By Wikipedia

Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III is a media mogul and philanthropist. He is best known for founding TBS and CNN, and his $1 billion pledge to the United Nations donated through his United Nations Foundation. Turner's penchant for making controversial statements has earned him the nickname "The Mouth of the South."

Turner's media empire began with his father's billboard business which he took over at the age of 24 after his father's suicide. The billboard business, Turner Outdoor Advertising, was worth approximately one million dollars when Turner took it over in 1963. Purchase of an Atlanta UHF station in 1970 began the assemblage of the Turner Broadcasting System. His Cable News Network revolutionized news media, coming to the fore covering the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Turner was also in the news for his much publicized marriage to Jane Fonda as well as their subsequent divorce.

Life

Turner was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. When he was nine years old, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia. He attended the McCallie School, an unaffiliated Christian prep school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Colorful episodes from his life include being expelled from Brown University for having a female visitor in his room in 1960. At the university, Turner was an unspectacular student in class, though he was vice-president of the Brown Debating Union.

Ted Turner began sailing when he was nine years old. He entered competition when he was eleven in the junior program at the Savannah Yacht Club, and went on to compete in the Olympic trials in 1964. In the 1970s, Turner's sailboat racing ventures included the America's Cup. In 1977, he skippered the winning yacht, Courageous, and attracted publicity for showing up at the post-race press conference drunk.

WTBS/Braves/CNN

Turner's broadcast empire began with WJRJ, a UHF station transmitting on Channel 17 in Atlanta, Georgia that Turner bought in 1970. On December 17, 1976, the renamed WTCG (for Turner Communications Group) began broadcasting to a satellite that rebroadcast it to four cable systems. The channel grew to become a basic cable staple, and was renamed WTBS (for Turner Broadcasting System) in 1979. From 1981-1997 WTBS broadcast its shows beginning five minutes after the hour and half-hour, encouraging channel-surfers and gaining its own time entry in television listings. Much like fellow "Superstation" WGN-TV, WTBS gave national broadcast to a Major League Baseball team-- the Atlanta Braves, which was not coincidentally owned by Turner. In fact, he had bought the broadcasting rights to Braves games three years before he bought the team and only did so when the owners of the team seemed poised to move the team and leave his fledgling cable station without any original programming. A separate TBS cable channel was instituted when WTBS abandoned its Superstation status; however, as of 2006, TBS and WTBS do still offer similar, but not identical, broadcasts.

In 1980 Turner began broadcasting CNN, the first 24-hour cable news channel. CNN was followed by CNN Headline News in 1982.

He purchased the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks in 1976 from a group of Chicago-based owners for a reported $10 million. His relationship with the Braves was somewhat peculiar before the team's success in the 1990s; Turner was one of the more hands-on owners in baseball history, at one point going as far as to give the team's regular manager the day off so Turner could manage. It was against Major League rules for a manager to have even a small interest in the club and he was fined and warned about every trying a stunt like that again. About this experience, he famously said, "Managing isn't that difficult, you just have to score more runs than the other guy". Turner Field, which was first used for the 1996 Summer Olympics as Centennial Olympic Stadium and then converted into a baseball-only facility for the Braves shortly thereafter, is named after him.

After a failed attempt to acquire CBS, Ted Turner purchased the legendary but struggling Hollywood Film Studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) from Kirk Kerkorian in 1986 for $1.5 Billion.

Following the acquisition, Ted Turner assumed an enormous debt and had no other choice but to sell parts of the acquisition. United Artists and the MGM "Leo the Lion" Trademark logo were sold back to Kirk Kerkorian. The MGM Studio lot in Culver City was sold to Lorimar/Telepictures. Turner kept MGM's pre-1986 and pre-merger film and TV library, which included nearly all of MGM's material made before the merger, and a small portion of United Artists's film and TV properties (which included very few UA pictures, the TV series Gilligan's Island, the RKO Radio Pictures library, and the pre-1948 Warner Bros. library that was once the property of Associated Artists Productions, UA Television's predecessor company).

Turner used these assets to begin adding new cable channels. In 1988, he introduced Turner Network Television (abbreviated TNT) with a broadcast of Gone with the Wind. TNT was, at least initially, a vehicle for older movies and television shows, but slowly began to add original programming and newer reruns. Since its launch in 1994, Turner Classic Movies adopted the role of broadcasting the older Warner Brothers, RKO, and MGM libraries. As with the original TBS, TNT used sports broadcasts to attract a broader audience; in the latter case, signing contracts with NASCAR and the NBA.

In 1992 the MGM library, which as noted above included a number of Warner Brothers properties, including the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies libraries became the core of Cartoon Network. Turner's companies had also purchased Hanna-Barbera Productions (presently known as Cartoon Network Studios) by this time, further adding content. With the 1996 Warner Bros. merger, the channel had a staggering collection of cartoons in its archive.

In the mid-80s, Turner became a driving force for the colorization of black and white films. In 1985, the film Yankee Doodle Dandy became the first black and white movie to be redistributed in color thanks to computer colorization. Despite widespread opposition to the practice by many film aficionados, stars and directors, the movie won over a sizeable section of the public on its re-release, and Turner would soon colorize a majority of films that he had owned. However, in the mid-90s, the high cost of the process led Turner to abandon the idea of colorizing films. In contrast with TNT, TCM has shown the unaltered versions of films.

Turner Entertainment Co. was established in August 1986 to oversee the entire film properties owned by Ted Turner.

Through Turner Enterprises, he owns 14 ranches in Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma and South Dakota. According to his Ted's Montana Grill website, "Turner Enterprises' mission is to manage Turner lands in an economically sustainable and ecologically sensitive manner, while conserving native species."

In 1988, Turner purchased World Championship Wrestling. In 2001, under AOL Time Warner control, it was sold to the competing World Wrestling Federation.

In 1989, Ted Turner created the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship to be awarded to a work of fiction offering positive solutions to global problems. The winner, chosen from 2500 entries worldwide, was Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. He founded the Turner Foundation in 1990.

In 1990 Turner created the character Captain Planet, an environmental superhero. Turner produced two TV series with him as the featured character.

He appeared in the 1993 epic Gettysburg, as a colonel in the Confederate army.

On September 22, 1995, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. announced plans to merge with Time Warner Inc. This merger completed on October 10, 1996, with Turner as vice chairman, head of Time Warner's cable networks division. On January 10, 2000, Time Warner announced plans to merge with AOL as AOL Time Warner. This merger closed January 11, 2001.

In February 2002, at a speech in Rhode Island, Turned said, "I think they were brave," in reference to the 19 men involved in the September 11th terrorist acts. He then added that they "might have been a little nuts." These statements caused great controversy, and Turner later said that they were "reported out of context, and I deeply regret any pain they may have caused".

On January 29, 2003, AOL Time Warner announced that Ted Turner would resign as a vice chairman. On February 24, 2006, Turner announced that he would not seek re-election as director on the AOL Time Warner board of directors.

Achievements

He is America's largest private landowner, owning approximately two million acres (8,000 km²), which is greater than the land areas of the two smallest states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. According to documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, Turner's land has a higher gross domestic product than the country of Belize. He also has the largest private bison herd in the world, with 40,000 head. In 2002, Turner co-founded Ted's Montana Grill, a restaurant chain specializing in burgers made from fresh ground bison meat. In addition, Ted Turner is the founder of Cartoon Network.

After the American-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, Turner founded the Goodwill Games as a statement for peace through sport.

In 1998, Turner gave $1 billion in Time Warner stock to United Nations causes, founding the United Nations Foundation.

Quotes

• "I'd rather go to hell. Heaven has got to be boring."
• "If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect."

Bibliography

• Racing Edge by Ted Turner (Simon & Schuster, 1979)

• Biographies
  • Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbable Empire by Ken Auletta (W. W. Norton, 2004)
  • Clash of the Titans: How the Unbridled Ambition of Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch Has Created Global Empires that Control What We Read and Watch Each Day by Richard Hack (New Millennium Press, 2003)
  • Me and Ted Against the World: The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN by Reese Schonfeld (HarperBusiness, 2001)
  • Ted Turner Speaks: Insights from the World's Greatest Maverick by Janet Lowe (Wiley, 1999)
  • Riding A White Horse: Ted Turner's Goodwill Games and Other Crusades by Althea Carlson (Episcopal Press, 1998)
  • Ted Turner: It Ain't As Easy as It Looks: The Amazing Story of CNN by Porter Bibb (Virgin Books, 1996)
  • CNN: The Inside Story: How a Band of Mavericks Changed the Face of Television News by Hank Whittemore (Little Brown & Co, 1990)
  • Lead Follow or Get Out of the Way: The Story of Ted Turner by Christian Williams (Times Books, 1981)

Baseball Executive References