Ted Turner

BORN: November 19, 1938 • Cincinnati, Ohio

American television executive

Ted Turner is one of the most influential forces in the development of modern cable television. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Turner went from being the head of a failing billboard company to being one of the best-known television executives in the world. He founded the first cable superstation to broadcast programs across the country via satellite. He also pioneered the concept of a twenty-four-hour, all-news cable network. His creation, CNN, completely changed U.S. news broadcasting. Turner's bold willingness to invest in his own vision in the face of doubt and ridicule made him a billionaire and secured his place in television history.

"All my big competitors were like a pack of wolves, and they were all chasing me, but I was fast enough to be out in front of them."

A rebellious childhood

Robert Edward Turner III, known from childhood by the nickname Ted, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 19, 1938. His parents were Florence and Ed Turner. When Ted was nine years old, the family moved to the city of Savannah, on the Atlantic Coast of Georgia, where Ed Turner ran a thriving billboard business called Turner Advertising. Ed Turner was an alcoholic who also suffered from mental health problems. He was a harsh and controlling man who dominated his children and his timid wife. But his father's nature only brought out the rebellious spirit in young Ted, who often pulled pranks and did small acts of vandalism that earned him beatings from his father.

As a boy, Turner was small and thin and not well suited for athletics. At the age of eleven, he took up competitive sailing, because the sport rewarded quick wits rather than physical size and strength. Turner competed in sailing races and excelled at the sport. He also did surprisingly well at boxing. He credited his success in this area to his father, who taught him how to take a beating. Turner's rebellious nature eventually convinced his parents to send him away to several military boarding schools, including the Georgia Military Academy in Atlanta and the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Always quick with an argument, Turner won the high school debating championship before graduating from McCallie.

When it came time to enter college, Turner disappointed his father by being rejected by Harvard University. He was forced to settle for his second choice, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. During his college years at Brown, Turner continued to earn a reputation as a troublemaker by drinking alcohol and getting into fights. He enjoyed playing the role of a loud, feisty Southern boy among his more serious Northern classmates. He even kept a rifle in his dormitory room, which he occasionally fired out the window. Turner continued his successful debating career in college, becoming vice president of the Brown Debating Union. But he was expelled from Brown in 1959 for sneaking a woman into his dorm room.

Facing loss and taking responsibility

When Turner was twenty years old, his seventeen-year-old sister Mary Jane died. She had been diagnosed with an incurable immune system disease called lupus erythematosus when she was only twelve. Turner had been a devout Christian before witnessing his sister's painful struggle with illness. He had even considered becoming a missionary (someone who spreads the Christian faith among non-Christian people). But after Mary Jane's death, he lost faith in a God who could allow an innocent girl to suffer as his sister had. He remained an atheist (someone who does not believe in God) throughout his life.

In 1960 Turner married Judy Nye, whom he had met through yacht racing. Marriage did not steady his wild nature, however, and he had affairs with other women from the beginning. Turner and Nye had two children, Laura and Teddy, before their divorce in 1963. The following year Turner married Jane Smith, with whom he had three children, Beau, Rhett, and Jennie. Turner remained a difficult husband, however, treating his wife rudely in public and continuing to have affairs with other women. Like his own father, he was distant and frequently harsh with his children.

Turner also went to work in his father's business during this time, and he soon showed a strong talent for sales. In 1962, Ed Turner expanded his billboard advertising company into a number of new cities. Within a short time, however, he became fearful that he could not succeed in the new markets and started selling off some of his acquisitions. Increasingly upset about business pressures and mounting debts, Ed Turner committed suicide on March 5, 1963.

Ted Turner was deeply affected by his father's suicide. The unruly son turned into an aggressive businessman in an attempt to fulfill the expectations of the father he had never been able to please. Turner started by building up the billboard business, selling family property and going into debt to get back into the advertising markets his father had abandoned before his death. Soon Turner Advertising was the largest billboard company in the southeastern United States.

In the late 1960s, Turner began expanding from billboard advertising into other areas of the communications industry. He bought several radio stations in the South, beginning with WAPO Radio in Chattanooga in 1968. Two years later he entered television broadcasting by purchasing a failing UHF station, WJRJ in Atlanta.

Television signals are carried by radio waves, which exist in a range of frequencies called the radio spectrum. The Federal Communications Commission (the U.S. government agency in charge of regulating television) allocated two portions of the radio spectrum for television broadcasting: very-high frequency (VHF) and ultra-high frequency (UHF) channels. Most of the stronger VHF channels were controlled by the powerful national broadcasting networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). The weaker UHF channels tended to belong to independent commercial stations or nonprofit educational stations. Although Turner's first TV station used the inferior UHF portion of the broadcast spectrum, he soon came up with a bold plan to expand the reach of its signal.

Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin

From 1992 to 2002, Gerald Levin served as the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Time Warner Inc., one of the largest media and entertainment companies in the world. Over the course of his career, Levin became known as a bold, strategic leader with a remarkable ability to predict the future direction of business and technology. His ideas contributed to the rapid growth of cable TV services in the 1980s and to the increasing consolidation (the combination of several businesses into one large business) of American media in the 1990s.

Gerald Manuel Levin was born on May 6, 1939, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For much of his youth he planned to become a rabbi (a Jewish religious leader). Levin majored in biblical studies at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, but then he decided against further religious training. Instead, he studied law at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating first in his class in 1963.

Levin started out working as an attorney in a New York City law firm. In 1972 he changed career paths and went to work for Home Box Office (HBO), a regional cable TV service that offered pay-per-view movies and sporting events to viewers on the East Coast. HBO was owned by Time Inc., the publisher of Time magazine. Levin started out as the vice president of programming at HBO, and he became president of the company the following year.

In 1975 Levin convinced his bosses at Time to invest $7 million in a plan to distribute HBO's programming nationwide. His plan involved bouncing HBO's signal off a communications satellite orbiting Earth. The signal from the satellite could be received by cable TV systems across the country. Levin's bold idea helped HBO increase its number of customers from 100,000 to 14 million over the next four years. During that time, a number of other cable TV stations began distributing their signals by satellite as well. In this way, Levin's idea contributed to the rapid growth of cable TV in the 1980s.

Levin was named chairman and CEO of HBO in 1976, and three years later he was promoted to vice president of video projects at parent company Time Inc. In 1984 he became the vice president of strategy. In this position, Levin began pushing Time to expand its business beyond magazine publishing and cable TV stations. He wanted the company to enter the movie and music businesses as well.

In 1990, in one of the biggest business deals in U.S. media history, Time Inc. combined its operations with Warner Communications. Levin played an important role in planning and negotiating the merger of the two companies. He supported the deal because it gave Time access to Warner's television, film, and music content. In 1992 he became chairman and CEO of the combined firm, known as Time Warner.

Levin continued expanding Time Warner's communications empire in 1995, when he arranged to purchase Turner Communications. This company, founded by Ted Turner, controlled a number of popular cable TV channels, including TBS and CNN. In 2000 Levin made another huge business deal, this time combining Time Warner with the Internet service provider America Online (AOL). He believed that merging with AOL would give Time Warner access to a valuable new distribution channel for its content: the Internet.

Unfortunately, the AOL deal was widely considered to be a disaster for Time Warner. A few months after it was finalized, investors lost confidence in Internet-related businesses and the price of shares of stock in these companies dropped rapidly. The shares of AOL stock that Time Warner had received in the merger lost half of their value, causing financial trouble for the newly formed AOL Time Warner. Levin came under a great deal of criticism from stockholders, and he stepped down as chairman and CEO in 2002.

Becoming the king of cable

Turner renamed his Atlanta television station WTCG, for Turner Communications Group. He began showing classic TV series, cartoons, old movies, and sporting events to attract viewers, and by 1973 the station was making a profit. Then Turner began thinking about ways that he could broadcast programs to a much larger audience. In 1975, a pay-per-view TV channel called Home Box Office (HBO) started offering its programming to viewers across the United States by bouncing its signal off communications satellites orbiting Earth. The signal was picked up by cable TV systems and sent through cable lines to their customers. Turner decided to use the same approach.

In 1976, Turner turned his independent station into a national cable TV network. Like HBO had done the year before, Turner arranged to deliver his signal to cable systems across the country via satellite. He changed his call letters to WTBS (for Turner Broadcasting System) and referred to it as a Superstation. He soon convinced national advertisers to place their commercials on his cable network. Within a few years, more than 160 million viewers in over 200 countries were watching Turner's lineup of popular shows from the past.

Turner used the wealth he gained from his broadcast stations to buy the Atlanta Braves professional baseball team and the Atlanta Hawks professional basketball team. He later acquired two Atlanta hockey teams, the Flames and the Thrashers. These purchases turned out to be brilliant business decisions, because they gave Turner the right to broadcast all of the teams' games on WTBS. Of course, the flamboyant Turner also enjoyed the special privileges he gained as a team owner, like playing poker with the players and coaching from the sidelines.

As Turner developed a reputation as an important media person, his private life remained troubled. Considered by many to be ill-mannered and coarse, Turner was known to cheat on his wives, bully his children, and alternately charm and terrorize his business associates. Still a skilled and passionate yachtsman, in 1977 he captained the boat Courageous that won the prestigious America's Cup sailboat race. After arriving noticeably drunk to collect the trophy, Turner gained the nickname Captain Outrageous.

Creating CNN

As his business enterprises earned greater profits, Turner became convinced that he had a duty to make the world a better place. He began to envision a television network devoted to presenting news from around the world. He believed that such a global news channel could help people in different nations understand each other better and thus contribute to world peace.

With this ambitious goal in mind, Turner launched an innovative new broadcasting enterprise in 1980. His Cable News Network (CNN) became the first cable television channel to offer news programming twenty-four hours per day. In the beginning, many longtime network news experts ridiculed Turner and his cable news channel. They jokingly dubbed CNN the "Chicken Noodle Network" and complained about the poor quality of its sets and the low pay it offered to reporters. CNN initially struggled to attract viewers, but it gradually began to surprise its critics and live up to its founder's ideals. In 1982 CNN began broadcasting in Asia, and in 1985 it expanded to Europe.

Within a few years of its creation, CNN became famous for its coverage of breaking news events. In 1986, for instance, CNN was the only TV channel to provide live coverage of the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. After the first American astronaut walked on the Moon in 1969, the broadcast networks had stopped paying much attention to the U.S. space program. So when Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts on board, CNN achieved a major scoop on the competition. The incident helped make CNN the first choice for many TV viewers when important news broke.

CNN really moved to the front of TV news coverage during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. This conflict began when the Middle Eastern nation of Iraq invaded its smaller neighbor, Kuwait. When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (1937–) refused international requests to remove his troops from Kuwait, the United States and a coalition (cooperative group) of other countries sent military forces to the Persian Gulf region. The coalition spent several weeks bombing strategic targets in Iraq, then launched a ground attack that succeeded in forcing the Iraqi troops to leave Kuwait.

On the night the coalition bombing raids began, CNN had three anchors stationed in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. These men—Peter Arnett (1934–), Bernard Shaw (1940–), and John Holliman (1948–1998)—covered the attacks live from the balcony of their downtown hotel room. Their daring footage attracted 11 million viewers—or about 20 times the normal ratings for CNN. CNN's coverage of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which was broadcast via satellite, helped the cable network become a prime news source for TV viewers around the world. In fact, news experts started discussing a theory called the CNN effect, in which CNN actually influenced world events by focusing its news cameras on them. Network executives who had laughed at the idea of twenty-four-hour news soon began to develop their own competing cable news channels, such as MSNBC and Fox News.

Rancher and philanthropist

Turner continued expanding his media empire throughout the 1980s. In 1986, following a failed attempt to buy the CBS broadcast network, Turner made a $1.5 billion deal to buy the Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) and United Artists film studios. These purchases gave him access to huge film libraries, which he used to provide programming for his cable TV networks. In 1988 Turner launched a new cable channel called Turner Network Television (TNT), and in 1994 he added Turner Classic Movies (TCM) to showcase the MGM films. Deciding that modern audiences did not like to watch black-and-white movies, he began the process of colorizing (using computerized methods to add color) many of the older films he had bought. Classic film lovers were horrified by the practice, but many viewers enjoyed the colorized films. In 1991, Turner bought a library of classic cartoons from the legendary animation studio Hanna Barbera, and the following year he introduced the Cartoon Network in order to present these programs.

During this time, Turner began seeing a mental health professional who diagnosed him with manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder. People who have this condition suffer severe mood swings, with periods of high energy and extreme happiness alternating with periods of deep depression. A doctor prescribed the drug lithium to help Turner control his mood swings. After divorcing his second wife in 1988, Turner married actress Jane Fonda in 1991. During this marriage, Turner became more relaxed and developed closer relationships with his children. He eventually was able to stop taking lithium. Although he and Fonda divorced in 2001, they remained friends afterward.

In 1995, Turner Broadcasting merged with the giant media company Time Warner. While Turner retained some influence over the operation of the business he created, he found it difficult to no longer be the boss. Time Warner's management had little patience with Turner's strict style of leadership or his often embarrassing public displays of temper. When Time Warner merged with the large Internet company America Online (AOL) in 2001, Turner found himself with almost no power. He stepped down from his position as vice chairman of the Time Warner board of directors in 2003, and in 2006 he left the company entirely.

At first Turner was angry about losing control of the company he had built. But he soon turned his attention to other interests. For instance, he became the largest individual landowner in the United States, with more than 200 million acres of land in several western states. Since he was always an avid outdoorsman, Turner's lifelong love of fishing and hunting led him to become an active environmentalist. To help preserve the American bison from extinction, he developed the largest private herd in the world, with more than 40,000 animals. He also started a national chain of restaurants, Ted's Montana Grill, which featured buffalo meat specialties.

Moreover, Turner dedicated his time and money to various charitable causes. He eventually became known as one of the world's leading philanthropists (people who support charities) and publicly challenged other billionaires to follow his example. From 1985 until 1991, Turner operated the Better World Society, which promoted environmental education by making documentary films on subjects such as world hunger and pollution. In 1989 he established the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Awards to honor writers whose works offered solutions to important world problems. To administer his vast contributions, he created the Turner Foundation in 1990.

In 1997 Turner was honored by the United Nations (UN) for his humanitarian work. That year, in an unprecedented gesture, he donated one billion dollars—a third of his personal fortune—to the UN to help provide food, medicine, and other aid to needy people. In 2000 he contributed $35 million of his own money to help settle a dispute between the UN and the United States.

In Ken Auletta's 2004 biography Media Man, Turner summed up his remarkable career in typically folksy fashion. Comparing himself to "a rabbit that's small and fast," he noted that "all my big competitors were like a pack of wolves, and they were all chasing me, but I was fast enough to be out in front of them."

For More Information

BOOKS

Auletta, Ken. Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbable Empire. New York: Norton, 2004.

Bibb, Porter. It Ain't as Easy as It Looks: Ted Turner's Amazing Story. New York: Crown, 1993.

Goldberg, Robert, and Gerald Jay Goldberg. Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.

Klein, Alec. Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.

Stark, Steven. Glued to the Set. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Williams, Christian. Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way: The Story of Ted Turner. New York: Times Books, 1981.

PERIODICALS

Auletta, Ken. "The Lost Tycoon." New Yorker, April 23, 2001.

Henry, William A. III. "History as It Happens." Time, January 6, 1992.

Lewis, Mark. "Levin's Legacy at AOL Time Warner." Forbes, May 17, 2002.

Painton, Priscilla. "The Taming of Ted Turner." Time, January 6, 1992.

"Ted Turner." Current Biography, June 1998.

Waters, Harry F. "Ted Turner Tackles TV News." Newsweek, June 16, 1980.

WEB SITES

"CNN." Bookrags. http://www.bookrags.com/history/popculture/cnn-bbbb-05/ (accessed on May 24, 2006).

McLeland, Susan. "Ted Turner." Museum of Broadcast Communications. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/T/htmlT/turnerted/turnerted.htm (accessed on May 24, 2006).

Seel, Peter B. "Gerald Levin." Museum of Broadcast Communications. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/L/levingerald/levingerald.htm (accessed on June 19, 2006).

"Ted Turner: Young Rebel in Business." Reference for Business. http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/businesses/A-F/Turner-Ted.html (accessed on May 24, 2006).