wall Street Journal in 1986.

Within months it was obvious even to Mr. Turner that he could not generate enough revenue to cover his debt payments. So, in June 1986, he agreed to sell everything but the film library for $490 million. In the end, Mr. Turner paid a whopping $1.2 billion for just the MGM library.

Still crushed by debt, Mr. Turner sought to squeeze profits from his MGM library by colorizing classic black-and-white movies in what turned out to be a misguided attempt to increase their appeal among younger viewers. He was attacked by the press, filmmakers, movie buffs and politicians as a cultural philistine. Stung, he ended up colorizing only a few films, among them the 1941 Humphrey Bogart detective movie “The Maltese Falcon,” before abandoning the plan amid condemnation by many actors and directors, including the filmmakers Billy Wilder and Woody Allen.

Mr. Turner further tarnished his image by uttering ethnic and racial slurs in public forums. In 1985, The Atlanta Constitution reported that Mr. Turner had said that the MX mobile missile program and the unemployment rate could be tackled together by hiring jobless African Americans to carry missiles on their backs from one silo to another.

In “Ted Turner Speaks,” a collection of his public statements compiled in 1999 by Janet Lowe, Mr. Turner was quoted at a sports banquet as saying that he had other reasons to dislike the baseball agent Jerry Kapstein besides the fact that he “is a Jew.”

In his defense, Mr. Turner’s associates pointed out that he had placed Black employees, like Bill Lucas and the Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, to senior posts in the Atlanta Braves organization and had appointed Jews like Reese Schonfeld to top spots at CNN.

Mr. Turner’s second marriage did not survive this troubled period. He made no attempt to hide his liaison with a former Playboy magazine cover model, Liz Wickersham, whom he tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into an anchor for a CNN program. In the late 1980s, Mr. Turner and his wife, Jane Smith, divorced.

An Era of Prosperity

Faced with mounting debts and almost certain bankruptcy, Mr. Turner agreed in 1987 to sell 37 percent of Turner Broadcasting to a group of 31 cable companies for $562 million and to cede to them seven of the 15 seats on the TBS board. Moreover, he agreed not to make any expenditure of more than $2 million unless he had the approval of 12 of the 15 board members. For the first time since his father’s death, Mr. Turner had to share control of his business.

With the days of wild gambles over, a new era of steady, spectacular prosperity was beginning for Mr. Turner. By 1989, his fortune had doubled to $5 billion. CNN and CNN Headline News reached more than 50 million households worldwide. His MGM film library, which included “The Wizard of Oz” and “Citizen Kane,” evolved into a lucrative investment after all, drawing millions of new viewers to Turner Network Television, or TNT, and then Turner Classic Movies.

Mr. Turner added to his empire in 1991 by purchasing, for $320 million, Hanna-Barbera Productions, whose library included such characters as the Flintstones, the Jetsons and Yogi Bear. A year later, he introduced the Cartoon Network, a 24-hour all-cartoon channel that proved immensely popular. And in 1993, he acquired the film production companies New Line Cinema and Castle Rock.

His colleagues and employees began to report that Mr. Turner had mellowed. Episodes of women-chasing and tantrums declined. In interviews, Mr. Turner said he had begun taking lithium, a drug often prescribed to counter manic-depressive behavior.

He could still startle with his public statements. In one speech, to the American Humanist Association convention, he described Christianity as “a religion for losers.” Barely a year after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of student dissidents, he shocked the foreign correspondents association in Beijing by suggesting that the Chinese government was not to blame.

“The students should have known better, don’t you think?” he said. “They had been warned.” Some of his critics suggested that his growing business deals with China might have colored his views.

Still, he remained popular with many Americans, who saw him as an affable, successful rebel. Adding to his celebrity was his unlikely courtship of Ms. Fonda. Both were wealthy and famous, but they were opposites in many ways. He was a notorious womanizer; she, an ardent feminist. He had been a right-wing conservative in his youth; she had been called Hanoi Jane for speaking out on North Vietnamese radio against the American military effort during the Vietnam War. He loved to hunt; she was an environmentalist.

He wooed her — just after her divorce from the liberal activist and California state legislator Tom Hayden — by emphasizing their similarities, including as the children of a suicidal parent (in Ms. Fonda’s case, her mother) and their friendships with icons of the far left, like Mr. Castro. She later wrote in a memoir that she had been dazzled by his charisma, which she likened to “a 3-D stereophonic, Shakespearean-level, sound-and-light show.”

The couple married in 1991 — the third marriage for each — and in subsequent years, Mr. Turner devoted more of his time to environmentalism and global peace, while Ms. Fonda virtually retired from Hollywood to devote herself to Mr. Turner and his new causes.

Their marriage lasted 10 years, with Ms. Fonda saying his insatiable need for other women and her own deepening spirituality, including an embrace of Christianity, were underlying causes.

Mr. Turner’s survivors include two daughters, Laura Turner Seydel, who is chair emeritus of the Captain Planet Foundation, a Turner environmental group, and Sara Jean Turner Garlington, who goes by Jennie, an environmentalist and trustee of the Turner Foundation.

He is also survived by three sons, Robert E. Turner IV, known as Teddy, who has been an executive with Turner television interests; Rhett Lee Turner, a filmmaker and photographer; and Reed Beauregard Turner, known as Beau, who is board chairman of the Turner Endangered Species Fund; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Moving Beyond Empire-Building

By the mid-1990s, Mr. Turner appeared to have reached the limit of his empire-building ambitions. In 1995, he reached a deal to merge his Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner by agreeing to exchange all his company shares for $7.5 billion worth of Time Warner stock. Gerald M. Levin, the Time Warner boss, became chairman and chief executive of the new conglomerate, which kept the Time Warner name, while Mr. Turner accepted the post of vice chairman.

“I’ve been a C.E.O. for 33 years, and that’s a long time for anyone,” Mr. Turner told The New York Times in 1995, adding later, “I’m married to Jane Fonda, so I know what it’s like to be No. 2.” In 2001, when the internet company AOL bought Time Warner for $160 billion, creating the world’s biggest media enterprise, Mr. Turner moved further down the corporate hierarchy and resigned from the board two years later.

At times, Mr. Turner seemed more enthusiastic about charitable and environmental causes than business. In 1986, he delved back into the sports world, creating the Goodwill Games, athletic competitions among nations that were originally intended to ease Cold War tensions. A charitable effort, it disbanded after 15 years and five international events.

By 1996, he had amassed nearly 1.3 million acres of ranch land, roughly enough to fill the state of Delaware, on eight ranches in Montana, New Mexico and Nebraska. His herd of 12,000 buffalo was one of the largest in the nation. And he announced that his land would be kept undeveloped and later set aside for nature preserves.

He started renewable energy ventures; opened a chain of restaurants that serve bison, Ted’s Montana Grill, in an effort to create a market for the meat and therefore preserve the animal from extinction; and founded what is now Ted Turner Reserves, offering guided “eco-conscious” tours and luxury lodging at vast properties in New Mexico.

He also became a major philanthropist, creating foundations devoted to protecting the environment, supporting the United Nations and reducing the threat of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare.

A $1 billion donation to the U.N. in 1997, dispensed over 10 years, was aimed at aiding refugees and children, clearing land mines and fighting disease.

With typical brashness, Mr. Turner said the billion-dollar donation represented just the increase in his net worth in the previous nine months, and he called on other wealthy businesspeople to follow his philanthropic example.

“There’s a lot of people who are awash in money they don’t know what to do with,” Mr. Turner said in a CNN interview with Mr. King after the announcement. “It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t know what to do with it. I have learned the more good that I did, the more money comes in. You have to learn to give. You’re not born as a giver. You’re born selfish.”