Ted Turner

Robert Edward Turner III (November 19, 1938 – May 6, 2026) was an American businessman, television producer, media proprietor, and philanthropist. He founded CNN, the first 24-hour cable news channel, and WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television. Turner also founded the television networks TNT, TBS, The Cartoon Network, Inc., and Turner Classic Movies, and acquired professional wrestling company Jim Crockett Promotions, which became the basis of the promotion World Championship Wrestling (WCW).

Turner began his media empire in March 1963 when he took over his father's billboard business—Turner Outdoor Advertising, then worth $1 million—after his father's suicide at the age of 53. His purchase of an Atlanta UHF station in 1970 began the Turner Broadcasting System. In 1980, he founded CNN, one of the most prominent news networks in the world. Turner owned the Atlanta Braves baseball team, which won the 1995 World Series. He turned the team into a nationally popular franchise, and he launched the charitable Goodwill Games. Turner was also a passionate proponent of professional wrestling as a television product, having aired wrestling on TBS dating back to 1971, and credited wrestling with helping TBS gain a national footprint with the coming of cable television. In 1988, Turner purchased Jim Crockett Promotions, which he then rebranded as WCW, a promotion that would supersede the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) in popularity during the mid-1990s, an era now called the Monday Night War.

As a philanthropist, he gave $1 billion to create the United Nations Foundation, a public charity to broaden U.S. support for the United Nations; Turner served as co-chairman of its board of directors. In 2001, he co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) with U.S. senator Sam Nunn (D‑GA), a non-partisan organization dedicated to reducing global reliance on and preventing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

In 2020, Forbes awarded Turner a perfect philanthropy score of 5, the highest possible rating, placing him among an exclusive group of just ten Forbes 400 members, alongside Warren Buffett, George Soros, Eli Broad, and others who have each given away at least 20% of their fortune.

Robert Edward Turner III was born on November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Florence (née Rooney) and Robert Edward Turner II, a billboard magnate. When he was nine, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he was raised as an Episcopalian. He attended The McCallie School, a private boys' preparatory school in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Turner attended Brown University and was vice-president of the Brown Debating Union and captain of the sailing team. He became a member of Kappa Sigma. Turner initially majored in classics. His father wrote that this choice made him "appalled, even horrified", and that he "almost puked". Turner later changed his major to economics, but before receiving a degree, he was expelled for having a female student in his dormitory room. He was awarded an honorary B.A. from Brown University in November 1989 when he returned to campus to give the keynote address for the National Association of College Broadcasters' second annual conference.

Turner joined the United States Coast Guard Reserve to fulfill his national service obligation before he would have been drafted. Honored by the United States Navy Memorial with its Lone Sailor Award in 2013, Turner told The Washington Post, "I liked boats", and ended up getting "deployed to some pretty sweet places — Charleston and Fort Lauderdale."

After leaving Brown University, Turner returned to the South in late 1960 to become general manager of the Macon, Georgia, branch of his father's business. Following his father's suicide in March 1963, Turner, at age 24, became president and chief executive of Turner Advertising Company; he turned the firm into a global enterprise. He joined the Young Republicans, saying he "felt at ease among these budding conservatives and was merely following in [his father]'s far-right footsteps", according to It Ain't as Easy as It Looks.

During the Vietnam War era, Turner's business prospered; it had "virtual monopolies in Savannah, Macon, Columbus, and Charleston" and was the "largest outdoor advertising company in the Southeast", according to It Ain't as Easy as It Looks. The book observed that Turner found that his father had sheltered a substantial amount of taxable income over the years by personally lending it back to the company and that the billboard business could be highly profitable tax-depreciable revenue stream that threw off enormous amounts of cash with almost no capital investment".

In the late 1960s, Turner purchased several Southern radio stations. In 1969, he sold his radio stations to buy a struggling television station in Atlanta, UHF channel 17 WJRJ-TV. At the time, UHF stations did well only in markets without VHF stations, like Fresno, California, or in markets with only one station on VHF. Independent UHF stations were not ratings winners or profitable even in larger markets, but Turner concluded that this would change as people wanted more than several choices. He changed the call sign to WTCG, representing Turner Communications Group, and promoted the company as "Watch This Channel Grow".

Initially, the station ran old movies from prior decades, along with theatrical cartoons, classic sitcoms and drama programs. As better syndicated products fell off the VHF stations, Turner would acquire them for his station at a very low price. WTCG ran mostly second- and even third-hand programming of the time, including fare such as Gilligan's Island, I Love Lucy, Star Trek, Hazel, and Bugs Bunny. Other low-cost content included humorist Bill Tush reading the news at 3 a.m., prompting Turner to jokingly comment that, "we have a 100% share at this time". Tush once delivered the news with his "co-anchor" Rex, a German Shepherd. The dog, which belonged to an associate, was shown next to Tush on set, wearing a shirt and tie while eating a peanut butter sandwich. Rex appeared only on one episode, but a myth grew where many people thought the dog was a nightly guest.

In 1972, WTCG acquired the rights to telecast Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks games. In addition to the Atlanta station, Turner purchased the former WCTU in Charlotte, North Carolina, which became WRET-TV after his initials. The station initially flailed to the point that, in 1972, Turner appeared on the station to appeal for contributions from viewers; by 1975, the station had become profitable and one of the most-watched independent stations in the country. In 1976, each of the contributors to the station four years prior received checks returning their money—with interest. WRET became Charlotte's NBC affiliate in 1978.

As a youth, Turner was a member of the Young Republicans. His political views as an adult were described by Out magazine as being aligned with "progressive politics and humanistic values", and as having had "a lasting impact on Turner Broadcasting and its parent company".

On September 19, 2006, in a Reuters Newsmaker conference, Turner said of Iran's position on nuclear weapons: "They're a sovereign state. We have 28,000. Why can't they have 10? We don't say anything about Israel‍—‌, they've got 100 of them approximately‍—‌or India or Pakistan or Russia." Turner was a proponent of healthcare reform bills, and said: "We're the only first-world country that doesn't have universal healthcare and it's a disgrace."

In 2010, following both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster that killed 29 miners in West Virginia, Turner stated on CNN that "I'm just wondering if God is telling us he doesn't want to drill offshore. And right before that, we had that coal mine disaster in West Virginia where we lost 29 miners ... Maybe the Lord's tired of having the mountains of West Virginia, the tops knocked off of them, so they may get more coal. I think maybe we ought to just leave the coal in the ground and go with solar and wind power and geothermals ..."

Turner endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2018, he revealed he had once considered a run for president when he was married to Jane Fonda, who told him she would leave him if he ran.

Along with advocating for clean water and improved stewardship of the land, he established the Turner Foundation to address ways to curb population growth. Turner put $125 million of his own money into the foundation and spent $6 million per year to address population growth rates. Addressing the issue at a Montana gathering in 1996, he stated that he denied discussing any elimination of population growth. He went on to discuss hunger and poverty and ways to address those issues.

Turner rejected religion following the death of his sister. However, in 2008, he said he was no longer an agnostic or an atheist, as he had previously identified. Turner stated, 'I regret anything I said about religion that was negative,' and mentioned that he had begun praying for friends who were ill.

Turner was married and divorced three times: to Judy Nye (1960–1964), Jane Shirley Smith (1965–1988), and actress Jane Fonda (1991–2001). The latter marriage took place on December 21, 1991, on Fonda's birthday, and the divorce was filed on May 22, 2001. He had five children: Laura Turner Seydel and Robert Edward Turner IV by his first wife, and Beau Turner, Rhett Turner, and Jennie Turner Garlington by his second wife. Generally, his children have followed in Ted's philanthropic and conservationist goals.

Turner is regarded as one of the entrepreneurs who transformed the cable industry and has been referred to as "the Alexander the Great of broadcasting" by Slate:

While Turner has been described as a "valiant liberator" and cast the networks as oppressive scoundrels, in content, his programming fell short of inspiring. His network was built on sitcom reruns, old movies, cartoons, and Atlanta Braves games. He found an audience for classics of a bygone time, along with slightly down-market content such as professional wrestling. Nonetheless, he would find glorious terms even for retreads and junk, claiming to be pulling America back to television's golden age: "I want to get it back to the principles," he once said, "that made us good." Nostalgic, Manichean, and boot-strappy: like programmer, like programming.

The cable industry boomed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as nearly a dozen cable networks launched based on the Turner model. They include much of what we now consider the staples of cable TV, including ESPN, MTV, Bravo, Showtime, BET, the Discovery Channel, and the Weather Channel. Those are the better-known channels only by virtue of having survived; others, such as ARTS, CBS Cable, and the Satellite News Channel, folded or were acquired by other companies.

Professional wrestling promoter and former Senior Vice President of WCW, second in charge after Turner, Eric Bischoff praised Turner, claiming "He was an inspirational leader, he was a risk taker, he appreciated people who took risks, he was not afraid of failure, while most people are. Ted was not afraid to fail; he was more afraid of not trying and not conquering that next horizon."

On June 24, 1999, Vince McMahon stated on Late Night with Conan O'Brien: "All I'll say about Ted is he's a son-of-a-bitch, other than that, he's probably not a bad guy, but I don't like him at all". Later in 2021, when asked about the upstart All Elite Wrestling (AEW) in comparison to Turner's WCW, McMahon dismissed AEW, stating that "it certainly is not a situation where 'rising tides' because that was when Ted Turner was coming after us with all of Time Warner's assets as well".

2015: Lifetime Achievement – News & Documentary

1995: World Series champion (as owner of the Atlanta Braves)

1996: Atlanta Braves home ballpark (1996–2016) named Turner Field

2004: Commemorative banner at State Farm Arena honoring his tenure as owner of the Atlanta Hawks

1984: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement