RIP, Citizen Turner

We have made no secret over the years of telling pretty much anyone who would listen that our favorite movie ever made is 1941’s “Citizen Kane.” The film was the pinnacle of the meteoric career of its director and star, Orson Welles, and is often at (or near) the top of any list of the greatest works in cinema. In the script by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles, the movie’s central plot revolves around the framework of a newsreel obituary of the life of media tycoon Charles Foster Kane.

If you have never watched it, or haven’t recently, we’d urge you to do so the next time you can. It is a true classic.

In many ways, the figure closest to a real-life version of the fictional Kane was William Randolph Hearst. Clearly, the movie takes some liberties to draw broad parallels to Hearst, given his immense power and influence at the time. Hearst’s use of what was labeled “yellow journalism” to sensationalize and champion causes of his choosing was legendary. The parallels between Hearst and Kane are obvious, but none stand out more than both men’s use of their media holdings to push America into a war. In Hearst’s case, it was the Spanish-American War of 1898. For Kane, it was a war with neighboring Cuba.

While scriptwriter Mankiewicz may have had Hearst in mind when he penned the life story of Citizen Kane, the figure who might have been the real-life version of the fictional character was only three years old when the movie premiered. His name was Robert Edward Turner, the third.

With his life ending today after some 87 years, the chronicle of who he was and what he accomplished seems far closer to the fictional legacy chronicled in “Citizen Kane.”

There will be many words written today and in the next few days about R.E. Turner, III. Ted Turner, as he preferred to be called, was many things in the course of his life. Attempting to capture that life in a handful of words leads one to use terms like “mogul,” “innovator,” “bombast,” “womanizer,” “outspoken,”” tycoon,” “philanthropist,” and a host of others. A quick skimming of the obituaries already published all point to Turner’s signature accomplishment as being the founder of the Cable News Network, CNN, in 1980. The New York Times goes so far as to label him as “the creator of the 24-hour news cycle.”

While it’s true that CNN brought the round-the-clock coverage of news to television, and more specifically, cable television, which was beginning its own rocket-powered journey to media dominance, the 24-hour news cycle had been around for quite some time.

“That’s one of the things that I think must be changed, Mr. Carter. The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day, and so will the Enquirer.” - Orson Welles as “Citizen Kane.”

We aren’t the first to draw the parallels between the fictional Kane and the bigger-than-life Turner. The 1995 biography of Turner from father and son authors, Robert and Gerald Jay Goldberg, was aptly titled “Citizen Turner - The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon.” It is one of at least ten books written about Turner’s life, including his 2008 autobiography, written with Bill Burke, which is appropriately titled “Call Me Ted.”

But in the years before he became the billionaire who revolutionized television news and powered the cable revolution by first putting his Atlanta-based UHF television station up on a satellite to create the first “superstation.” And before he bought the MGM movie studio and its vast film library in 1986 (which included, among its many titles, “Citizen Kane”), he created channels like Turner Network Television, Turner Classic Movies, and Cartoon Network.

Before all of that, he began his media empire by owning radio stations.

After stepping in to run Turner Outdoor Advertising, the billboard company his father, Ed, had built before taking his own life in 1963, Turner would go on to acquire an ownership interest in radio stations serving the southern cities of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1960s. By 1970, he would have moved into television by first acquiring WCTU, a struggling UHF television station in Charlotte, North Carolina. He would change the call letters to include his own initials, making it WRET. Not long after, he would add WJRJ in Atlanta, another struggling UHF station programming the usual fare of old movies and TV shows, paid religion, and infomercials. It would become WTCG, the flagship of the Turner Communications Group.

We should note here for the record that a few years later, in 1972, a young high school student who had fallen in love with the radio business would go to work (part-time) for WTMA (AM) in his hometown of Charleston. His first paycheck would bear the name of the Turner Communications Group. It would not be the last time that his path would intersect with Ted Turner.

By the mid 1970’s, the nascent cable television business was desperate to find anything that would elevate it from just being a way to improve the reception of over-the-air broadcast television stations. Atlanta’s WTCG was being carried into markets outside Atlanta via a growing network of microwave repeaters, largely because of its carriage of Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves, which Ted Turner had bought to serve as a programming anchor for the television station. In 1976, WTCG began being uplinked to RCA’s Satcom I satellite to achieve national distribution to cable systems across the country and become a so-called “Superstation.” The Satcom satellite would become crucial to cable operators as the orbiting home of early cable networks such as Home Box Office and Showtime. In 1979, a Connecticut startup cable network promising 24-hour sports coverage would launch via Satcom. Originally known as the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, it would quickly lose the entertainment programming to become simply “ESPN.”

Meanwhile, Ted Turner, who had become famous for winning the “America’s Cup” yacht race two years before in 1977, would win the catastrophic running of the Fastnet race in 1979, as captain of his yacht named “Tenacious.” The race would claim the lives of 15 sailors, and only 85 of the 300 boats that started would cross the finish line. After his return, Turner would focus more on another race, this one based on land. This one would be to get the first 24-hour all-news television network off the ground.

On June 1st of 1980, Turner presided over the ceremonial start of what he called “The news network for America…the Cable News Network.” To get it on the air, he would sell the Charlotte television station for $20 million to Westinghouse’s broadcasting arm. Ironically, just two years later, Westinghouse would team up with ABC to launch a competitor to CNN, known as “Satellite News Channel.” SNC would be built atop Westinghouse’s success with 24-hour, all-news radio stations in major markets (such as New York’s 1010 WINS) and ABC’s experience in television news. Turner rushed to launch “CNN2,” a headline news service featuring a rolling 30-minute newscast. (It would eventually become CNN Headline News.) SNC tried to buy its way onto cable systems by offering to pay a fee for each subscriber (reversing the industry standard of cable systems paying to carry programming channels).

But Turner’s dedication to the cable business and to the companies that operated cable systems would prove to be an insurmountable obstacle for SNC’s growth. Westinghouse and ABC would pull the plug on the operation just sixteen months later and sell the network’s satellite space and subscribers to Ted Turner.

In its first decade, CNN would battle its way from being known as the “Chicken Noodle Network” by establishing itself as the place for “breaking news.” The network would fully complete its adolescence in 1991, when it would be the only news network to have live reporters in Baghdad, when the US went to war over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The coverage was CNN’s coming-of-age moment in arriving as a global news leader. That same year, Ted Turner would marry actress and activist Jane Fonda. It would be the third marriage for each, and it appeared that Turner had finally met his match.

By the mid-1990s, Turner and his Turner Broadcasting System were major players in television of all kinds. In 1995, Ted Turner agreed to merge his media empire with the one created by the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications. Time Warner’s CEO, Gerald Levin, who had once led Home Box Office, had known Turner for years. He convinced Turner to accept $7.5 billion worth of Time Warner stock and the title of Vice Chairman of the board.

Earlier that year, we had joined TimeWarner’s cable arm to work on a project to replicate the success of that company’s creation of “New York 1,” a 24-hour “hyperlocal” cable news channel serving the five boroughs of New York City. By 1997, we had launched the first of those, “Bay News 9” in Tampa-St. Petersburg, Florida. Not long after, with plans in the works to launch similar operations in other Time Warner Cable areas around the country, we found ourselves in a meeting at CNN Center in Atlanta, discussing how the Time Warner Cable Local News Group might work more closely with our corporate cousin. At one point in the meeting, we were informed that Ted Turner wanted to come in and say a few words. He did and stated that he’d love to see us work more together. He wondered aloud why Gerry Levin hadn’t thought to label these local operations with the CNN name. Before any of us from the cable side could answer, he said he had to move on to his next meeting. He took a moment to shake each of our hands and thank us for all our work.

When he got to our place in the room, we quickly told him that we had worked for him some 25 years prior at his radio station in Charleston, and that we had once met briefly then. He smiled and said in that signature southern drawl of his, “You did? That’s great. To be honest with you, I don’t remember a lot from back then. I did my share of livin’ back then.”

With that, he stepped back and told us, as a group, that he thought what we were doing was great and important to the future of the company. He was out the double doors in a flash, and our team feasted on the compliment for weeks thereafter.

At the same time, Time Warner Cable was pioneering something that would be far more important to the company’s future. We saw it in the back room of a cable system office in Elmira, New York. It was one of the first working models of using the infrastructure of a cable television system to deliver high-speed internet service. This “broadband” service would become the company’s “Road Runner High Speed Internet” offering, which would quickly replace the slow dial-up telephone connections that most people used to connect to the budding phenomenon known as “the internet.”

One of the early leaders in the business of providing internet access via dial-up was the nearly ubiquitous “America Online.” AOL, as it would be called, would lead to Ted Turner later calling his decision to merge with TimeWarner as perhaps the one decision he considered “a mistake.”

In 2001, at the height of the original “internet bubble,” AOL would buy TimeWarner for $182 billion. It created the largest media company to date, with holdings from traditional publishing to the biggest name in the emerging digital space. Not long after the merger was completed, and corporate suits were replaced by blazer-and-khaki-wearing internet bros in company meetings, Ted Turner would be marginalized and eventually pushed off the company board two years later—by his former friend, Gerry Levin.

Ultimately, the union of AOL and Time Warner would be labeled “the worst merger in American corporate history.” AOL had bought Time Warner based on its inflated value during the “go-go” years of anything internet-related. Not long after the merger, AOL’s stock value plummeted, and things got bad. By 2009, Time Warner had spun off AOL as a separate company and later sold its cable holdings to Charter Communications. Time Warner sold its remaining media assets to AT&T in 2018 for $85 billion. After a lengthy fight with the US Department of Justice to close the deal, AT&T renamed Time Warner to WarnerMedia. AT&T quickly learned that running a content company wasn’t necessarily compatible with running a telecommunications company. In 2022, it spun off WarnerMedia as a new company and partnered with Discovery Networks to create Warner Bros. Discovery, under the leadership of CEO David Zaslav.

Which brings us up to last November, when Warner Bros. Discovery was set to be acquired by Netflix, only to be pushed aside early this year by a higher offer from Paramount-Skydance, led by David Ellison. That acquisition is now winding its way through its own lengthy process with the Justice Department. If it’s ultimately consummated, CNN and CBS will have the same owner, which is ironic because Ted Turner tried back in 1985 to make an audacious “hostile bid” for CBS, which would have put CNN and CBS under the same ownership. Turner’s bid, largely to be financed with “junk bonds,” was ultimately rejected by CBS. But the billion dollars CBS had to spend to spurn Turner led to a tortured path of corporate ownership over the decades, culminating in the hands of Ellison and his billionaire father, Larry.

Ted Turner’s personal wealth remained in the billions until the time of his death. After being pushed out at Time Warner, he focused on his other interests in real estate and conservation. He was, at one point, the largest private landowner in the US, owning large parcels in Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. He was instrumental in the reintroduction of bison to the American West and had the largest herd in the nation, with over 51,000 head on his ranches. He would partner in the founding of the restaurant chain “Ted’s Montana Grill” in 2002.

Turner and Fonda divorced in 2001, but reportedly remained friendly. Fonda told Deadline.com today, “I loved Ted with all my heart.” Turner was never reported to be in another serious relationship. He spent much of his later years alone on his large ranch near Bozeman, Montana. According to his lengthy obituary in The New York Times, he is survived by his three sons and two daughters from his first two marriages, along with fourteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

At the end of “Citizen Kane,” there is a lengthy bit of dialogue that centers around the question of Kane’s last words. This had been a challenge from the newsreel editor to the reporter who interviews the key people who had known Kane throughout his life, which makes up a good part of the film. The reporter, named Jerry Thompson, delivers this summation in the script:

“He was the most honest man who ever lived, with a streak of crookedness a yard wide. He was a liberal and a reactionary; he was tolerant - “Live and Let Live” - that was his motto. But he had no use for anybody who disagreed with him on any point, no matter how small it was…”

We certainly don’t suggest that this was also a description of Ted Turner, but rather the difficulty of summarizing the life of so large a man in a few sentences or even a single word. He was called at times “Captain Outrageous,” “Terrible Ted,” and “The Mouth of the South.” What we believe is that his major accomplishments deserve to be acknowledged equally, as does the complicated story of his personal life. It was a privilege to meet him on two occasions and to follow his career from college dropout to creator of the nation’s most recognized global news organization and finally to a philanthropist who donated a billion dollars to the United Nations, amongst his other charitable efforts.

We’ll end this as all good obituaries should, Ted Turner was 87 years old.

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