Ted Turner: 1938-2026: The Mouth of the South Clams Up at Last
One of the biggest names in news has gone silent. So has one of the biggest mouths on Earth, as I can attest.
Cable News Network founder Ted Turner passed away Wednesday in Florida, at age 87. Doctors diagnosed him in 2018 with Lewy body dementia, a degenerative neurological disease.
Long before Fox News Channel or MSNBC/MS Now, CNN became Earth’s first 24-hour TV news service on June 1, 1980. The Big Three broadcast networks’ evening news programs — “at the dinner hour,” as the family-friendly expression went — soon had competition, not just during those 30 minutes, but around the clock. The news cycle went from hunting and gathering stories all morning and afternoon and reporting them at sundown to presenting every day’s events live — 24/7/365.
Turner peered at me in amazement and said, “Wow! They let blacks into this place now?”
CNN’s high-water mark was its breaking news in January 1991. Viewers worldwide listened as anchor Bernard Shaw and foreign correspondents Peter Arnett and John Holliman hunkered down in a Baghdad hotel room and described in living color the sights and sounds of Gulf War I: U.S. forces attacked Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded Kuwait. Daddy Bush never finished the job; he bequeathed Hussein’s ultimate downfall to Baby Bush. But Turner and CNN triumphed back then with their riveting, revolutionary television coverage.
It’s hard to watch CNN’s non-stop anti-Trump rage today and imagine that it once was a serious, balanced, respectable news organization. How the mighty have fallen.
Ted Turner deserves applause for launching and guiding CNN as well as Turner Classic Movies, TNT, TBS, the Cartoon Network, the Atlanta Braves, and much more beneath the umbrella of Turner Enterprises, Inc.
Turner was an accomplished sailor. He captured the America’s Cup in 1977, while skipper of Courageous. He and his team took one of four championship races two minutes and 23 seconds ahead of the second-place vessel.
#RIP #TedTurner#Legend #Trailblazer #Pioneer pic.twitter.com/Ysx94qp8G4
— X – The Original DINOCOSTA (@ThisIsDINOCOSTA) May 6, 2026
Turner is associated with a musical genre known as Yacht Rock. Here is one definition of this style: It’s 1978. “Imagine yourself aboard a yacht with your close friend Ted Turner enjoying a fine Chardonnay and fresh shrimp cocktail, savoring the smooth sounds of FM gold produced by some of the finest musicians that southern California has to offer,” said Peter Olson, percussionist/vocalist and guitarist with the exceptional Yacht Rock Revue (based in Turner’s beloved Atlanta). “I think you understand now.”
Turner also distinguished himself in the mid-2000s as America’s No. 1 property owner. (He eventually slid to No. 4, according to The Land Report.) Like a medieval baron, Turner lorded over two million private acres across six states. This included 13 ranches in Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, and South Dakota (home to 45,000 bison) and his 29,000-acre Avalon Plantation in Lamont, Florida, where he spent his final days.
In 2006, the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, showed a posse of visiting journalists how distinctly government and individuals husband their holdings.
“In the Gallatin National Forest, pine trees and Douglas firs crowd together like rush-hour subway commuters,” I wrote, soon after inspecting that scene on horseback. “One well-placed lightning bolt could turn this overgrown hillside into a furnace.”
Things looked far different, where Turner was in charge: “Compare this neglected patch of the federal property portfolio to the practically groomed habitat at CNN founder Ted Turner’s 175-square-mile Flying D Ranch, about 50 miles away. Young and old members of assorted arboreal species stand comfortably apart from each other, minimizing fire risk.” Indeed, Turner’s spaced-out trees tend to thrive, even as Uncle Sam’s tightly packed forests go up in smoke, with depressing regularity.
Ever colorful, Turner famously was married to far-Left actress Jane Fonda, his third of three wives, between 1991 and their 2001 divorce — also his third of three.
And, speaking of color, Turner absorbed abundant incoming when he took selected black-and-white films from MGM’s 2,200-title library, which he purchased in 1986, colorized them, and then broadcast the newly tinted pictures. Many considered this gauche, if not a frontal assault on these cultural treasures.
“Keep Ted Turner and his crayons away from my movies,” pleaded Citizen Kane’s director Orson Welles. Turner spared Welles’ 1941 masterpiece, although not all of his films were so lucky.
“I took art in school,” Turner berated his critics, “and I’m a painter myself. I think the movies look better in color, pal, and they’re my movies. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Picasso doesn’t do squat for me. I wouldn’t put a Picasso in my bird cage.”
Turner’s interest in color seemed to go beyond black-and-white motion pictures, to human beings. Whatever he might have thought about pigment in public policy, he was keenly aware of melanin, at least when I met the man.
In late summer/early fall 2005, I attended an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in Manhattan. Among the national-security scholars, retired diplomats, and well-traveled journalists in the CFR’s posh Upper East Side headquarters, who stood right in front of me but Ted Turner! Thrilled at the chance to meet this media legend, I approached him to introduce myself.
Before I could congratulate him on building his communications empire or ask him about the ever-changing world of TV news, Turner peered at me in amazement and said, “Wow! They let blacks into this place now?”
Buffaloed by this comment, I had no time to reply before he scanned the mainly white crowd. Just days after a massive hurricane devastated New Orleans, Turner said: “Look at this place. It’s like Katrina in reverse!”
This was a special occasion: I was rendered speechless.
No wonder they called the late, great, and highly outspoken Robert Edward Turner III “The Mouth of the South.”
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Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor.