Ted Turner, CNN Founder Who Revolutionized News, Dies at 87

Ted Turner, the media mogul who founded CNN and forever changed the way the world receives its news, passed away Wednesday, May 6th, at his home near Tallahassee, Florida. He was 87. Turner had been living with Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder, since disclosing his diagnosis in 2018. 

Born in Cincinnati and raised in Savannah, Georgia, he built one of the most consequential media empires in American history, starting from nothing more than a struggling billboard company and an outsized belief in his own vision.

On June 1, 1980, Turner launched CNN, the first 24-hour all-news channel in American history. The industry mocked it as "Chicken Noodle News." Turner ignored them. CNN's live coverage of the 1986 Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 1991 Gulf War proved the skeptics wrong and made the network the global standard for breaking news. Time magazine named Turner its Man of the Year in 1991. He went on to launch Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies, before selling his entire Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner in 1996. "He did not just disrupt media," said Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. "He transformed it." 

Beyond media, Turner was a passionate conservationist. He became the largest private landowner in the United States, holding over two million acres dedicated to sustainable ranching and wildlife preservation. In 1997, he pledged $1 billion to the United Nations Foundation — at the time the largest charitable gift ever made by a living individual. He also founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Turner Foundation, focused on environmental causes.

He won the 1977 America's Cup, earned the nickname "Captain Outrageous," married actress Jane Fonda in 1991, and lived every chapter of his life at full volume. Fonda, upon his death, called him a "gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate." He is survived by five children, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.