TURNER, TED
Born Robert Edward Turner III on November 19, 1938,
in Cincinnati, Ted Turner began in the media by selling
space on his father’s billboards. When Turner was twentyfour, he became president of Turner Advertising when his
hard-driving father committed suicide in 1963. The young
Turner built his father’s ailing billboard business into a
multibillion-dollar media empire, which included the first
twenty-four-hour television news channel. In 1995, he
merged his Turner Broadcasting Company with Time Warner in exchange for a reported $7.5 billion and corporate
vice presidency in charge of cable operations.
In the early 1970s, Turner purchased WTCG (Channel
17), a struggling Atlanta UHF television station losing more
than $600,000 a year when people were not used to turning
to the high channels. If that were not enough, he purchased
a failing Charlotte station with a higher UHF channel number. He then negotiated with the Atlanta Braves to offer
them regional coverage through cooperation with other
stations, including Charlotte. Both Turner and the Braves
gained from the exposure; Turner eventually bought the
team and the Atlanta Hawks of the NBA.
Turner changed his Atlanta station to WTBS (for Turner
Broadcasting System) and transmitted it to local cable
companies via satellite. Turner paid only for use of the programs in one market, even though a satellite beamed his
superstation’s signal worldwide. Local stations complained
that Turner’s use of the same programs that they bought
in syndication was unfair competition. Always identifying
with the underdogs, Turner said he represented people in
rural areas and small towns who had no local stations. They
argued that Turner ought to pay more for retransmission
covering so many markets at one time. Turner won the first
round with congressional inaction.
Turner often criticized the major networks for corrupting American morals, but his alternative provided baseball,
professional wrestling, recycled network shows and old
movies, some showing more violence than network televison. With his own station, he seemed indifferent, even hostile, to news, until he hit on the idea that the world needed
access to news for twenty-four hours a day.
While the major networks were cutting their worldwide
presence, Turner began building the Cable News Network (CNN), which went on the air June 1, 1980, with an
emphasis on live reporting. Turner knew nothing about the
techniques or ethics of news, but he hired experienced and
committed journalists at a time the major networks were
cutting them.
Reese Schonfeld, who had worked for UPI Television
and UPI Movietone news, taught Turner the news business
and some basic news concepts, such as preventing advertisers from having veto power over anchor selection and persuading Turner from using his news channel to further his
own personal agenda. CNN’s executives believed they could
succeed in Atlanta (away from New York) because they
had a dedicated, non-union staff. The low-budget operation
made many mistakes at first, allowing critics to say CNN
meant Chaos News Network and Chicken Noodle Network.
Clearly, the critics underestimated the appeal of live remotes
from hot spots around the world. On December 31, 1981,
he opened a second channel, CNN Headline News that provided news summaries and updates every half hour.
When the Gulf War began in early 1991, CNN’s crew,
including reporters Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw, and John
Holliman were the only ones allowed to remain broadcasting from Baghdad, even while American planes bombed the
city. As the world watched the war live on television, some
network affiliates took CNN feeds along with those from
their own networks. At the same time, however, American
military leaders severely restricted reporters’ access to the
troops. The war, followed by other dramatic events covered
live, like the murder trial of sports celebrity O.J. Simpson
and the siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco,
Texas, established CNN’s reputation and made it profitable.
Live television gave international terrorists an immediate audience for bizarre hostage taking and other dramas.
CNN also gave extensive coverage to other, perhaps less
significant stories such as the trial involving Lorena and
John Wayne Bobbitt in 1993–1994 and to the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding scandal in 1994.
Before his merger with Time Warner, Turner threatened
to buy CBS to return it to traditional values and, at the same
time, Rupert Murdoch in 1995 promised to create an alternative Fox News channel that would be more conservative
than Turner’s. In the same year, Turner and Murdoch got
into a legal battle over which all-news channel would get
access to New York City’s cable system operated by Time
Warner. The feud got messy, as the New York Times wrote:
“Ted Turner was likening Rupert Murdoch to Hitler, Mr.
Murdoch was running cartoons in The New York Post
portraying Mr. Turner as a straitjacketed nutcase, and Mr.
Turner’s wife, Jane Fonda, was dissing Rudolph Giuliani’s
wife, Donna Hanover. And that’s when everyone was still
on the high road.”
As a sailor, Turner often won and hated to lose. Turner
took up sailing as a teenager and won the America’s Cup in
1977. He won Britain’s Fastnet race in 1979 in a storm that
smashed other yachts and killed other participants. With
CNN in the planning stage, executives thought their plan
may be scuttled when they heard news reports that Turner
himself was missing during that storm.
Hoping to get into movies, Turner purchased the financially troubled MGM studios in 1986. Although he did not
realize how troubled, he acquired an incredible archive that
provided the content for several cable networks, including
WTBS, Turner Network Televison (TNT), Turner Classic Movies, and, after the purchase of Hanna-Barbera,
the Cartoon Network. Under pressure to meet payments
on his MGM purchase, Turner ceded some control over
Turner Broadcasting Sytem to a group of cable operators
and began investing in land. He tried unsuccessfully to buy
CBS Television. In 1995, Turner merged with Time Warner,
owner of cable companies, providing a distribution method
for Turner’s movies.
Turner’s private life was often stormy. His first marriage
in 1960 was to Judy Nye, whom he met during a sailing
regatta in which he defeated her; she was one of the few
female skippers competing in 1959. They had two children,
Laura Lee and Robert Edward Turner IV. Ted and Judy
divorced soon after his father’s death. Ted married Jane
Smith from Birmingham, Alabama, on June 2, 1964. They
had three children. After the failure of his second marriage
and some very public affairs, Turner married the actress
Jane Fonda December 21, 1991, and they increased their
land and livestock holdings. By early 1997, they owned
1.3 million acres in ranches in Montana, New Mexico, and
Nebraska, placing them among the nation’s top landowners. They began stocking their Flying D ranch near Bozeman, Montana, with bison. They ran 12,000 bison on their
107,000-acre ranch and charged hunters $9,500 per animal
they took. Turner and Fonda divorced in 2001 and, in 2002,
he opened the first Montana Grill, a restaurant promoting
bison meat.
In 2003, Turner announced that he would step down as
vice chairman of AOL Time Warner. Although he initially
supported the merger of AOL with Time Warner Communications, Turner lost billions when the stock of the merged
company dropped in value.
Further Reading
Auletta, Ken. Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
Bibb, Porter. It Ain’t as Easy as It Looks: Ted Turner’s Amazing
Story New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1993.
Goldberg, Robert, and Gerald Jay Goldberg. Citizen Turner: The
Wild Rise of an American Tycoon. New York: Harcourt
Brace and Company, 1995.
Schonfeld, Reese. Me and Ted Against the World: The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN. New York: Collins,
2001.
Smith, Perry M. How CNN Fought the War: A View from the
Inside New York: Birch Lane Press, 1991.
Whittemore, Hank. CNN: The Inside Story: How a Band of Mavericks Changed the Face of Television News. Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1990.
Williams, Christian. Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way: The
Story of Ted Turner New York: Times Books, 1981.
William E. Huntzicker