Ted Turner, the man who invented the 24-hour news channel, could have been a dictator, or a “not nice guy”, Jane Fonda, his former wife and the love of his life, said of him soon after he died aged 87 on May 6.
Turner grew up on a Montana farm with a father who beat him with a wire coat hanger. He was packed off to military schools, places where wire coat hanger beatings might have been considered low-key.
Fonda told CNN that Turner will go to heaven “and there’ll be a lot of animals up there welcoming him”.
A man with the nickname “the Mouth of the South” is destined to have many stories told about him, not all of them good.
He famously had a plaque on his desk that read “Lead, follow or get out the way”, a simple and on-point philosophy we could really use more of. He reportedly also said that “the US has got some of the dumbest people in the world”, an observation that likely underpinned the creation of Cable News Network in 1980.
Turner slept on his office couch for years, becoming, in essence, one of the hard-living, underpaid reporters he had hired for this crazy adventure.
CNN was on the scene when the first Gulf War broke out in 1991 (it was the first time a war had been broadcast live on TV) and it led the herd that would follow in setting a gold standard for round-the-clock, worldwide coverage of wars, trials, revolutions and disasters.
Turner would later lose control of his companies and watch his $7bn fortune evaporate before his eyes.
Even so, he still led the herd. He helped save the American bison from extinction, with 45,000 of these woolly followers roaming his Montana farms when he died last week.
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