If Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane had been made as a TV movie 60 years later, its Kane would have been Ted Turner. Thanks to Welles, the figure of William Randolph Hearst, who dominated the American media world in the early part of the 20th century, is now better remembered for the flamboyant personal life portrayed on film.
Turner, who has died aged 87, was luckier. Although his good looks were often compared to Clark Gable’s playing Rhett Butler and his personal life was equally interesting, he is likely to be remembered primarily as one of the great innovators of television.
He first conceived of the “super-station”, proving cable television could support its own networks distinct from the terrestrial giants. Then he took cable (and satellite) a step further in 1980 by creating CNN, the first 24-hour news channel, which served as the role model and benchmark for every imitator that followed, and changed the way all television reported news.
Becoming one of America’s richest men in the wake of his corporate merger with Time Warner in 1996 brought Turner little satisfaction. Being pushed into a consulting position in his own business seemed to dim his spark.
Always driven by a ferocious competitive will to succeed and a faith in his own vision, Turner seemed happiest getting involved in the nuts and bolts of television production, often to the consternation of his employees.
Ted Turner with his third wife, the actor Jane Fonda, in 1995. Photograph: Sipa Press/Shutterstock
He was always controversial and often contradictory. Known as “the mouth of the south”, he sought international respectability and championed global understanding, yet over the years offended virtually every ethnic group in the US.
As owner of the Atlanta Braves baseball team from 1976 onwards, Turner took over as manager when they were playing particularly badly, though was soon barred from the field of play by the sport’s commissioner, Bowie Kuhn.
Unlike most millionaire owners, however, Turner was a sporting success himself. In 1977, he skippered the yacht Courageous to victory in the America’s Cup. He lived up to his nickname, “Captain Outrageous”, by showing up to collect the cup after over-indulging at his own victory ceremony. In 1979, he won the Fastnet race in whose storms 15 people were killed.
His feud with long-time rival Rupert Murdoch, another media mogul who built his father’s small business into a worldwide conglomerate, grew from a collision between a Murdoch-sponsored yacht and the Turner-skippered Condor during the 1983 Sydney to Hobart race. At the post-race banquet, an inebriated Turner challenged Murdoch to climb into the boxing ring with him for a televised match. And even as he built and extended his own TV empire, he still sought desperately to buy one of the “big three” US networks.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ted was the son of Florence (nee Rooney) and Robert Edward Turner II. He spent most of his childhood apart from his father, a moody depressive who often beat him. His younger sister, Mary Jean, died from an autoimmune disease when Ted was 20.
At McCallie military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he earned the nickname “terrible Ted” for practising taxidermy and growing lawn grass in his room. Admitted to Brown University, Rhode Island, an Ivy League establishment, he was expelled before earning a degree after being caught with a woman in his room.
In 1961, at 23, he joined his father’s business, Turner Communications, which specialised in roadside billboards, as an account executive. Two years later, his father, despondent over financial difficulties, took his own life at the family’s South Carolina plantation. At the age of 24, Ted became the company president.
Ted Turner, the owner of the Atlanta Braves, took over as manager before the game in Pittsburgh, 1997. Photograph: RCG/AP
He expanded into radio, using his company’s billboards to advertise his stations. In 1970, Turner merged with Rice Communications, gaining control of a small Atlanta UHF television station losing nearly a million dollars a year. Within three years he had turned it around, renaming it WTCG, and broadcasting its programming via satellite to the growing number of cable operators around the US.
The content consisted of old movies, reruns and wrestling (a particular favourite of Turner’s), but though little of it was original he could now sell advertising based on a national audience.
Turner was the first media mogul to buy into sports as programme fodder for his network, starting with the then moribund Braves baseball team, and eventually including basketball’s Atlanta Hawks and ice hockey’s Atlanta Thrashers.
Now renamed WTBS (for Turner Broadcasting System) in 1979, and later TBS, his “super-station” continued to grow. He was met with derision when he started CNN in 1980, not least because TBS’s lowest common denominator programming gave no hint of any commitment to the values of news coverage. But despite low budgets and a reliance on news agencies, Turner soon built CNN into an organisation that set new standards for coverage of breaking events, particularly international conflicts and crises.
He also moulded CNN into an worldwide broadcasting presence; more than one pundit attributed the collapse of the iron curtain to the dual presence of CNN and MTV on satellite TV. Concerned with CNN’s US-centric slant, Turner banned the word “foreign” from his networks, replacing it with “international”. Soon his wrestling announcers were referring to brass knuckles hidden in the wrestlers’ trunks as “international objects”.
Turner’s dream was to own a major terrestrial network, but his efforts to mount a hostile takeover of CBS failed. On cable and satellite, however, he was still growing, adding a second network, Turner Network Television (TNT). His purchase of the extensive MGM film library for $1.6bn was mocked at the time, but soon turned into a fount of content for both networks, and a third, Turner Classic Movies (TCM), borrowed the successful format of American Movie Classics. He also created the Cartoon Network.
Accumulating a huge film library brought out clearly the two sides of Turner’s nature. Although TCM showed movies without interruption, his other networks spaced commercial breaks unevenly, allowing long stretches of uninterrupted movie early, then filling the final half hour with ad breaks every four minutes. He pioneered broadcasting films fractionally quicker than their projection speed, which allowed more minutes for commercials. He also began “colorising” black-and-white films, although he stopped short of his intended improvement of Citizen Kane.
But TCM also pioneered restoration of many films, putting together versions of classics such as Greed and Touch of Evil that were closer to the director’s intentions than any previously shown.
Ted Turner being carried off by his crew in Newport, Rhode Island, after his yacht Courageous won the America’s Cup in 1977. Photograph: J Walter Green/AP
He also moved into competition with the Olympic Games, creating the Goodwill Games after various politically motivated sporting boycotts in the early 1980s. Intended to showcase only the most popular Olympic events, the games were a co-production with Soviet television, and moved between cities in the US and USSR.
Although sometimes an artistic success, including one edition in New York City, and the location at which several new sporting world records were set, the Games never worked financially and could not break the established stranglehold of the Olympics and the various sports’ own world championships.
Turner’s three marriages all ended in divorce. With his first wife, Judy Nye, whom he married in 1960, he had a son and daughter. With Jane Smith, whom he married in 1965, he had two sons and a daughter. His third marriage, in 1991, was to the actor Jane Fonda, who originally appeared to take to the job of corporate wife enthusiastically.
When Turner’s Braves came under fire from groups objecting to the team’s “tomahawk chop” cheer, Ted and Jane chopped vigorously during a World Series match, before Ted, unfortunately, fell asleep on national TV. The two split shortly after Turner lost control of his company in the Time Warner merger, and divorced in 2001.
In the same year, Time-Warner merged with AOL, and for a short time Ted played a more active role in the new company, but never in an operational role, which he craved. When AOL was hived off from Time Warner, and the stock price collapsed, Turner, as Time Warner’s largest shareholder, was estimated to have lost $7bn.
Like his father, Turner suffered depressions, but he threw himself into his international work, donating $1bn from his merger payout to the United Nations, which instantly caused him to drop out of the list of 10 richest men in the US.
Through his Turner Foundation, he supported charity work around the world on a scale unheard of since the days of the industrial barons of the 19th century. Much of his commitment was to environmental causes and sustainable development, including on his own land: until 2011, he was the largest private landowner in the US, and continued to maintain the biggest herd of bison, more than 50,000 animals.
Turner often attended business meetings wearing a Confederate officer’s uniform, and when TBS made the film Gettysburg (1993), Turner was cast as an officer in the dramatisation of Pickett’s Charge.
This ill-fated assault is a defining moment in some southern minds, an exercise in gallant futility by men who believe their spirit and faith in themselves and their cause can overcome any odds. Turner will likely be remembered as such a man: part southern gentleman, part rebel yell, convinced he could make an impact on the world. And he did.
He is survived by his children, Laura and Teddy from his first marriage, Beau, Rhett and Jennie from the second, as well as 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Ted (Robert Edward) Turner III, businessman and television executive, born 19 November 1938 ; died 6 May 2026
