Ted Turner, the founder of CNN- the "Cable News Network"
Ted Turner has, for a long time, served as an example of a successful man whom Americans refer to as a „self made man“. Ted Turner was born on December 19, 1938 in Cincinatti, America. His father was a businessman, Ed Turner, who became a millionaire through advertising. His father was a very angry man, so he sent his son, who was also moody, to military school as punishment, whereas in the aftermath he disapproved of his choice of studies - Greek classics. Ted Turner did not complete his studies; he was expelled from university after he was found with a girl in his dormitory room. In his youth, he played sport and both as a young man and later on, he achieved outstanding sports results. He entered the world of business after his father had killed himself at the age of 53, having left his advertising agency in quite a bad state. Nevertheless, Ted Turner managed to preserve the company, although half of it had been sold out. However, very few had hopes that he would accomplish anything more from what his father had achieved.
Ted Turner, the founder of the American television network CNN, is globally known as a superb yachtsman, an excentric owner of sports clubs and a media figure. However, he grew up feeling lonely and unloved. His aggressive father, who was constantly drunk, believed he would make his son crave for success by beating him. If Ted cried, his father would double the punishment. When at the age of 53, he committed suicide, and he left his son a substantial fortune.
Ted’s father, Robert Edward Turner Junior (Robert Edward Turner Jr.) was born in 1911 in Mississippi which used to be a plantation town. After the 1927 breakdown of bourgeois, when his father, Turner’s grandfather, could not pay for his college tuition, he found a job at the General Outdoor Advertising company, renting billboards. After a while he moved to Ohio where he met Florence Rooney. Edward was exhilarated when in 1938 she gave birth to a son whom he named Robert Edward Turner III. Three years later, he got a daughter, Mary Jane. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, he signed up for the navy, “dragging” his young wife and daughter to various navy bases on the shores of Texas and Florida over the next four years. Why he left his three-year old son with his grandmother in Cincinatti, is not clear to anyone and it is even less clear why he sent him to boarding school when he was only six.
Although unwilling to talk about this, Ted Turner once said that the saddest moment of his life was when his father had left him with his grandmother. This is when he became lonely and bitter, he admits. He even spent his holidays with grandmothers and Jimmy Brown, who served three generations of Turners. He taught young Ted how to sail (once when his father bought him a sailboat in an inexplicable outburst of generosity), hunt and fish.
After the war, Ted’s father moved to the old southern town of Savannah in Georgia, where he founded a company, Turner Advertising, and sent Ted to the Army. While Ted was fighting for his place under the sun in the military academy, his father took to drink.The more Turner’s billboard business empire grew, the less he cared for his family and his fits of anger became frequent.
At the time, at least for a short while, he changed his relationship to his son. Having seen his sailing skills, he joined the Savannah Yacht Club himself, helping Ted with a regatta while enjoying his victories. The boy was thrilled upon finding the way to approach his father. However, happiness was short- lived. After a year, then as a student of elite college of Chattanooga, Tennessee, he found out about his sister dying from a rare immune system disease.Mary Jane’s struggle with the severe disease lasted for five years.
After the first year at college, his father employed thirteen-year old Ted in his company. He worked full time, putting up jumbo billboards for 50 dollars per week, of which he had to give 25 dollars for accommodation and food, while living in his parents’ home. At the same time, his father wanted him to read at least two books per week.
At Brown University, into which he enrolled in 1960, Turner was regarded as an eccentric. He took no real interest in his studies, but he was eager to show his fellow students that he could drink more than them, seduce more girls and have even more fun. With a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a cigar in the other, he boasted how he had his father’s cheque for 5000 dollars, which he would be able to cash on the condition that he not have a single alcoholic drink until he was 21. The five thousand in his hand turned into a million dollars in his story - on the condition he did not drink or smoke till the end of his studies.
Brown University was a traditional and conservative university which imposed strict rules regarding behaviour and clothes on their students. Turner, of course, broke them one after another, provoking everyone around.
And while he was so provocative, he never neglected one thing – sailing. Very soon he became one of the best student yacht sailors in the country. In the 1958 regatta, he met Judy Nye, the daughter of the sailboat equipment manufacturer from Chicago.
In less than two years he doubled the company profit, working relentlessly, 15 hours a day, six and a half days per week. The success enabled him to live more luxuriously.
Their marriage seemed perfect at first glance. They would go sailing together but life at home was hell. He gave his wife 500 dollars per month to cover all the expenditures including the loan repayment for a new house, he made her iron his shirts and cook three meals a day. Obviously, she was not allowed to buy anything that he did not advertise on his jumbo billboards. So she had to get a job as a secretary in order to contribute to the home budget with her small income.
Alongside with his business success, more often than not, his father, Ed Turner, experienced bouts of depression which led to wrong business decisions. Having decided to sell a leading branch of his company at a low price against any business logic, he suffered difficult crises. Early in the morning, on March 5, 1963 he committed suicide on a family plantation in Binden.
After his father’s death, Ted bought back all the shares which his father had sold to other people. About six months after his father’s suicide, he met blond haired flight attendant, Jane Shirley Smith from Birmingham, at a party. They got married on June 2, 1964. He moved into a new house in Atlanta with her and Jimmy Brown came to live with them.Soon the family grew bigger. Using various legal wiles, Turner managed to get custody of his two children from his first marriage.
At the end of the sixties, he embarked on a new business venture. He bought a local radio station and had considerable success by advertising it via his jumbo billboards, which he had not managed to sell. After that he bought a local TV station. He was not bothered by the fact that its programme was followed by only 5 percent of viewers in Atlanta, nor by its looming bankruptcy. By 1970, he would waste 50.000 dollars a month on it, but in the end he managed to preserve it. Soon afterwards he bought another station in Charleston.
“People are fed up with psychological issues and film violence. I decided to offer something new to my viewers”, he said. The novelty came down to endless replays of black and white movies and old series which he could buy cheaply, claiming that they contained messages on “traditional family values”.
After the “family programme”, Turner focused his attention on the news. When all the other stations aired news, Turner put the rerun of “Star Trek“ on the air, and his news, aimed at viewers who found the adventures of the spacecraft Enterprise to be more interesting than the Middle East crisis, was broadcast at three o’clock in the morning. At the same time, he continued to collect ads for his TV stations, confusing his competitors who could not understand how he managed to do it. Recognising that apart from old movies his TV viewers took an interest in sport as well, he succeeded in buying off all the broadcasting rights for the Atlanta Braves baseball club which cost him a lot of money. It did not take long before his TV station started making a profit, and Turner himself presented some of the programmes.
A few years following the America’s Cup win, Turner began thinking of a new business venture. According to a Gallup poll, almost two thirds of Americans regarded television as the main source of information, and each of the three big TV networks spent an annual amount of almost 150 million dollars on evening TV news production.Despite such costs, advertisements during the news brought in enormous revenues.
So Turner began designing programmes which would just contain news, as opposed to other networks that broadcast live, forming a network of associates throughout America.
He named it the Cable News Network (CNN) and began gathering a team.The big networks were not concerned about the competition. They found it ridiculous that Turner, once rejected by big TV stars, searched for presenters among students of journalism, who were usually without any experience.
However, when CNN launched its programme on Saturday, July 1, 1980, they realised he had become a serious competitor to them. Turner’s vision – hope that his network would help in bringing the world together, that he would meet national leaders who would show him their countries at their best, so that he could air that via satellite – appeared silly to his competitors, but they had to salute his business ideas.
Big networks attempted to keep up with him, but he was always one step ahead of them. While they were reporting on what had happened, CNN was broadcasting live due to the worldwide network of correspondents. After a couple of years CNN became a leading global TV news network. Not only viewers, but world statesmen were also provided with information via this service.
With his growing influence, Turner really got to know most political potentates. A series of successful reports from worldwide hotspots, like the Falkland Islands war, or the assassination attempt on Reagan earned him a reputation among journalists.
Turner used his media power in other ventures as well. Owing to his friendship with the Russian heads of state, he managed to organise a world cup involving supreme sportsmen, generally from communistcountries at the Goodwill Games in 1986, when sportsmen from America and Russia did not compete in the same Olympic Games. Soon he gained enough power to attack one of the three major networks. His choice came down to CBS; he spent millions of dollars, but he failed in his attempt to buy it.
Like his father, Ted Turner is a man of contradictions, famous for his sharp tongue. He “improved” his inheritance in the course of time, so that his net worth is estimated at more than seven billion dollars.Apart from the most famous global TV news network, he owns the world’s biggest collection of movies and cartoons, and his empire is constantly growing. He is the biggest world donor (in 1997 he promised to award one billion dollars to the UN over the following ten years), he is one of the largest landowners in America, and on top of all that fortune, Turner is a man with a vision, a contradictory blend of entrepreneur and idealist. To prove this, there are his business ventures such as investments in films about the Indians, and the educational series “Capt. Planet”. All these ventures carry messages which Turner regards as important to our world, yet they contain business logic.
Turner is also well known for his turbulent marriage with famous actress Jane Fonda.
