Ted Turner

American media mogul

• Born: November 19, 1938
• Place of Birth: Cincinnati, Ohio

Turner, who helped to transform cable television from a fledgling enterprise into a force in popular culture, also formed several cable networks, notably Cable News Network, or CNN, which popularized twenty-four hour news coverage and helped revolutionize the cable news industry in the US. He also owned the Atlanta Braves, a professional baseball team, and propelled the team’s status through national broadcasting of its games via cable television. Turner also was instrumental in the preservation of classic films and in their colorization, a controversial move to film purists.

Early Life

Ted Turner was born on November 19, 1938, as Robert Edward Turner III in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Robert and Florence Turner. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Turner’s father joined the US Navy and moved to the Gulf Coast with his wife and daughter. Turner was left behind at a boarding school. After the war, Robert moved the family, including the young Turner, to Savannah, Georgia, but placed his son in a military academy outside Atlanta. The next year, Turner’s father sent him to a military academy, the McCallie School, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Although the school was known for its strict discipline, Turner began to experience disciplinary problems and soon became known for his odd behavior, including a penchant for taxidermy. It was at this school that he first was called Terrible Ted because of his erratic behavior. Nevertheless, his talent also was notable, as he soon became a student leader.

Turner enrolled at Brown University in 1956. He also continued his passion for sailing, a hobby he started at the age of eleven when a member of his family’s house staff began to teach him to sail with a small boat given to him by his father. Despite being known for his talents, particularly in debating, Turner was eventually expelled from Brown because a woman had visited him in his room, a violation of school policy.

In 1960, Turner’s father made him manager of his advertising business, a position in which he had great success by expanding the business and buying out competitors. That same year, Turner married Judy Nye, whom he had met while sailing. The two divorced in 1962. The next year, Turner’s father died by suicide suicide after becoming worried that his son’s business practices had been too aggressive and had placed the business in danger. Turner now owned Turner Advertising Company, which specialized in billboards.

After his father’s death, Turner turned down offers to buy the company and decided to run it by himself, becoming president and chief executive officer. He was able to bring it out of debt and continued its expansion. In 1964, he married his second wife, Jane Smith. He also became more serious about sailing.

Life’s Work

By the early 1970s, Turner transformed Turner Advertising into one of the largest advertising companies in the United States. In 1970, he purchased WTSG-Channel 17, an Atlanta television station. Shortly thereafter, he purchased another station, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Both stations had been struggling at the time of purchase. He also began buying old black-and-white films and was able to show them without paying royalties. The advent of cable television and the deregulation of cable access by the Federal Communications Commission allowed Turner and other private broadcasters to broadcast to a variety of localized cable networks. Satellite technology allowed a station’s signals to connect with local cable stations throughout the country. Turner changed the name of his Atlanta station from WTSG to WTBS and based the station’s offerings on the old films he had purchased, broadcasting throughout the country with a great deal of success.

In 1976, Turner continued his aggressive strategy to take over and improve struggling businesses when he purchased the Atlanta Hawks, a professional basketball team, and the Atlanta Braves professional baseball team, which had been floundering in the small Atlanta TV market. Rumors indicated the Braves would soon be moved to another city. Turner secured broadcast rights and added Braves games to the Turner Broadcasting Service (TBS) package. He marketed the Braves as America’s Team because it was the first sports team to have its games broadcast around the United States.

In 1977, after being suspended from baseball for violating trade rules, Turner entered and won the America’s Cup as the skipper of the yacht Courageous. Winning the America’s Cup, the most prestigious event in sailing, demonstrated Turner’s ambition and resolve. He took this resolve into his business practices once again, developing, in 1980, a unique, daily, twenty-four-hour TV news service called Cable News Network, or CNN. Around-the-clock, international TV news was an untried concept, and it was deeply criticized by media experts. Some believed that his station would cheapen the news.

The innovative quality of CNN’s programming came from the application of satellite technology to news production and distribution across national frontiers, revolutionizing not only news programming but also TV production. In 1981, Turner launched CNN2, a condensed edition of the news in thirty-minute slots and updates. CNN2 was renamed CNN Headline News in 1983. In 1985, he increased CNN’s audience with CNN International, a twenty-four-hour global news service. Its signal initially went to Europe, then by 1989 to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East via Soviet satellite. Beginning in 1987, the program CNN World Report collected and collated, without censorship, news reports from different parts of the world. In 1988, Noticiero Telemundo-CNN was launched as a Spanish-language news service for viewers in the United States and Latin America.

In 1986, Turner’s intense desire to expand his media empire led to a great deal of criticism when he attempted to take over Columbia Broadcasting System, or CBS. CBS management considered it a hostile takeover attempt and Turner backed off his plans after receiving considerable negative publicity. He diverted his attention to MGM Entertainment and purchased the company, thereby owning the rights to thousands of MGM films. This business venture was not successful for Turner, however, and he followed it up by creating the Goodwill Games, a joint adventure with the Soviet Union (later Russia), in which Olympic athletes would compete against one another in the years between Olympic Games. The Goodwill Games, too, failed economically.

Turner rebounded from his difficulties of the mid-1980s by making millions of dollars through colorizing classic films. This coincided with the creation of another station, Turner Network Television (TNT) in 1988, the year that he and his second wife were divorced. A few years later, however, he began to date actor and activist Jane Fonda, and the two were married in December of 1991. The next year, Turner launched yet another venture, the Cartoon Network. In 1996, Turner merged TBS with media giant Time Warner, which took ownership of the Atlanta Braves as part of the merger. He considered running for president in 1998 but decided instead to pursue other initiatives. Turner and Fonda were divorced in 2001, and he stepped back from his aggressive business ventures and focused on environmental issues.

During the early 2000s Turner gradually stepped back from his business ventures. In 2003 he resigned as Time Warner's vice chairman in 2003 and three years later he resigned from the company's board of directors; he remained one of the company's biggest shareholders throughout the 2010s. He maintained his reputation as a major figure in the television and broadcasting industry; in 2014 and 2015, he won two Lifetime Achievement Emmy Awards, one for sports broadcasting and another for news and documentary coverage.

Turner also remained active in a number of charitable and philanthropic efforts, such as playing a major role in the Turner Foundation, which he had founded in 1990 as an organization dedicated to environmental issues. He remained chairman of the Turner Foundation well into the 2020s. Turner's other philanthropic efforts included his founding and leadership of the United Nations Foundation, a US-based group dedicated to promoting support for the United Nations (UN) among people in the United States. He also signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment to give away at least half of his wealth.

Significance

Turner was one of the most influential people in television over the latter part of the twentieth century. He was an innovator in broadcasting, including cable networks and news shows. His creativity in pursuing cable networks helped transform the concept of cable from a mere idea to a standard of television, and the twenty-four-hour news format has been replicated by a number of stations, including Fox News Channel and MSNBC.

Turner demonstrated that success can come by being bold and refusing to tone down one’s ideas for fear of failure. He was named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1991 for his achievements in broadcasting. Turner was also notable for his philanthropy and activism to help solve global challenges such as climate change, hunger, malaria, and nuclear proliferation, among others. Indeed, he donated $1 billion to the United Nations Foundation in 2002, and continued to fund the Turner Foundation, which he founded in 1990, as well as other philanthropic organizations. Johns Hopkins University awarded Turner the Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal for Humanitarianism in 2001. Turner was also inducted as a Georgia Trustee in 2010.

Bibliography

Auletta, Ken. Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire. New York: Norton, 2005.

Bibb, Porter. Ted Turner: It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks. Chicago: Johnson, 1997.

Field, Robert. Take Me Out to the Crowd: Ted Turner and the Atlanta Braves. Huntsville, Ala.: Strode, 1977.

Lowe, Janet. Ted Turner Speaks: Insights from the World’s Greatest Maverick. New York: Wiley, 1999.

Slide, Anthony. Nitrate Won’t Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States. Jefferson: McFarland, 2000.

Sterling, Christopher H., and John Michael Kittross. Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting. 3d ed. Mahwah: Lawrence, 2001.

"Ted Turner." Forbes, 10 Jun. 2024, www.forbes.com/profile/ted-turner/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

"Ted Turner." Turner Enterprises, www.tedturner.com/turner-family/ted-turner/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

"Ted Turner Biography." CNN, www.cnn.com/insidecnn/education/tedturner/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Wilkinson, Todd. Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet. Guilford: Lyons, 2013.

Williams, Christian. Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way: The Story of Ted Turner. Los Angeles: Times, 1981.