Whenever cable TV entrepreneur Ted Turner would see my name badge reading “Cincinnati Enquirer” at TV critics’ press tour events in Los Angeles, he’d instantly be transported to his Cincinnati childhood.
“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” he would shout, as he did selling the Enquirer on a street corner near the Cincinnati Zoo. “I got my start selling the Enquirer on a streetcar stop when I was eight years old. It cost a nickel.”
Soon after that, Robert Edward “Ted” Turner III — who died Wednesday, May 6, at age 87 — moved with his parents to Georgia, where he started his TV empire in 1970.
The outspoken media maverick never forgot his roots. When we chatted in the 1980s and ‘90s, he fondly recalled living at 711 Gholson Avenue in Avondale and visiting the Cincinnati Zoo.
“Of all the things I enjoyed in Cincinnati, while growing up here, the zoo was probably No. 1,” he told me in 1988 while here for the Cincinnati Bicentennial celebration. He was impressed to be invited home to the black-tie "Salute To Our Stars" gala at the convention center at that time, which he attended with his mother, Florence Rooney Turner Carter.
“To be included with Oscar Robertson, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Roy Rogers — that’s a big deal,” he said.
From billboards to media mogul
Turner was a big deal, too.
He took over his father’s billboard company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, in 1963 at age 24 after his father died. In 1970, he purchased Atlanta’s Channel 17, an independent UHF station. Six years later he originated the “superstation” concept, transmitting the WTBS signal to cable systems nationwide by satellite.
On June 1, 1980, Turner launched the Cable News Network — or CNN — the world’s first live, around-the-clock, all-news network which created the 24-hour news cycle (16 years before the Fox News Channel premiered).
Some critics were not impressed, derisively calling it the "Chicken Noodle News." Main anchorman Bernard Shaw told me he had trouble getting into the 1980 Republican Convention in Detroit the next month because security officers had not heard of CNN.
Two years later, he debuted CNN Headline News, a 24-hour, constantly updated and highly visual half-hour newscast on Jan. 1, 1982. Legendary WCPO-TV anchorman Al Schottelkotte said he was stunned to attend a “CNN2” preview at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters and hear that “it was patterned after the Al Schottelkotte News in Cincinnati. I nearly fell out of my chair,” Schottelkotte once told me.
CNN International premiered in 1985. After that came the Cartoon Network, CNN Airport Network, Turner Classic Movies, TNT (Turner Network Television), CNN Radio, Turner Sports and Sportsouth (which carried Turner’s Atlanta Braves baseball and Atlanta Hawks basketball games).
Everyone knew about CNN in 1991, when Shaw, Peter Arnett and John Holliman reported live from Baghdad in the Gulf War known as “Desert Storm.”
Turner had tried to buy CBS for $3 billion in 1985, but couldn’t. He joked with TV writers after a 1995 press conference that his epitaph would be, “He never got a major network.” The next year, he sold the Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner for $7 billion.
'Captain Outrageous'
Like Pete Rose, baseball’s Hit King, Turner could fill a reporter’s notebook with brash, outlandish comments that earned him the nickname, “Captain Outrageous.”
- Before TBS aired Abortion: For Survival in 1989 he called pro-life advocates “bozos” and “idiots.”
- Also at that same Los Angeles press conference he blasted the four major broadcast networks’ “sleazy, rotten, violent programming,” contending that was “the reason the murder rate is up 24 percent in the last 25 years.”
- After paying $1.5 billion to buy 3,000 movies from MGM in 1985, he colorized Casablanca and many other black-and-white classics. When confronted by some unhappy TV critics in 1988, Turner said: “Give me a break! Why can’t I color my own property? I ain’t telling you what color to paint your house! . . . I did it because I wanted to do it! It’s mine! I did it because I love these movies. I had to sell half my company to own these movies. Casablanca didn’t have to be colorized, there’s no question about it. But I did because I wanted to.”
- At a 1992 press conference with TV writers he boasted that he had been encouraged by people to run for U.S. president. “I thought about it some,” he admitted. But actor/activist Jane Fonda, his wife at the time, objected. “I’ve got a job now. I’m president here (at Turner Broadcasting), not vice president. Somebody said, ‘Why don’t you run for president?’ And I said: I already am.”
His media empire grew with the acquisitions of New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment, which would produce Seinfeld, When Harry Met Sally and The Shawshank Redemption. He bought Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, a longtime property of Cincinnati’s Taft Broadcasting, before he debuted Cartoon Network in 1992. He also created the Goodwill Games, an international Olympics-like sports competition in 1986, after boycotts for the 1980 Olympics (by the U.S.) and 1984 Olympics (by the Soviet Union).
The globalist and environmentalist also created the Captain Planet and the Planeteers cartoon series in 1990, and funded multiple TV specials featuring oceanographer Jacques Cousteau’s expeditions. When asked in 1995 what worried him the most, he told TV writers: “I care most about the future of the human race and the planet. Part of it comes from Captain Cousteau.”
And part of it came from the Cincinnati Zoo.
“Not only did I go to the zoo and look at the animals, but I read a lot of books about the environment and the natural world. I learned at an early age that there already had been a number of species that had become extinct. That very much concerned me, because I’d never get a chance to see them, except in picture books,” he said.
Turner was a frequent visitor to his hometown, even after his mother died on Jan. 4, 1992. After the 1988 Cincinnati bicentennial bash, he skipped Marge Schott’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game party at the Cincinnati Zoo that was being televised on TBS because “I’m going to watch it on TV. I’m in the TV business,” he told me.
The University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music presented Turner the Fredric W. Ziv Award for outstanding achievement in telecommunications in 1997. He returned in 1999 to speak at the Cincinnati Zoo’s Barrows Conservation Lecture series at Rockdale Temple.
Turner has not been seen in public in recent years. In 2018, before his 80th birthday, it was announced he had dementia.
When Turner mimicked being an Enquirer newsboy, he told me that he “wanted to be a publisher” as a kid selling newspapers in 1946-47, after World War II and before the arrival of Cincinnati commercial television in 1948.
“A publisher, that’s right. That was before television. Then I decided I’d be a TV man,” he said.
Ted Turner was a revolutionary TV man. He never got a major TV network, but he changed the world with CNN’s 24-hour-news cycle, and his passion for peace and the planet.
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