Remembering the life and legacy of visionary CNN founder Ted Turner

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: The founder of CNN, Ted Turner, died today.

A risk-taking entrepreneur known for his outspoken style, Turner created the first 24-hour news network and revolutionized how billions across the world consume the news.

Judy Woodruff has this remembrance.

Ted Turner, CNN Founder: You will never get in trouble if you don’t do anything, but, on the other hand, you will never get anywhere either, you know?

Judy Woodruff: He was brash, bold, a business genius and a television pioneer. Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati in 1938 and moved with his family to Savannah, Georgia, after World War II.

He took over the family’s advertising firm after his father’s suicide in 1963 and built it into a powerhouse. By the late ’60s, he was buying up radio and TV stations.

Narrator: Stay with the Superstation as “Newswatch” continues.

Judy Woodruff: They included a struggling Atlanta outlet that he transformed into the first so-called satellite Superstation, WTBS, showing movies and sitcoms. To that mix, he added sports, buying the Atlanta Braves baseball team and securing the rights to broadcast live games nationwide.

But Ted Turner’s real revolutionary moment came in 1980 with the launch of the first all-news cable channel, CNN.

Ted Turner: And barring satellite problems in the future, we won’t be signing off until the world ends.

Judy Woodruff: With 24-hour international coverage, it changed the industry and the way the world gets news.

Man: Officials say allied airstrikes have effectively paralyzed any potential Iraqi counterstrength.

Judy Woodruff: In 1990 and 1991, CNN broadcast the first Persian Gulf War live and from behind Iraqi lines.

Ted Turner: We changed the way things were done. It wasn’t — we weren’t anti-American. We were just pro-truth.

Judy Woodruff: By the mid-90s the man once dubbed Mouth of the South was at the height of his success, adding the Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies to his cable stable.

In 1996, he sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner, but stock prices plunged after Time Warner merged with AOL and the tech bubble burst. In the process, Turner lost a bundle and his last connections with his media empire, as he recalled in a 2015 interview. `

Christiane Amanpour, CNN Chief International Anchor: Will you ever get over it?

Ted Turner: No. I don’t have to get over it. I live with it. You have got to be able to take some disappointment in life too.

Judy Woodruff: Disappointment also came in failed marriages to Jane Fonda and two other wives. But Turner’s zest for competition had brought him a different kind of success in the 1977 America’s Cup sailboat races, when he piloted the yacht Courageous to victory.

The feed earned him another nickname, Captain Outrageous. In later years, he became a fierce advocate for nuclear disarmament and for the environment. He created the U.N. Foundation in 1997 to support the world body and donated a billion dollars of his own money.

Ted Turner: We have to have the United Nations just like we have to have a federal government here in the United States. Is it perfect? Is it free of corruption? Is everybody honest and ethical? No. But we still have to have it.

Judy Woodruff: Another mission of Turner’s, to save American wildlife, and he did, becoming one of the largest individual landowners in the country, preserving roughly two million acres and building up a significant bison herd at his Montana ranch.

In 2018, Turner confirmed he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder that resembles Alzheimer’s. He remained largely out of public view in his final years. Ted Turner was 87.

Amna Nawaz: That was our own senior correspondent, Judy Woodruff, reporting.

Judy joins us here now.

Judy, it’s good to see you.

Judy Woodruff: It’s good to see you. Thank you for having me.

Amna Nawaz: So, Ted hired you to join CNN. You worked there for years in the ’90s and early 2000s as an anchor and correspondent. Tell us about what it was like back then, how he lured you over to CNN.

Judy Woodruff: Well, I had been at the “News Hour” for 10 years with Jim Lehrer and Robin MacNeil, had no intention of leaving.

But Tom Johnson, who Ted had put in charge of CNN, reached out to me, and after literally almost four months of conversation, and finally he said: “You need to go to Atlanta to have a serious conversation with Ted Turner.”

So I show up in Ted’s office at CNN headquarters. And the first — one of my first questions to him was: “So, tell me, how do you feel about women journalists? I want to know, do you take them seriously?”

He said: “Are you kidding? I’m married to Jane Fonda.”

(Laughter)

Judy Woodruff: And it kind of shut me up. I mean, I didn’t say much about women after that.

But he took the news seriously, Amna. He was all about the news, and that was ultimately what persuaded me this was a leap worth making.

Amna Nawaz: Yes.

Judy Woodruff: Both of them said, we wanted — the news is the king, where we are. We want to be not just 24/7, but we’re going to be global. They had already done the Iraq War, and they had, frankly, put themselves on the map.

Amna Nawaz: I mean, the first 24 hour news network, it seems odd now when it’s become the norm, but it was a real gamble back then. I mean, you mentioned he changed the industry, but does it seem like he changed much more than that?

Judy Woodruff: He changed everything, I mean, in terms of journalism, because he believed that it was possible.

And people told him, this — people said, this is crazy. They called it the Chicken Noodle News Network, told him it was — just couldn’t be done. He was determined. He had this vision of news being available to everyone, and it being all about the news. He saw news going in an entertainment division, if you can imagine this, back in 1980.

And he wanted the news to be serious. He hired Bernie Shaw as one of his first anchors. He believed in diversity. He believed the newsroom should look like America. He talked about that. And he had that vision even after he lost CNN. He would talk about the news networks, plural, all of them, need to stick to the news, as he saw them drifting closer and closer to entertainment.

Amna Nawaz: I mean, the rest of the world saw him as this visionary and this pioneer. You knew him personally, though, too. What do you want people to know about Ted Turner?

Judy Woodruff: That he was the visionary that we have been talking about, that, in a way, he had this almost childlike, naive vision. He wanted the world to be a place of peace. He wanted war to end. He wanted to end nuclear weapons. He put a lot of effort into nuclear nonproliferation.

He gave a billion dollars, Amna, to the United Nations, which people saying, what? What was that about? That was an individual giving his money. And back then, that was a lot of money. It sounds like a lot now. It was a lot then. And he lived out that pledge, even though his fortune was diminished by those — by the mergers that happened.

He wanted the world to be a better place. He cared about a lot of that you saw. He was one of the country’s biggest landowners. And, as we have been saying, he transformed journalism. He made it into, frankly, the kind of nonstop place that it is today.

And I think his forever legacy will be this belief that news matters and the truth matters. You couldn’t have a conversation with Ted where he didn’t talk about it’s important to get the whole story and to tell the truth, to be transparent. And he said, we need to be in those parts of the world where no one else is.

Amna Nawaz: Yes.

Judy Woodruff: That legacy is one that lives on.

Amna Nawaz: Well, I’m sorry it has to be under these circumstances, but it is always good to have you here.

Judy Woodruff: It’s always…

Amna Nawaz: Judy Woodruff, thank you so much.

Judy Woodruff: It’s good to be with you. Thank you.