Friday, May 8, 2026

Ted Turner Died - A Great American Businessman

 When I was in college Ted Turner was the pin-up guy for A Great Businessman. Audacious, fun, successful - and he married Jane Fonda. He also won the America's Cup - provign by winning American greatness.

There will not be another Ted Turner 

Comapred to Ted, Donald Trump is a loser, married to a souless mannequin, whose legacy is formed by slapping his name on things belonging to his betters rather making anything of his won.

Ted Turner, 1938–2026 (The Bulwark)

The one thing Turner understood, and helped create, before most was the ability to turn media properties into nationwide phenomena via the burgeoning technology of satellite and then cable television. He parlayed a handful of radio stations into a bottom-feeding UHF channel, then rebranded it the Turner Broadcasting System and beamed it into space, then into everyone’s homes. (Or, at least, everyone with a dish and a cable sub.) TBS out of Atlanta joined WGN out of Chicago as weird little windows into America for folks around the country, a fact that helped turn the Turner-owned Atlanta Braves into a national sports brand just a tier below the Yankees and the Cowboys, particularly in the American South where baseball franchises were few and far between.

But TBS was relatively small potatoes—an overpowered UHF channel trafficking mostly in reruns and sports—compared to Turner’s next big idea: CNN, the Cable News Network. Founded in 1980, it was the first 24-hour news network. But news alone would not fill all those hours; this is TV, after all, and television viewers demand programming. So there were shows like Lou Dobbs’s Moneyline and Evans and Novak, a show built around the longtime writing duo of Robert Novak and Rowland Evans who brought a sort of Siskel-and-Ebert charm to the day’s events. And then a few years later, Crossfire, which (alongside The McLaughlin Group) did much to introduce the shouting-head format to the body politic. Larry King Live debuted in the middle of the decade and helped bring newsmakers to the masses via the call-in format.

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