{"id":1083,"date":"2026-05-06T14:21:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T14:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/05\/06\/ted-turner-maverick-mogul-and-cnn-founder-dies-at-87\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T14:21:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T14:21:00","slug":"ted-turner-maverick-mogul-and-cnn-founder-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/05\/06\/ted-turner-maverick-mogul-and-cnn-founder-dies-at-87\/","title":{"rendered":"Ted Turner, Maverick Mogul and CNN Founder, Dies at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\tTed Turner<\/a>, the media visionary who forever altered the news business by founding CNN and helped introduce Americans to pay TV by creating cable channels like TNT, Turner Classic Movies and Cartoon Network, has died. He was 87.<\/p>\n

\tTurner, who later turned his attention to saving the planet and pushing progressive political causes, died Wednesday, according to a statement from the family released by Turner Enterprises. Turner died peacefully surrounded by his family. He battled Lewy body dementia in recent years. <\/p>\n

\tTurner wrote his own version of the Ten Commandments he called \u201c11 Voluntary Initiatives,\u201d a copy of which he carried on a printed card kept in his wallet; famously donated $1 billion to the United Nations; and spent several years as the largest shareholder of Time Warner, where he was nevertheless fired as vice chairman shortly after the conglomerate\u2019s ill-fated merger with AOL. \t<\/p>\n

\tHe also was married to two-time Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda<\/a> for a decade.<\/p>\n

\tA former owner of baseball\u2019s Atlanta Braves and an expert yachtsman in his younger days, Turner won the America\u2019s Cup in 1977, then appeared drunk at the resulting news conference, an embarrassing moment that caused him to cut back on his alcohol consumption before he quit entirely in 2011.<\/p>\n

\tHe told Stephen Galloway of The Hollywood Reporter<\/em><\/a> a year later that he was rarely depressed, even though he had contemplated suicide and was once wrongly diagnosed as a manic depressive. He did suffer from \u201ca mild to moderate case of anxiety\u201d but boasted of an IQ of 128 \u2014 \u201cin the 97th\u00a0percentile,\u201d he noted. \t<\/p>\n

\tDuring the same interview, Turner said he was no longer interested in the media business but was passionate about his 2 million acres of property. The environmentalist, in fact, was racking up hundreds of thousands of miles a year on his private jet, visiting his 14 ranches that were home to 55,000 bison.<\/p>\n

\tThe charismatic Turner was the nation\u2019s second biggest land owner after Liberty Media chairman John Malone, and his fortune was estimated at $2 billion, down from a high of about $11 billion at the height of the Internet bubble, when AOL used its overpriced stock to acquire Time Warner at the turn of the century.<\/p>\n

\tHe said at the time that the merger that created the now-defunct AOL Time Warner was \u201cbetter than sex,\u201d words he\u2019d soon regret.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tOften described as a loose cannon, Turner was nicknamed \u201cMouth of the South\u201d and \u201cCaptain Outrageous\u201d as he often courted controversy, once comparing fellow media mogul Rupert Murdoch to Adolf Hitler and challenging him to a pay-per-view boxing match.<\/p>\n

\tOn another occasion, shortly after hijackers brought down the Twin Towers, Turner described the terrorists as \u201cbrave\u201d men whose actions were motivated by world poverty, and he accused Israel of terror against Palestinians. Afterward, he explained both of those comments by telling The Guardian<\/em>: \u201cLook, I\u2019m a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word \u2026 You know, I wing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tBrash even as a young man, Turner attended Brown University but didn\u2019t graduate because he was kicked out after he was caught with a woman in his private quarters. He did, however, eventually amass 46 honorary degrees. \t<\/p>\n

\tRobert Edward \u201cTed\u201d Turner III was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 19, 1938, to Florence and Robert Edward Turner II. His father, a billboard magnate, was a stern man who would whip his son with a razor strap for stepping out of line, but the youngster refused to capitulate to his dad\u2019s authority.<\/p>\n

\tWhen Turner was 24, his father, battling depression and under the influence of alcohol and pills, shot himself dead, leaving the advertising business to his son. (Turner\u2019s younger sister, Mary Jean, had already died from lupus at age 17.)<\/p>\n

\tTurner\u2019s earliest \u2014 and in hindsight, brilliant \u2014 moves as the newly minted owner of a small media business were to threaten lawsuits to regain control of assets his father had agreed to sell before dying. He then acquired some local radio stations before diving into TV with the purchase of a UHF station in 1970 and changing its call letters to WTCG \u2014 for \u201cWatch This Channel Grow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tIt did, of course, first by running reruns of Bugs Bunny cartoons and shows like Gilligan\u2019s Island<\/em>, Star Trek<\/em> and I Love Lucy<\/em> before acquiring the rights to Braves games in 1973. Three years later, he boldly used satellites to turn WTCG into what he called a \u201csuperstation\u201d to compete with HBO by broadcasting old movies and TV shows, along with sports, to a national audience. \t<\/p>\n

\tWTCG became WTBS after he purchased that call sign from a radio station for $50,000 with the idea of branding his burgeoning media conglomerate as Turner Broadcasting System. His purchase of the Braves, as well as the NBA\u2019s Atlanta Hawks and his creation of the Olympic-style Goodwill Games in 1986, were partially motivated by a desire to sew up sports rights for TBS.<\/p>\n

\tA bold risk-taker who never seemed to mind stretching his finances to the limit, Turner had been nursing an idea of a round-the-clock news channel for nearly a decade before he purchased an old mansion in Atlanta, supplied it with television equipment and hired a dozen anchors.<\/p>\n

\tHe sunk $21 million into the venture and launched CNN on June 1, 1980, only for skeptics to deride it as the \u201cChicken Noodle Network.\u201d He hired talent like Lou Dobbs, Wolf Blitzer and Bernard Shaw and kept the money-losing channel afloat with profits from WTBS, but CNN went from red ink to black in 1985 and became a household name with its unmatched coverage of the Persian Gulf War. (Months earlier, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Turner quickly spent $35 million to establish facilities in the Gulf region.)<\/p>\n

\t\u201cHostilities began on the evening of Jan. 16, 1991,\u201d Turner reminisced in his 2008 autobiography, Call Me Ted Turner<\/em>. \u201cI was in Los Angeles watching CNN at Jane Fonda\u2019s house and I\u2019ll never forget it. Bernie, Peter Arnett and John Holliman delivered gripping coverage as the bombs began to fall. For the first time in history, a war was being televised live from behind the scenes. \t<\/p>\n

\t\u201cI grabbed the remote. While CNN\u2019s team provided riveting coverage and our lead anchor compared being in Baghdad to experiencing \u2018the center of hell,\u2019 CBS\u2019 Dan Rather was sitting at his desk in New York talking about the attack. When I flipped to ABC, Peter Jennings was also behind a desk, talking. NBC and Tom Brokaw? Same thing. Turning back to our live coverage, I smiled. CNN scored the journalistic scoop of the century.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tTime\u00a0<\/em>magazine made Turner its \u201cMan of the Year,\u201d and the success of CNN has spawned such notable competitors as MSNBC and the Fox News Channel.<\/p>\n

\tIn 1986, Turner paid more than $1 billion for the film library of MGM\/United Artists, which also included Warner Bros. movies and Looney Tunes cartoons, and used his windfall of classic films to launch TNT and TCM.<\/p>\n

\tFive years later, he paid $320 million for Hanna-Barbera \u2014 home of The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons and Scooby-Doo \u2014 and those characters, along with Bugs, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and the Road Runner, became the core of Cartoon Network, which bowed in 1992.<\/p>\n

\tTurner sold his media empire to Time Warner in 1995 for $6.5 billion and joined the conglomerate as its vice chair and president of Turner Broadcasting. Shortly after AOL purchased Time Warner, Turner\u2019s friend Gerald Levin<\/a>, the CEO of the merged company at the time, forced him out.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cIt\u2019s pretty hard to love someone who fired you, particularly from a job you really liked,\u201d Turner told THR<\/em> in the 2012 story. \u201cBut I don\u2019t hate Jerry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tTurner\u2019s personal life seemed almost as frenetic as his professional one. In the 1980s, some saw him as a modern-day Rhett Butler, and he never discouraged the comparison. He even played a Confederate officer in Gods and Generals<\/em>, a Civil War movie he produced in 2003.<\/p>\n

\tBy 2012, he had been married and divorced three times and was shuffling four girlfriends simultaneously, an arrangement he acknowledged was not ideal. But he was never under the microscope more than when he was married to Fonda.<\/p>\n

\tTurner met the actress while she was still married to Tom Hayden and was smitten, so he phoned her after she divorced the liberal politician. She thought it was too soon to date and told him to call her again in six months, and so he did, to the day. They married in 1991 and divorced 10 years later.<\/p>\n

\tIt was widely reported at the time that Fonda\u2019s decision to leave him was fueled by her becoming a Christian, though in his autobiography he refutes the reporting, and Fonda told THR<\/em> she divorced Turner because she was tired of \u201cbeing defined as so-and-so\u2019s wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\u201cShe\u2019s as opinionated as me, if not more,\u201d Turner said. \u201cWhat am I supposed to do, sit down and cry? I did for six months \u2026 after that, you gotta go on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tThe graduate of a Christian, military prep school (where he was a debate champion), Turner considered himself politically conservative for many years before becoming staunchly liberal. A trip to Cuba in 1982 to meet then-dictator Fidel Castro and a friendship with President Jimmy Carter nudged him leftward, and striking up a relationship with Jacques Cousteau helped him to define his environmentalism, he said in his autobiography.<\/p>\n

\tIn 1999, Turner toyed with the idea of running for president against George W. Bush either as a Democrat or Independent. \t<\/p>\n

\tOn his list of \u201c11 Voluntary Initiatives\u201d that he carried in his wallet was the vow, \u201cI promise to care for Planet Earth and all living things thereon, especially my fellow beings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tThe outspoken father of five predicted that overpopulation would cause food shortages and that global warming would lead to cannibalism, and he put his money where his mouth was in order to avoid such calamities. He founded the Turner Foundation in 1990 to raise money for environmental causes, and he had given an estimated $200 million to charity in addition to the $1 billion he gifted to the U.N. in 1997, which came at the rate of $100 million annually and was earmarked for initiatives involving population control and the environment.<\/p>\n

\tAt one time, Turner owned as much as 5 percent of the land in New Mexico, though several years before his death he began to periodically give large chunks to Native Americans.<\/p>\n

\tIn his autobiography, Turner mused of his own death, writing: \u201cI\u2019ve often considered and joked about what I might want written on my tombstone. At one point, when I felt like I couldn\u2019t get out of the way of the press, \u2018You Can\u2019t Interview Me Here\u2019 was a leading candidate. In the middle of my career I considered, \u2018Here Lies Ted Turner. He Never Owned a Broadcast Network.\u2019 These days, I\u2019m leaning toward, \u2018I Have Nothing More to Say.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\tTurner is survived by his five children, 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. A private family service is planned and public memorial will be held at a later date, the family said, requesting privacy as they \u201cgrieve the death of their beloved patriarch.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ted Turner, the media visionary who forever altered the news business by founding CNN and helped introduce Americans to pay TV by creating cable channels like TNT, Turner Classic Movies and Cartoon Network, has died. He was 87. Turner, who later turned his attention to saving the planet and pushing progressive political causes, died Wednesday, according to a statement from the family released by Turner Enterprises. Turner died peacefully surrounded by his family. He battled Lewy body dementia in recent years. Turner wrote his own version of the Ten Commandments he called \u201c11 Voluntary Initiatives,\u201d a copy of which he carried on a printed card kept in his wallet; famously […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[94,95,2,676,100,677],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-business-news","category-hollywood","category-jane-fonda","category-obituaries","category-ted-turner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}