You must give to a man who announced several days before the opening of his signature project – Cable News Network (CNN), the project that changed the landscape of journalism forever by launching the era of 24-hours live news coverage on 1st June 1980:
‘We’ll play the National Anthem only one time, on the first of June, and when the end of the world comes, we’ll play ‘Nearer my God, to Thee’ before we sign off…’
He was not bluffing. CNN indeed played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on the first of June 1980, as it commenced broadcasting from its Atlanta Studio.
And CNN indeed had a video with a military band playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, with a tag that read ‘Hold for Release till the end of the world is confirmed’.
Thankfully that end is yet to be confirmed, and the world has, so far, been spared the dubious pleasure of hearing that solemn recording on CNN.
One rival and ‘frenemy’ who followed Turner’s footsteps and started the next 24-hour television news service beaming to the world was Rupert Murdoch, the Australian American media potentate and founder of Sky News and Fox News. What is less well-known is the fact that Ted Turner twice challenged Rupert Murdoch to a fistfight, which Murdoch, of course, declined.
They never really liked each other. Murdoch’s creation, Fox News, founded in 2016, has become the ideological and cultural opposite to CNN, and the home, platform and mouthpiece, not just of the mainstream Right Wing in the USA, but of a more contentious and virulent movement that is shaking up American society and attacking its institutions, namely Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement.
Another interesting bit of the jigsaw puzzle is that Ted Turner started life as a registered Republican, despite his latter-day liberal inclinations.
Ted Turner was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. After his family moved to Georgia, he attended a private boys’ school, from where he proceeded to Brown University. Apparently, he did not make up his mind on what he wanted to study until he was already on the campus. When he eventually wrote to inform his father that he had decided to major in Classics, his father replied that he was ‘appalled and horrified’. Later, he changed his course of study to Economics. However, before he could graduate, he was expelled from the University for ‘camping’ a female student in his room.
Unfazed by this disgraceful experience, he embarked on a swashbuckling, larger than life career that bestrode such disparate pursuits as sailing, ranching, baseball, ice hockey, and broadcasting, in every area achieving landmark success as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
At barely twenty-five years, he took over his father’s billboard business, after his father committed suicide, making it immediately into a more bankable proposition. This enabled him to buy some radio stations, which he sold in short order to purchase a struggling television station in Atlanta. He also bought two baseball teams, whose matches were broadcast to a wide audience through his television station. He began to use satellite to transmit content from his television station, which was now effectively a ‘Super Station’, to local cable television stations across the USA. His viewership figures skyrocketed, as did his advertisement revenue and personal wealth. Other ventures followed. Success seemed to attend even the brashest of his moves. He won the America’s cup in Sailing. He bought vast tracts of land to pursue his interest in the preserving the environment and raising and preserving the iconic American ‘buffalo’, the bison.
In 1979 he sold off his television station to actualise his ‘mad’ CNN dream, which all the experts had told him could never work.
On the first of June 1980, CNN began to broadcast news, in real time, to all the corners of the world. It has not stopped for a minute since then.
In a recent interview with one of the many journalistic superstars spawned by CNN, Christiane Amanpour, Turner disclosed that he himself did not know where the money was going to come from at the beginning, as he did not have enough money to run CNN for long. CNN did not become financially self-sustaining until after ten years of operation.
It is now routine for people to broadcast from everywhere, even in the middle of a war or a coup, or an earthquake. The vista of Bernard Shaw, risking imminent death, broadcasting live from the Iraq War, saying ‘The skies over Baghdad are being illuminated’, even as American cruise missiles were flying by outside the window near him, just to bring the news to the world, brought about a redefinition of the duty of a journalist to get the news at whatever cost, an implication already embedded in Ted Turner’s revolutionary decision to make the technology and structure available in CNN.
There have been a whole shebang of twists and turns to the Turner story since. He married three wives serially and is survived by five children. It is on record that he took Lithium, which suggests he at some point lived with Bipolar Affective Disorder. In his last years, he lived also with Lewy Body dementia, as announced by himself.
He was an atheist, presumably the reason why his last wife, activist actress Jane Fonda, who found Christianity late in life, left him. But he admitted he ‘began to pray’ in his last years.
A humane man who cared deeply about human beings and the environment, he donated one billion dollars to the United Nations for a Foundation, and bankrolled the Goodwill Games to foster world peace.
He was not always right, not always consistent in his logic, but he never lacked the courage of his convictions.
Robert Edward Turner III has been one of the most impactful men on earth in the past century. May his feisty soul rest in peace, at last.
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