Ted Turner made his mark across media and entertainment as a trailblazing entrepreneur. Nowhere was his impact more profound than in journalism with the launch of CNN. Ted Turner was also nothing short of a gift to the journalists who covered his long run in the public eye.
Turner, the media mogul who died May 6 at the age of 87, was always colorful copy. The cable TV visionary launched the world’s first all-news channel on June 1, 1980, forever changing the cadence and process of newsgathering. With a flick of the switch, Turner created the 24/7 news cycle. More important, his Turner Broadcasting System had the financial fortitude to keep CNN on the air, against all odds and in the face of huge losses in its early years.
There’s a reason Turner earned the nickname “the Mouth of the South.” In the presence of a microphone or an audience, Turner rarely held back, whether he was in a board meeting or at a press conference or on a red carpet.
“We’ll squash Rupert like a bug,” Turner declared in November 1995 when word spread that Rupert Murdoch was planning to launch Fox News as a cable channel to compete with CNN. Disney, which was in the process of buying ABC, was also flirting with launching a news network.
“Rupert can trot out news. Disney can trot out cartoons. We will whip their asses,” Turner defiantly told the audience at the Western Cable Show in Anaheim, Calif.
I remember the roar that went through the crowd when Turner delivered those zingers. I also remember fighting hard for the chance to cover Turner’s appearance. At that time there was no more compelling or charismatic CEO in all of America.
Turner was then in the process of selling Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner. That deal would change the course of his life as he effectively lost control of the assets he’d labored so hard to build. I’ve often wondered if he regretted it, even though he said many times in
interviews that he did not.
In person, Turner was tall, lanky and loud. He was handsome in a silver-fox way. He wore his pencil-thin Rhett Butler mustache like a name tag. He had a curious habit of starting his sentences by dropping his jaw and emitting a guttural sound that came out like “Daaaawwww” before any actual words were spoken.
CNN was the world-shaking achievement of which he was justifiably proud. From Turner’s home base in Atlanta, his genius was his ability to see cable TV’s multichannel revolution coming. He sussed it out in the mid-1970s, and spent the next decade setting up his company to capitalize on the opportunity. He turned a little-watched UHF station in Atlanta into TBS, the world’s first “superstation,” and he spent big on satellite technology to send the TBS signal to cable operators around the country.
Turner bought the storied MGM/United Artists studio in 1986, and he tried but failed to buy CBS. When Turner got into financial trouble, he was forced to sell MGM/UA back to Kirk Kerkorian. But Turner held on to MGM’s most valuable assets — its voluminous library of movies and TV shows. The MGM library fueled the launch of TNT, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network and more.
When cable television eventually was embraced by Hollywood and Wall Street, Turner bragged about having gotten there first. In the early 1990s, Turner Broadcasting produced a poster that featured its leader strumming an acoustic guitar, with the tagline “I Was Cable When Cable Wasn’t Cool” (which was a play on Barbara Mandrell’s 1981 hit “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool”). I wish I still had one.
In 2019, I conducted one of Turner’s final media interviews, timed to the 25th anniversary of Turner Classic Movies, for a Variety cover story. We spoke by phone. The once garrulous executive needed help from a trusted assistant to fully express himself as he struggled with the impact of Lewy body dementia. When I asked him to name his proudest achievement in business, he paused uncharacteristically before answering.
“I’ve always subscribed to the notion that calculated risk is necessary to achieve any real success in business,” Turner said. “Once you’ve weighed the possibilities, you have to take that final leap of faith, which is something I’ve done with some of my biggest business decisions, including the creation of CNN. The ultimate success I experienced with my purchase of the MGM library, TCM, CNN, TBS and the other networks is all the vindication I needed.”
