Tycoons

Ted Turner Wants CNN Back

Giving up the company was “a mistake.”

After a decade in retirement, former media mogul Ted Turner wants back in on the action, telling an interviewer about his wish to be back at the helm of Time Warner with a focus on news and, of all things, cartoons. “I’d like CNN to report to me, and the Cartoon Network,” he said. Turner founded CNN 29 years ago, and voiced concern over “fluffy” stories on the network and what he sees as a need for “less talk, more news.” He also expressed his desire to move Captain Planet into a plum time slot on the Cartoon Network to expose kids to “the environmental superhero instead of just Superman.” Later in the interview, Turner talked shop, and though he claimed to have patched things up with former rival Rupert Murdoch, he took a jab at Murdoch’s cherished medium of choice, print journalism: "You're chopping all these trees down and making paper out of them and trying to deal with all the waste paper. It's the biggest solid-waste problem that we have."