Ted Turner

Ted Turner

Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III (born November 19, 1938) is an American 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 forefront 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. Turner attended Brown University and although an unspectacular student in class, he was vice-president of the Brown Debating Union. In an early episode illustrating his notoriously colorful personality and outspoken nature, Turner was expelled from Brown in 1960 for having an unauthorized female visitor in his dormitory room.

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.

Turner's broadcast empire began modestly when he inherited his father's bankrupt billboard advertising company. Soon afterwards, he purchased 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 coincidentally owned by Turner. 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. During the early days of CNN, Turner resided in a penthouse apartment in CNN Center, and he would occaisionally wander down from his apartment into the halls of the CNN broadcast studio barefoot wearing only a bathrobe to check on the operation [1].He purchased the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks in 1976 and created the Goodwill Games in 1986. 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. 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 legendarybut struggling Hollywood film studio MGM/UA Entertainment Co. fromKirk Kerkorian in 1986 for $1.5 Billion.

Following the acquisition, Ted Turner assumed an enormous debt and had no otherchoice but to sell parts of the acquisition. MGM/UA Entertainment Co. was sold back to Kirk Kerkorian. The MGM/UA Studiolot in Culver City was sold to Lorimar/Telepictures. Turner kept MGM/UA's pre-1986 andpre-merger film and TV library, which included nearly all of MGM/UA'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 Bros., RKO, and MGM libraries. As with the original TBS, TNT used sports broadcasts to attract a broader audience; in the latter case, sigining 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 [2], 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, which he produced, as Colonel Waller T Patton, a role he reprised in the 2003 prequel Gods and Generals, also produceed by Turner.

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.

Ted Turner has often been criticized for anti-Christian or anti-Catholic remarks, most recently in 2001 when he called a Catholic woman a 'Jesus freak' for wearing ashes on her forehead in commemoration of Ash Wednesday. [3]

In February 2002, at a speech in Rhode Island, Turner 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". [4]

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 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.

Under his ownership, World Championship Wrestling became the only federation in history to outrate and outsell the McMahon family and their World Wrestling Federation.

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. However, the details of how funds are allocated are generally less well known. Human rights scholar Mary Ann Glendon has noted that "Mr. Turner's gesture looks less like a gift and more like a take-over bid aimed at U.N. agencies with privileged access to vulnerable populations." United Nations agencies would be required to submit proposals to the UN Foundation. The foundation was to be headed by a man with views similar to Mr. Turner's, former U.S. State Department official Timothy Wirth. Wirth spearheaded the aggressive U.S. population control agenda at the 1994 Cairo conference and has praised China and its coercive one-child policy for its "very, very effective high-investment family planning." (See "Unfinished Business" by Mary Ann Glendon in The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 1999.)

Quotes

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

Trivia

* The character of Duke Phillips on the animated series The Critic is based on him.
* The character of Ash Dashley in the comic strip Bloom County is loosely based on Turner as well.
* The character of Avery Carrington in the Playstation 2 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City bears a striking resemblence of him. He is also a real estate tycoon in the game.
* Has been frequently lampooned on the television program Family Guy, being portrayed as a child-like, mentally challenged individual who is a frequent Bridge partner of Bill Gates. For example, in the Family Guy Episode Screwed the Pooch, it is revealed at the end of the episode that he had sex with and impregnated a racedog.
*Ted Turner has also been parodied on the Adult Swim show, Robot Chicken as Captain Planet. Ted (Captain Planet) is trying to stop Pan-Global Oil from spilling sludge in the Atlantic Ocean, all while screaming 'CAPTAIN PLANET