Ted Turner — the bullish founder of CNN and a suite of other cable channels, not to mention a bison steakhouse, a non profit designed to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and an international sports competition — died Wednesday at the age of 87. He had announced just before his 80th birthday that he had Lewy Body Dementia, a degenerative disease that causes dementia and muscle failure.
Turner never seemed at a loss for brass or chutzpah.
"If Alexander the Great could conquer the known world, why couldn't I start CNN?" Turner once told Oprah Winfrey.
He 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 network broadcast news 24/7 from that point on and indeed built a global array of bureaus.
Former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan says Turner took inspiration from 24-hour radio stations that relayed news headlines, and endless sports highlights on ESPN. Turner remained baffled why the broadcast giants — ABC, NBC and CBS — hadn't launched cable stations.
"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."
Sixteen years later, NBC (in partnership with Microsoft) and Fox would launch sibling cable news channels. Each ultimately found success by embracing strong (though opposing) points of view. Broadcast networks subsequently sought to replicate the original cable ethos with stripped down streaming services.
Turner, a colorful figure with a Southern drawl and rail-thin mustache, had pronounced views himself, often (though not exclusively) of a liberal bent. But he wanted his station to reflect the news, not ideology. He thought human understanding across borders would benefit from reporting on stories and people around the world.
"He was a visionary, a trailblazer, a rabble-rouser, a do-gooder — and he thought there would be a market for it," Jordan says.
Turner often carried a mischievous twinkle in his eye. And his values had been incubated in an earlier era.
Jordan joined CNN in 1982 while he was still in college, working overnights as a desk assistant during his first few years. Back then, Turner often slept in a pull-down Murphy bed in his office above the newsroom. He would come down to the newsroom to grab coffee, Jordan recalls, but did not usually interact with the staff. The first time they met, Jordan says, was because Turner had a guest.
"It was Raquel Welch," Jordan says. "They were both in bathrobes. And Ted was so proud of himself for having such good company that he introduced himself and Raquel Welch to everyone in the newsroom at 4 o'clock in the morning."
‘Chicken Noodle News’
CNN has been a mainstay of television journalism for so long it's hard to remember that it was often underestimated in its infancy.
In the 1980s, many people didn't understand what the fuss was about, longtime broadcast journalist Joie Chen recalls.
"Many people didn't even have cable yet. I didn't have cable growing up," says Chen, who joined CNN as an international anchor in 1991. "In those early years, you know, CNN was just considered 'Chicken Noodle News' and Ted Turner was at first just considered a dilettante."
CNN became a training ground for journalists who would be hired by better paying outlets. Chen left CNN in 2001, later working at CBS and Al Jazeera.
"Look, we were young and at times very shoddy, but we were the only game in town and we did some extraordinary things," Jordan says.
Over time, whenever news was happening, CNN was there. CNN broadcasted live when catastrophe struck the space shuttle Challenger and its crew in 1986.
And in 1991, CNN experienced a defining moment — effectively owning television coverage of the first US-led war against Iraq. It was the only U.S. network able to broadcast live from Baghdad as bright flashes from bombs lit the sky.
Anchor Bernard Shaw and Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Peter Arnett were among those CNN journalists who projected calm under fire.
Chen recalls Turner never intended for his journalists to become famous and, she contends, he underpaid his staff.
"We were always told Ted's mantra was, 'You are not the star; the news is the star," she says. She left CNN at the end of 2001.
Competition grows
Even as he struck an exuberant tone, Turner's mood could swing to depression. He also battled again and again with rival media tycoon Rupert Murdoch – and even threatened to do so with his fists in Las Vegas, as The Guardian recounted.
Murdoch's New York Post in turn questioned Turner's sanity. Meanwhile, Turner maintained a friendly rapport with the late Cuban autocrat Fidel Castro.
In later years, as CNN competed not just with other cable channels but digital news outlets and social media, it lagged behind its TV peers in ratings. Executives turned over prime time to higher-rated opinion panel discussions featuring ideological clashes.
Conservatives and pro-Trump commentators repeatedly accused the network of listing to the left.
But it retained its journalistic DNA to a significant extent, rising to the moment as its reporting teams covered political developments, natural disasters and armed conflicts. That was part of Turner's legacy too.
Turner married and divorced three times; his third marriage was to Hollywood and fitness star Jane Fonda in 1991.
He also took on lots of debt – and investors – to make ambitious deals at a time when his main rivals, including Murdoch, were launching all-news cable stations. Eventually, it became too much.
In 1996, Turner sold CNN and the rest of his company, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., to Time Warner for about $7.34 billion – a move he deeply regretted. A few years later – in 2000 – Time Warner sold itself to AOL, against Turner's wishes. The AOL deal is considered one of the worst mergers in U.S. corporate history. Turner has called it "one of the biggest disasters that have occurred to our country."
In 2001, his marriage to Fonda — a source of strength – ended. And shortly after that, he was completely out at AOL, separating from the company he'd spent a half-century building.
"I lost Jane. I lost my job here," Turner said in a 2012 interview on CNN's “Piers Morgan Tonight.”
He added, earning laughter from Morgan, "I lost my fortune, most of it, got a billion or two left. You can get by on that if you economize,"
Yet he demonstrated resilience. "You carry on. And I found other things to do."
‘Other things to do’
Turner had been finding other things to do for years. He was relentlessly competitive and an accomplished yachtsman.
In the 1970s, Turner bought a television station and made it into the national "superchannel" now known as TBS; He also bought the Atlanta Braves to ensure content for it. The Braves became one of the nation's most popular baseball teams during the generation he owned or ran it; the team appeared repeatedly in the World Series in the 1990s and early aughts.
In 1986, Turner launched the Goodwill Games, an international competition meant to bypass the Cold War fights that had broken out over the Olympics. It lasted until 2001.
In 1997, as Turner was being honored by the United Nations, he pledged to donate a billion dollars to it. With that money, he created what's known as The UN Foundation that has helped the international institution endure.
As the years progressed, Turner created the Nuclear Threat Initiative to secure loose nuclear weapons in the former Soviet republics and elsewhere. He also gave widely to conservation and anti-global warming efforts. His philanthropy helped inspire the "Giving Pledge" of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and other billionaires – and he was one of the first signatories to it.
He also founded Ted's Montana Grill with hopes of making bison a popular alternative to beef. Turner had been raising bison on his many ranches, and saw the restaurant chain as a way to reach customers while saving the species from extinction.
"I was 10 years old when I first read about them," he told Bethesda Magazine in 2015. "I said then I was going to work hard, see if I can make some money, and then I'm going to buy some land and raise bison and see if I can get the herd back away from the door of extinction."
In his final years, the flamboyant showman retreated from the public eye. Ever direct, he publicly acknowledged his affliction with Lewy Body Dementia, or LBD, in 2018. He spent much of his later life out of the public eye, whether in Atlanta or riding horses and fishing at his vast properties in Montana.
Copyright 2026, NPR
