The media titan who launched CNN has died at age 87.
Ted Turner died on Wednesday, according to Turner Enterprises.
“Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgment,” Mark Thompson, chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide, said in a statement. “He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand, and we will all take a moment today to recognize him and his impact on our lives and the world.”
“Ted was a visionary, a trailblazer, and a foundational force behind many of the brands that are central to Warner Bros. Discovery today,” CEO David Zaslav wrote in a memo to the company.
Turner disclosed in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder. Early last year, he was hospitalized with a mild case of pneumonia but later recovered. He is survived by five children, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
The media mogul launched CNN, the world’s first live, 24-hour global news network, in June 1980, a decade after he entered the television business with the acquisition of WJRJ-TV/17, an independent station in Atlanta.
“I worked until 7 o’clock, and when I got home the news was over,” he said in 2013. “So I missed television news completely. And I figured there were lots of people like me.”
Nicknamed “Captain Outrageous” and “Mouth of the South” for his outspoken personality, Turner grew his empire over the years to include professional sports teams such as the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks.
“Ted was a little unorthodox and a little unpredictable,” former Braves outfielder Dale Murphy once said. “He put the Atlanta Braves organization on the map.”
Turner also made a mark as an influential philanthropist, supporting a variety of causes including sustainable energy, biodiversity, and even the global response to nuclear threats.
In 1977, he made a historic pledge of up to $1 billion to the United Nations and later launched the United Nations Foundation.
Perhaps the most public chapter of Turner’s life was his decade-long marriage to actress and activist Jane Fonda—the pair was married from December 1991 until May 2001.
When news of Fonda’s separation from her second husband, Tom Hayden, made headlines, Turner spoke to a trusted friend about his interest in courting her: former President Jimmy Carter.
“I think I was the first person he ever mentioned that subject to,” Carter said in 2013, recalling a conversation he had with Turner during a fishing trip in 1989.
Turner phoned Fonda to make his interest known, but she rejected him and asked him to call back in six months.
“At first they didn’t get along at all,” Carter recalled. “In fact, they didn’t like each other. I heard this from both of them. It was months later before they decided to try again. And they evolved into one of the nicest romances that I’ve ever known about.”
But Turner’s lifestyle, which involved splitting time among 28 properties, eventually took a toll on Fonda. The actress filed for divorce in April 2001, saying the marriage was “irretrievably broken,” though they remained good friends.
“I would never love anyone like I love him,” she said. “But I just couldn’t keep moving in his world, along the surface for the rest of my life. I knew that I would get to the end of my life and regret not doing the things that I also needed to do for me.”
