Ted Turner Dies at 87: CNN Founder, TBS Pioneer, and Media Mogul Leaves Historic Legacy

Ted Turner died yesterday. And, you know, it’s interesting, right? Like I am reaching the age where people from my childhood are passing away more and more frequently. And some of them it’s like, oh, man, you know, you hate to hear that. And some of them are like, oh, I remember that guy or that girl. And then some of them are like, this feels really big. Like this feels like a really big deal. Like I felt that way last year when Hulk Hogan passed away. Hence the Hogan figurine on the desk here. But I think a lot of people, and I was watching the Hogan documentary on Netflix, if you guys haven’t seen it yet, it’s pretty well done. If you’re a big time wrestling fan, you’re not going to learn anything new. But if you’re just a casual person who knew of Hulk Hogan, the life of Hulk Hogan, you know, maybe in the 80s, you watched wrestling or 90s a little bit, you’ll enjoy it. It’s well done. He’s in it. The interviews are recorded right before he died. You enjoy it. Like I felt that way when Hogan died. It was like, damn, this feels like a really big deal. Not a big deal like, oh, a head of state or the Pope or whoever had passed away, but a big deal like this guy was a big deal and really influenced a lot of stuff and a lot of people.

Ted Turner’s Death Marks the End of a Major Era in American Media

And I felt that way yesterday when I saw the news, Ted Turner died. So Ted Turner was 87 years old, and he had been ill for quite a while. Most people knew this. He had not made public appearances in years. He had what is known as Lewy Body Dementia, and that is a progressive neurological disorder. It’s very similar to like sort of Parkinson’s, and it just over time, it just swallows you up. It’s a horrible thing to have. And he had not been seen publicly in a very long time. But, you know, I got to thinking back about Ted Turner and then reading some of the stuff on him. I think you can make a case Ted Turner is a Mount Rushmore type of person in terms of most interesting Americans who ever lived. Like the life of Ted Turner is fascinating because of all of the areas that he played in, so many different sandboxes. He was successful at so many different things. He had huge influence in so many different areas of American society. When you think about the 70s and 80s and into the 90s until Time Warner took over Turner. By the way, Turner got 6.3 billion in stock from the 1996 purchase of Time Warner, and then they made a gazillion dollars on the AOL Time Warner merger. We joke about how our buddy Rust is silly rich. Ha ha, Ted Turner, you want to see really rich? Oh my gosh.

How Ted Turner Built a Media Empire Through TBS, CNN, and Cable Television

So like, I’m reading about a bunch of the stuff with Turner and there was some stuff obviously that I knew and then stuff I didn’t know. So listen to like the arc of Turner’s life, right? This is amazing. And I’m not sure you could recreate this today because the media landscape is so different, but he essentially sort of took over his, he had a very small family media business in 1970, and he started it basically by buying a couple of television stations, one in Atlanta, Georgia, and one in Charlotte, North Carolina. And he was so good at television management and ownership that by 1976, he launched TBS. And most of you hear my voice. You know this because you’re old enough to remember cable television. That was the deal. You’re old enough to remember cable when there weren’t 9 million channels. Like you had like 50 on your cable package. TBS in the 80s and the 90s, it was the original superstation. It was sort of the original cable channel. It was the original thing that was broadcast across the continental United States in the 1980s and 90s. TBS, the Turner Broadcasting Station.

TBS, the Atlanta Braves, and the Rise of Cable Sports Broadcasting

TBS was a massive deal, and like it was getting all the feels as I’m thinking back because I remember as a kid, every day, especially summers, they were all the same. You would tape Chicago Cubs television on WGN, Chicago Cubs games because Chicago Cubs, not true anymore, but they had very few night games. In fact, until 1988, they didn’t have any night games. But when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, they had very few night games, handful a year. And so most of the Cubs games would start, especially home games, at 1:20. And that was back, remember when you had the time change, when the times would change, and so Chicago, Illinois was on the same time as us for a while, and then it wasn’t, and that was like a big, you had to set your VCR. You guys remember the tapes. And I remember every day. Every day. My father, God love my father, God bless him, he’s still alive. I’m not saying like he’s departed, but I just, I remember my dad. Yeah, Dad, we love you. You’re awesome. Every day I remember my father with a very stern warning before he would leave the house to go to work. And I guess he was probably stern because he was anticipating the day of having to deal with nothing but dangerous criminals all day. So there was. What did he have to look forward to? Maybe I’ll put some guy back in the federal pen. But I remember the very stern warning every day because the Cubs game would start at 1:20, which meant it would not end until like 4:30 or later, depending on how late the game went. And so I would be home from school at like, you know, 3:15, and so I remember very stern warning from my dad, do not touch that television until I get home. Very stern warning because you had to tape the game. And if you risked messing with the TV, remember you had the TV, you had a VCR and it was plugged in the back of the TV, and we called it the timer, right? You time the tape and occasionally if you did something with the TV, you’d mess with the tape. And if you messed with the tape, if the final pitch of that Cubs game was not on that tape and the 10th Inning Show, I was in big trouble. There was no television for me. There was only Nintendo until my old man got home from work. And I just think about this. I just remember that you would watch that, you would get home, you would play your Nintendo, you do your stuff, you get your homework done, and then you’d eat dinner, and then you’d watch the Cubs game and you could time it up perfect. The Cubs were on WGN because you could fast forward through the commercials. You could get done with the Cubs game in time for the Atlanta Braves to start on TBS at 7:05. So literally, and one of the things my mother did that was great, and I look back on it now and I didn’t appreciate it, always get your homework done as soon as you get home from school. Don’t screw around, Robert Kendall, because you’re not going to watch any baseball until that homework’s done. And so you get your homework done. And then if you had your homework done by like, say four, you knew it was just euphoria. It was the greatest thing ever because you had like six hours of baseball to watch.

From CNN to WCW: Ted Turner’s Influence Extended Across Television and Sports

And TBS was such a part of that. And that was at the height of my childhood, was the height of the Atlanta Braves, right? Maddux and Glavine and Smoltz and all of those guys. And that was Ted Turner. Ted Turner owned the Atlanta Braves. That’s why they were on TBS. You know, TBS, he owned the Braves. He put them together. He owned the Atlanta Hawks. Then with the success of TBS, he founded CNN, the original cable news network. CNN has become such a joke, you know, over the past, what, decade and a half as it’s gone totally left. But there was a time in the 80s, the 90s, early 2000, CNN, until the rise of Fox News, was it. CNN was it. I don’t know why I keep saying CBS. I don’t know. I think of TBS. CNN was it. That was Ted Turner. He founded TNT. TNT was and is still a massive presence on the cable channels. He founded that in 1988. And thinking about all this, the other thing about TBS, World Championship Wrestling, baby. The home was TBS and TNT because Ted Turner owned World Championship Wrestling. And World Championship Wrestling for a period of time in the 90s was the only viable competitor World Wrestling Federation ever had. That was a massive deal. They were beating the pants off Vince McMahon in the late 90s with Hulk Hogan and all of those guys. Ted Turner was good at everything he did, including professional wrestling. I mean, this is amazing. Everything for a period of time, everything Ted Turner touched turned to gold.