Ted Turner, billionaire media mogul and CNN founder, dies at 87

The elder Turner, struggling with financial hardships and mental health issues, died by suicide in 1963; his son took over the advertising company, taking on the roles of president and CEO.

Turner Advertising was renamed Turner Communications with the acquisition of several radio stations. Turner branched out into other media, purchasing a beleaguered UHF television station in Atlanta, as well as the rights to old movies and sitcom reruns.

In the mid-1970s, Turner made one of the most consequential decisions of his career. He was one of the first media company owners to use satellite technology to broadcast his station to a national cable television viewing audience, widening his reach and boosting revenues.

Turner filled the “Super Station” lineup with a combination of vintage Hollywood titles, throwback sitcoms and baseball games.

In 1979, the company rebranded once again, becoming Turner Broadcasting System Inc. and establishing itself as one of the key enterprises of the cable television revolution.

Turner leveraged his media success in sports, buying the Atlanta Braves in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks in 1977. The Braves won the World Series in 1995 under his ownership.

In the late 1970s, Turner came up with the idea for a 24-hour cable news channel — a significant shift in an era when the “Big Three” network news programs still reigned supreme and many viewers did not conceive of news consumption as a minute-to-minute activity.

CNN aired its first broadcast on June 1, 1980, anchored by the husband-and-wife duo of David Walker and Lois Hart.

In the mid-1980s, as CNN emerged as a cornerstone of the cable lineup and a household name, Turner bought MGM/UA Entertainment Co., which included Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s sprawling library of more than 4,000 movies.

He offended cinephiles and much of the Hollywood establishment with his plans to “colorize” black-and-white films from the MGM library. In a 1989 article, the Los Angeles Times called him “The Man Hollywood Loves to Hate.”

The critic Roger Ebert wrote that Turner’s airing of a colorized version of “Casablanca” was “one of the saddest days in the history of the movies.”

“It is sad because it demonstrates that there is no movie that Turner will spare, no classic however great that is safe from the vulgarity of his computerized graffiti gangs,” Ebert wrote.

Turner eventually backed down, deciding the colorization process was not cost-efficient. He soon sold off MGM/UA, but he retained ownership of the MGM movie library, which later formed the backbone of programming on Turner Classic Movies, or TCM, launched in 1994.

Turner married for a third and final time in 1991, partnering with the Oscar-winning actor and activist Jane Fonda.

The union between an avatar of American capitalism and an outspoken progressive who railed against the status quo raised eyebrows, but the two were smitten from the start and bonded over their shared curiosity about the world.

“In his heart, Ted is not a wealthy, powerful, privileged person,” Fonda told interviewers for “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” an HBO documentary released in 2018. “He’s a little boy who likes to play, and who has wild brilliance, and that’s what I was attracted to.”

“We were both children of suicide, so we understood each other,” Fonda added.

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