Ted Turner, the brash Atlanta businessman who bet his fortune on a 24-hour news channel the industry dismissed as a joke, died Wednesday at 87, surrounded by his family. Turner Enterprises confirmed the death in a news release, CNN reported. No cause was given.
Turner had disclosed in 2018, just over a month before his 80th birthday, that he suffered from Lewy body dementia. Earlier this year he was hospitalized with a mild case of pneumonia and spent time recovering at a rehabilitation facility.
Whatever one makes of what CNN became in the decades after its founder lost control, the network's creation on June 1, 1980, was an act of genuine entrepreneurial daring. Turner mortgaged everything he had on the idea that Americans wanted news around the clock. The establishment scoffed. Turner built it anyway, and changed the way the world consumed information.
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 19, 1938. His childhood was defined by distance and discipline. His father sent him to boarding school at age four and, by Turner's own account, beat him with a leather strap or a wire coat hanger. The elder Turner ran a billboard company and had exacting expectations. When young Ted chose classics as his major at Brown University, his father fired off a letter dripping with contempt:
"My dear son, I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major. I am a practical man, and for the life of me I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek. With whom will you communicate in Greek? I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me."
Turner never finished at Brown. He returned to Macon, Georgia, to work in his father's billboard company. Then, on March 5, 1963, his father shot himself in the upstairs bathroom of the family's home near Savannah. Turner was 24.
He took over Turner Outdoor Advertising, steadied it, and began to expand. By 1970 he had purchased two independent UHF television stations, one in Atlanta, one in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Atlanta station, Channel 17, became the springboard. In 1976 Turner beamed its signal to a satellite, and WTBS became cable television's first superstation, reaching subscribers across the country.
Turner's reasoning for launching a 24-hour news network was characteristically blunt. He explained it himself in plain terms:
"I worked until 7 o'clock, and when I got home the news was over. So I missed television news completely. And I figured there were lots of people like me."
He recruited Reese Schonfeld as CNN's founding president and launched the network from Atlanta's Techwood Campus on June 1, 1980. The industry called it the "Chicken Noodle Network." Turner called it his "greatest achievement."
Lisa Napoli, a former CNN journalist and author of "Up All Night," a book about the network's creation, wrote that Turner believed Americans were dangerously ill-informed and that "there was no better place to promote a variety of opinions than on almighty television. With a news channel, he could quite possibly help save the world."
Turner poured himself into the work. He lived on a couch in his office for the first ten years, he later said, and spent two decades working from the building before finally going home. "I wanted to be home," he said. In those early years, former CNN president Tom Johnson recalled, Turner would come down to the company cafeteria, the Hard News Café, in his housecoat to have breakfast with staff. "He was one of us," Johnson said.
The network grew fast. CNN2, later renamed Headline News, then HLN, launched in 1982. CNN International followed in 1985. When the Persian Gulf War broke out in 1990, the value of round-the-clock news coverage became impossible to deny. Time magazine named Turner its Man of the Year in 1991, crediting him with turning viewers in 150 countries into "instant witnesses of history."
In the broader sweep of American public life, Turner belonged to a generation of larger-than-life figures who shaped institutions that outlasted them, for better and for worse.
CNN was only part of the story. Turner bought the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks, partly to lock in long-term television programming rights. National Review noted that Turner helped build the Braves into a national brand through a then-novel strategy of telecasting games coast to coast.
In the mid-1980s he acquired MGM's library of more than 4,000 old films, a move that fed Turner Classic Movies and Cartoon Network, two more cable channels he added alongside Turner Network Television. The man who started with billboards wound up running one of the most sprawling media empires in the country.
Former Turner Broadcasting CEO Terry McGuirk put it simply: "What Ted made happen was just as important as the Internet revolution."
In 1996, Turner sold his company to Time Warner for $7.34 billion. He stayed on as vice-chairman. Four years later, Time Warner agreed to be purchased by AOL, a deal that became one of the most infamous corporate disasters in American history. When the internet bubble burst in 2001, AOL Time Warner posted a record $99 billion loss. Turner said he lost more than $7 billion in three years.
He resigned as vice-chairman in 2003 and later announced he would not seek reelection to the board. The man who had built CNN from nothing found himself locked out of the company he created.
The Washington Times reported that Turner himself acknowledged the mistake plainly: "I made a mistake. The mistake I made was losing control of the company."
In a 2012 interview with CNN's Piers Morgan, Turner reflected on everything he had lost, the network, the marriage, the money:
"I lost Jane. I lost my job here. I lost my fortune, most of it. Got a billion or two left. You can get by on that if you economize."
He told Morgan he was "brokenhearted."
Turner's marriage to actress Jane Fonda was one of the most talked-about unions of the 1990s. They began dating in 1989, married in 1991, and stayed together for a decade. Former President Jimmy Carter recalled that the two initially disliked each other. "It was months later before they decided to try again," Carter said. "And they evolved into one of the nicest romances that I've ever known about."
The divorce left both of them reflective. Fonda later said she could never forget why she fell in love with Turner, but added that she could not keep "moving in his world, along the surface for the rest of my life." Turner said simply: "We were so far apart philosophically, we couldn't do it." He told interviewers he had "loved many people" but was no longer "in love."
Turner's personal losses ran deeper than divorce. His sister Mary Jean contracted a rare form of lupus at 12, suffered brain damage and severe pain for years, and eventually died. Turner said the experience shattered his faith. "She hadn't done anything wrong. What had she done wrong? And I couldn't get any answers," he said. "Christianity couldn't give me any answers to that."
His father's suicide left a wound that never fully healed. "He went against everything he taught me: 'Be courageous and hang in there,'" Turner said.
Turner's post-CNN years were defined by giving and by land. In 1997 he pledged $1 billion to the United Nations, a staggering sum he paid off in full by 2015. He founded the United Nations Foundation. In 2001 he gave the U.S. government $31 million to pay off a debt owed to the UN.
He became the second-largest private landowner in North America, accumulating 2 million acres across 28 properties, including 19 ranches, in Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Argentina. In 2002 he opened the first Ted's Montana Grill; the chain now has more than 40 locations in 16 states.
His scale of philanthropy and land ownership placed him among the handful of American figures whose private decisions carried genuine public weight, much like the ceremonial traditions that mark enduring national relationships.
Mark Thompson, chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide, issued a statement calling Turner "the presiding spirit of CNN" and "the giant on whose shoulders we stand." Wolf Blitzer, announcing the death on-air Wednesday morning, called Turner "a legend" who "revolutionized the television business." Co-anchor Pamela Brown added: "We're all here doing this because of Ted."
Breitbart reported that President Donald Trump was among the early public figures to pay tribute, calling Turner "one of the Greats of All Time... one of the Great of Broadcast History and a friend of mine."
The New York Post reported that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav called Turner "a visionary, a trailblazer, and a foundational force behind many of the brands that are central to Warner Bros. Discovery today."
Christiane Amanpour said Turner "was the original. He made us all proud, he made us all hopeful, and he made us all strive for his vision of a better world."
Turner is survived by five children, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Just The News reported that details surrounding his death were not immediately clear beyond the Turner Enterprises statement.
Turner once bragged, "If only I had a little humility, I'd be perfect." He was not perfect. But in an era when media elites increasingly talk only to each other, it is worth remembering that the man who invented 24-hour cable news did it not from a boardroom in Manhattan but from a converted country club in Atlanta, on a hunch, with borrowed money, and against the advice of nearly everyone around him. That kind of audacity is rarer now than it was in 1980, and the country is poorer for it.
In a media landscape where historic moments now unfold across dozens of platforms simultaneously, every one of them owes something to the gamble Turner placed forty-six years ago.
Whatever CNN became after Turner lost control, the original idea, that ordinary Americans deserved to know what was happening in the world, on their own schedule, was as democratic as anything in broadcasting history. The founder deserved better than what his successors made of it.
