Ted Turner, media mogul and former Atlanta Braves owner, has died at 87

ATLANTA — Media mogul, team owner, restaurateur, philanthropist and a lover of the wide-open spaces. Those are just a few of the titles that Robert “Ted” Turner III held throughout his lifetime.

Turner died Wednesday at the age of 87.

The man who would come to be known as “The Mouth of the South” was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 19, 1938. The family later moved South.

His father, Ed Turner, was a demanding, hard-working man who drank heavily, struggled with bouts of depression and sometimes beat his son with a razor strap.

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The elder Turner sent his son away to military boarding school and believed that instilling a sense of insecurity in him would give him more drive.

It worked.

“You won’t hardly ever find a super-achiever anywhere that isn’t … motivated at least partially by a sense of insecurity,’’ Ted Turner said in a 1991 TV interview with David Frost.

As a teen, Turner wanted to become a Christian missionary. But he lost his faith after the long, agonizing death of his younger sister, Mary Jane, who had a form of Lupus, he told an interviewer for Time when the magazine named him Man of the Year for 1991.

Turner attended Brown University, but he was a rebellious student and was kicked out after sneaking a woman into his room. He then moved to Atlanta, where he joined his father’s billboard business, got married and had two children. But Turner didn’t find stability. His father committed suicide when Ted was 24.

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Turner later told Time that his father’s death “left me alone, because I had counted on him to make the judgment of whether or not I was a success.”

Turner’s first step in building a media empire started in 1963. That’s when he took over his father’s billboard business, Turner Outdoor Advertising.

Among Ted Turner’s many accomplishments, perhaps the biggest was starting a first-of-its-kind, Atlanta-based 24-hour news network, the Cable News Network (CNN).

“I dedicate the news channel for America,” Turner said upon the network’s launch.

Turner was also well known for his run as the owner of the Atlanta Braves. He made Major League Baseball history when he decided to manage the team for one day before being removed. He was also well known for his work with a number of charities. Over his lifetime, Turner donated a fortune, in his mind, to better the world.

Many of Turner’s enterprises were designed to ensure he had enough programming for his expanding number of Cable Television networks.

That list started with his “Super Station WTBS”, which was one of the very first national Cable TV Channels. That grew into Turner Network Television (TNT), CNN, CNN Headline News, The Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies (TCM), Boomerang, Turner South, CNN International, and others.

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The creation of CNN helped break the lock that broadcast networks had on TV news. CNN pioneered global 24-hour coverage, blazing the way for an era of information on demand.

“I’m like the bear that went over the mountain to see what he could see,” he said in a 1994 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “One thing opened up, then another, and I kept moving on.

As CNN prepared to launch in 1980, a Washington Post reporter wrote “The premiere will be greeted with almost universal skepticism both by the TV and financial communities alike.”

Derided as the Chicken Noodle Network, CNN squeezed Turner’s resources for years as it struggled to make a profit. It eventually became very profitable, and the network grabbed almost universal praise when it scooped the world by reporting on the opening of the Gulf War in Iraq, reporting from Baghdad.

CNN fostered TV’s global news coverage. And Turner himself began embracing a broader, world view. He banned the word “foreign” from CNN’s on-air vocabulary.

“We try to present the facts as they are, not from a U.S. perspective but from a human perspective,” he said in 1991. “I believe that our humanity supersedes our nationalism.”

Turner spent much of his early career taking on major network executives. Later, he used his wealth and notoriety by tackling global issues.

In the late ’70s, Turner bought the then-floundering Atlanta Braves – using his “Super Station to make the team a household name nationwide. That happened before the team’s run of division titles throughout the ’90s.

In 1995, Turner’s Braves won their first World Series. That win and the Braves run of successful teams earned him an induction into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame

In 1997, Turner grabbed national headlines with his announcement that he would donate $1 billion to the United Nations, with the donation being spread out over 10 years.

Later, Turner announced a plan to spend $250 million on the Nuclear Threat Initiative to help curb the growing spread of weapons of mass destruction.

But Ted Turner was a deep, complex man who wanted to give. He eventually became the second-largest landowner in North America, at one point owning more than 2 million acres of land.

He used a lot of that property to reintroduce wild animals into their natural habitats, and he became the biggest bison rancher in the world.

Convinced that economics could help the survival of bison, Turner, along with restaurateur George McKerrow Jr. launched a new chain of restaurants -- Ted’s Montana Grill.

Turner will be remembered by many as a visionary.

Several years ago, former Channel 2 Action News anchor John Pruitt sat down with Turner for a one-on-one interview, where he asked him what he thought about all of the recognition he’s gained and being placed alongside several other Georgia legends.

“That sounds like a list of pretty great people,” Turner said. “I’ve been called it so many times -- I’ve been called a lot of other things too of course -- but I think CNN was visionary.”

“He really changed the world,” David Zaslav, chief executive officer of Warner Bros. Discovery, said. “He changed the lives of so many of us who got to align with him and live this great journey in the cable and media business.”

Turner also gained a ton of publicity through his relationship with actress Jane Fonda, whom he married in 1991.

The pair became Atlanta’s glamour couple, sweeping into charity events, attracting double-takes across Georgia and joining cheering fans at Braves games.

Eight years later, they divorced, though the two remained friends.

“I’ve never met anybody who can so quickly recognize a truth and internalize it,” Fonda said of Turner in a 1992 Time Magazine article. “When he feels something is right, he just does it. Without a backward look.”

In a 2023 interview, Fonda admitted that she left acting for Turner.

“I left for 15 years ... I did not think I was gonna come back, ‘cause when I married him, I thought it’d be forever,” Fonda said. “He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had two million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay.”

“He was so sweet and generous and, could it be possible — humble?” she said.

Time Magazine made the media mogul their cover page Man of the Year in 1991, also calling him a visionary “for influencing the dynamic of events and turning viewers in 150 countries into instant witnesses of history.”

In that same Time Magazine story, Turner spelled out his ultimate goal in life, saying, “I’m not going to rest until all of the world’s problems have been solved... Homelessness, AIDS. I’m in great shape. I mean, the problems will survive me -- no question about it.”

At the end of September 2018, Turner revealed he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive disease related to Alzheimer’s.

“It’s a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer’s. It’s similar to that. But not nearly as bad. Alzheimer’s is fatal,” Turner said in an interview with Ted Koppel. “Thank goodness I don’t have that. But, I also have got, let’s -- the one that’s -- I can’t remember the name of it.”

He eventually said, “Dementia. I can’t remember what my disease is.”

The Lewy Body Dementia Association says an estimated 1.4 million Americans are affected by the disease, which is the second most common form of degenerative dementia.

Over the years, Turner’s family has not revealed much about his disease’s progression, but in a 2022 interview, his daughter, Laura Turner Seydel, said her father was brave to share his diagnosis.

“Ted is known as ‘Captain Courageous,’ and he’s battling through,” she said.

Turner’s family said he remained active with his nonprofit work as a chairman for Turner Foundation and Nuclear Threat Initiative. Seydel had also said that Turner enjoyed spending his time on his ranch in Montana.

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