There are men who build things, and then there are men who build them so big that, years later, they wander off to save something else entirely, just to prove they can.
Ted Turner did both.
Turner took his father’s modest billboard business and turned it into a media juggernaut that permanently altered how Americans watched sports, news, and just about everything else with a screen. He put Atlanta Braves games on a scrappy local station that became the SuperStation, teaching a generation that baseball could be consumed nightly. He created CNN, which told the networks that the world did not, in fact, need to wait until 6:30 p.m. to find out what just happened.
He was a visionary, but also a man whose opinions arrived uninvited. He talked fast, thought big, and rarely edited himself. “Mouth of the South” wasn’t a nickname so much as a job description. Yet beneath the bluster was a genuine belief that journalism mattered, that sports should be shared, and that the world was better off when people could see it for themselves.
I never met Ted Turner, but I once overheard him doing something that perfectly captured the peculiar blend of audacity and decency that defined him.
In January 1991, two days after the Gulf War began, I was a young reporter from Macon, on assignment at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters. I was shadowing Tom Johnson, who was then president of the network, for a profile story. I followed him everywhere — to the studio, the control room, into meetings where adults tried to calmly discuss how to cover a war unfolding live on television.
That afternoon, Johnson motioned for me to pick up the phone in front of me. On the other end was Turner, speaking first to Johnson — and then to King Hussein of Jordan. Turner wasn’t calling to boast or bloviate. He wanted to know whether CNN journalists heading toward the Jordanian border would be safe.
Only Ted Turner would pick up the phone and call a king. And he did it because he cared about his reporters getting home alive.
What’s less remembered is what Turner did after he stepped back from broadcasting. Turner bought land — a staggering amount of it — and decided to try his hand at saving the planet.
He became one of the largest private landowners in the country, not to put up condos, but to restore ecosystems. He turned his attention to environmentalism with the same intensity he once aimed at network television. He helped revive American bison herds, reintroducing animals that once defined the continent.
It was classic Ted Turner. Go big, aim high, and refuse to think small. He treated conservation the way he treated news — as something urgent, global, and worth spending real money on. He talked about climate change long before it was fashionable and believed the future should be protected even if it didn’t make a quarterly report look good.
In the end, Ted Turner lived several lives. He was a disruptor, a loudmouth, a benefactor, and an environmental crusader. He changed how we watch the world, then tried to make sure the world itself stuck around long enough to be watched.
Somewhere, a herd of bison is grazing peacefully on land Ted Turner helped restore. Somewhere else, a breaking news alert is flashing across a screen he helped invent. Both are part of the same legacy — proof that even the Mouth of the South knew when it was time to stop talking and start doing.
My View From the cheap seats 