Ted Turner death: CNN founder who unleashed 24-hour news cycle dies at 87

Ted Turner, the cable television pioneer who founded CNN and turned nonstop breaking news into a global addiction, died Saturday at 87.

Family members announced the death while revealing that Turner had suffered from progressive Lewy body dementia over the past six years and had been under hospice care at his Florida home since early April.

The bullish entrepreneur nicknamed “the Mouth of the South” launched Cable News Network on June 1, 1980, forever scrambling the rhythms of broadcast journalism and, critics say, the collective pulse rate of the planet.

Background

Before CNN, nightly newscasts in the United States ran 22 minutes of national content, then television stations signed off. Turner, already owner of Atlanta’s WTBS “SuperStation,” bet regulators and advertisers that viewers would watch news delivered fresh each hour, even if the pictures were sometimes a satellite uplink and a talking head.

The gamble paid off. CNN drew only 1.7 million households at birth; by the 1991 Gulf War, 11 million Americans tuned in round-the-clock, and more than 200 foreign broadcasters carried the feed. “We stayed live for 16 straight hours,” Turner told The New York Times that year. “Iraq and America saw television history together.”

Satellite technology allowed the network to blanket 212 countries by the mid-1990s, establishing the template copied by BBC World, Sky, Fox, al-Jazeera, and dozens of national 24-hour channels that followed.

What’s Next

Funeral services will be private in Atlanta, the city that became Turner’s media base. Turner Enterprises, overseeing his remaining 2 million acres of ranch land and bison herd, is expected to continue philanthropic operations under a family trust, a spokesperson said. The CNN newsroom planned a moment of silence at 1900 GMT Sunday, coinciding with the hour the first broadcasts began 46 years ago.