Entertainment
Ted Turner, CNN creator who revolutionized the media industry, dies at 87
Ted Turner, the brash media mogul who created CNN and revolutionized how Americans watched television, and who wielded his media empire and wealth to pursue liberal global causes and land conservation, has died. He was 87.
Turner died Wednesday, CNN reported, citing a news release from Turner Enterprises.
In 2018, he revealed he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a neurodegenerative disease.
The media business is full of big-talking executives. But Turner’s outsized public persona — some called him the “Mouth from the South” for his free-wheeling trash talk — actually matched the Georgian’s influence on news, politics, sports and entertainment in the late 20th century. Over and over again, Turner shook up established industries by invading quickly and expanding options for consumers, while railing against monolithic competitors who were less daring or nimble than his maverick Turner Broadcasting System.
Turner created the cable stations TBS and Turner Classic Movies; he owned the Atlanta Braves baseball team, the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, and revitalized professional wrestling with World Championship Wrestling.
Turner was one of the first adopters of cable and satellite broadcasting technology, and for many rural Americans living beyond the tower signals of major cities, Turner was the first person to bring them interesting TV.
He constantly generated headlines. He had a Clark Gable pencil mustache, raced sailboats, cavorted with the late communist leader Fidel Castro in Cuba, and at one point married Academy Award-winning actress and activist Jane Fonda. His wealth enabled him to become one of the largest private landowners and wealthiest philanthropists in the U.S.
July 1990 image of Ted Turner with Jane Fonda.
(Tony Duffy/Getty Images)
His crowning cultural achievement was the creation of the Cable News Network in 1980, which created the model for today’s cable news titans. The 24-hour news channel was not widely expected to be a success. All-night broadcasting had not been proven as a business model in an industry dominated nationally by corporate monoliths like ABC, NBC and CBS, where news programming was something that happened on a set schedule. And CNN’s headquarters weren’t in media centers like New York or Los Angeles, but Atlanta.
But Turner believed that “over-the-air networks would decline as audiences turned to videos and other outlets for entertainment on demand,” journalist Daniel Schorr, whom Turner courted to join CNN, recalled of Turner’s pitch in a 2001 memoir.
“The network future belonged to whoever would deliver what was happening now — live news and live sports. That was why he wanted to be the first to deliver all news, all sports, all the time,” Schorr wrote.
Within two years, CNN had more than 9 million subscribers; many millions more were to come. By the 2000s, Turner’s once far-flung idea for an around-the-clock news service had become so successful that it had attracted imitators like MSNBC and Fox News.
“We not only became profitable, but also changed the nature of news — from watching something that happened to watching it as it happened,” Turner said of CNN in 2004. “If we needed more money for [broadcasting from] Kosovo or Baghdad, we’d find it. If we had to bust the budget, we busted the budget. We put journalism first, and that’s how we built CNN into something the world wanted to watch.”
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 19, 1938, and raised in Georgia. A mischievous child — who later became a mischievous adult despite attending the Georgia Military Academy — he had a tough childhood at the hands of his alcoholic father, Ed.
“Ninety percent of the arguments I had with Ed were over his beating Ted too hard,” Ted’s mother, Florence Turner, recalled later.
“My dad ran an old-fashioned household and he insisted that pretty much everything had to be his way,” Ted Turner said in a 2008 memoir. “My father and I had a complex relationship but I loved him.”
The younger Turner attended Brown University but dropped out before graduating. His savings had run out, his father had stopped financially supporting his tuition, and in his final days on campus, he was suspended for bringing a woman to his dorm room, according to his memoir.
He soon joined his father’s expanding billboard advertising company, Turner Advertising, where he had been working off and on for years since childhood and which had since become one of the largest advertising companies in the South.
He inherited the business at the age of 24 after his father died by suicide. By then, Turner had already had years of experience helping run the company, and he worked furiously to reverse his father’s recent sale of part of the company to a competitor and paid down its daunting debt, an act of corporate savvy that presaged the empire-building to come.
While growing the business, Turner was also pursuing his passion for competitive sailing, which is how he met his first wife, Judy Nye, in college. It’s also how their marriage ended. Turner intentionally hit his wife’s boat during a 1963 race to keep her from passing him, and the pair, who had two children, split immediately afterward.
It was to be the first of three divorces for Turner, who was better at sailing and at business than keeping marriages together. “My problem is I love every woman I meet,” Turner has said. He would go on to win the America’s Cup in 1977 while expanding his father’s company into a modern multimedia conglomerate.
Using the billboard business as a springboard into new industries, Turner started buying local radio stations across the South in the late 1960s. In 1970, he bought the Channel 17 television station in Atlanta, competing with local network affiliates by airing old movies whose rights were affordable and picking up programming dropped by the less nimble competition. He didn’t like putting news on prime time back then — too negative — and soon picked up broadcast rights for the Braves, Hawks and other local sports.
Oct. 1998 photo of former President Jimmy Carter, right, and Atlanta Braves team owner Ted Turner, during Game 6 of the National League Championship Series in Atlanta.
(PAT SULLIVAN/AP)
The Braves were a ratings hit, and when the team flailed and went up for sale, Turner’s company became its owner in 1976. The team continued to flail but Turner boosted its profile with gimmicks such as sewing “Channel 17” on the back of a pitcher’s jersey and dressing up as the team’s batboy and manager, to the league’s disdain. Turner bought the Hawks shortly after.
With his ambitions for TV limited by entrenched local network affiliates, Turner expanded his independent station’s reach across the South and then the U.S. by embracing the new technologies of cable and satellite broadcasting. Channel 17 became nationally known as the “SuperStation,” with call letters WTBS, later shortened to TBS. The quirky Atlanta station’s local broadcasts of old movies and sports games had become national broadcasts.
Still hungry for more, Turner finally turned his attention to news programming. He launched CNN in 1980 in a desperate bid to create a national 24-hour news channel before the broadcast titans ABC, NBC and CBS — and their gargantuan budgets — could beat him to it.
There were some lean early years. But the nascent channel fended off an attempt by ABC to create a competitor, and critics could see the value of an ever-present news channel, even if quality was a little thin at times. “Non-viewers of CNN are missing a lot. There are so many reasons to watch,” Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg wrote in 1986, hailing the 6-year-old channel as an “institution.” “It’s not always good, but it’s always there.”
In 1986, CNN was the only broadcaster running live coverage when the Challenger shuttle liftoff ended in disaster. In 1991, the network gave Americans a live and uninterrupted look at the invasion of Iraq. American officials held news conferences knowing that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was watching them on CNN.
Americans had seen images of war before, but not broadcast nonstop into their homes.
“CNN seeks to be a stethoscope attached to the hypothetical heart of the war, and to present us with its hypothetical pulse,” the French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote, critiquing the conflict as a media spectacle. Media scholars began to wonder whether a “CNN effect” was influencing government policy. Officials found that they now had to respond much more quickly to crises unfolding on live television.
Turner was not adversarial to communist countries of the era and even tried his own version of the Olympics, called the Goodwill Games, a bit of private-sector peace-craft that brought the Soviet Union and the U.S. out of their respective Olympic boycotts and back into direct competition in the 1989s. All on television, of course.
Turner also saw professional wrestling as part of his sports portfolio, at one point trying to pit his World Championship Wrestling program against competitor Vince McMahon’s wrestling empire, then called the World Wrestling Federation. Turner similarly tried to take a bite out of MTV with the Cable Music Channel, with a promise “to stay away from the excessive, violent or degrading clips to women that MTV is so fond of putting on.”
The moralism was a Turner hallmark. Turner had started his life as a conservative — Turner had met his second wife, Jane Smith, at a 1964 fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater — and turned toward more liberal-leaning causes, such as world peace, nuclear nonproliferation and fighting climate change, later in life.
At the 1990 American Humanist Assn.’s annual convention, Turner presented his “Ten Voluntary Initiatives” — his atheistic version of the Ten Commandments — which included pledges to world peace, environmentalism, nonviolence and “to have no more than two children, or no more than my nation suggests.” (Turner had five children — Rhett Turner, Laura Turner Seydel, Jennie Turner Garlington, Robert E. “Teddy” Turner IV and Beau Turner.) He would become a major private donor to the United Nations, pledging $1 billion and launching the United Nations Foundation nonprofit.
In 1991, a year marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first U.S. war against Iraq and the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Time magazine named Turner its “Man of the Year” for his “visionary” creation of CNN, which covered those events live. He also married Fonda that year (the ceremony was reported by CNN) and his Braves narrowly lost the World Series.
Time’s honorific was also a nice bit of corporate synergy. The magazine’s parent company, Time Warner, owned about 20% of Turner Broadcasting System stock.
Adversaries thought that Turner’s ventures could be reckless and impulsive. Far-seeing accomplishments in national broadcasting and the creation of CNN were also paired with several expensive misadventures, including a failed attempt to buy CBS. Turner had to unwind a purchase of the MGM film studio less than a year after buying it, though he held onto one valuable asset: The studio’s film library, which became the foundation of the Turner Classic Movies channel.
In 1996, Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner to form the world’s largest media company, marking the beginning of the end of Turner’s apex in corporate media. Time Warner’s 2000 merger with budding internet giant AOL, then the largest-ever corporate merger, ended in disaster. Turner, who had not been a key player in the negotiations, was fired as an executive.
As the company’s largest shareholder, his wealth plummet with its stock price. Turner resigned from the board in 2003, and in 2007, announced he had sold his shares in the company. In his later days, one of his best-known ventures was his Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain. The headlines stopped coming as often.
“I’ve often considered and joked about what I might want written on my tombstone,” Turner said in a 2008 memoir. “At one point, when I felt like I could get out of the way of the press, ‘You Can’t Interview Me Here’ was a leading candidate. … These days, I’m leaning toward, ‘I Have Nothing More to Say.’”
Pearce is a former Times reporter.
Mortal Kombat II, 2026.
Directed by Simon McQuoid.
Starring Karl Urban, Adeline Rudolph, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Ludi Lin, Mehcad Brooks, Tati Gabrielle, Lewis Tan, Damon Herriman, Chin Han, Tadanobu Asano, Joe Taslim, Hiroyuki Sanada, Max Huang, Martyn Ford, Ana Thu Nguyen, Desmond Chiam, CJ. Bloomfield, Vanesa Everett, Sharon Brooks, Steven Cragg, Sophia Xu, and Ed Boon.
SYNOPSIS:
The fan favorite champions — now joined by Johnny Cage himself — are pitted against one another in the ultimate battle to defeat the dark rule of Shao Kahn that threatens the very existence of the Earthrealm and its defenders.
Drunk in a bar while running away from his destiny of future Earthrealm Champion in returning director Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat II, a fan of the washed-up, never-kut-it-as-a-star leading man of korny action movies Johnny Cage (Karl Urban, a bizarre kasting choice, forcing him to push some of the kharacter’s goofiness into the actor’s more hard-edged style – even if one has never played the video games it is easy that something is off tonally about this performance for much of the running time) is ecstatic to meet him, only to be met with a self-deprecating teardown of his work while asserting that what audiences want today is grounded and gritty, citing John Wick as an example.
That’s true to an extent, but it doesn’t mean Mortal Kombat is fit for that path. And yet, that is half of the tone screenwriter Jeremy Slater has cooked up here for the sequel (thankfully including a tournament this time, even if these are some of the strangest rules for such a thing, without any bracketing or a number of kontestants that would kontinuously evenly split in half – think 16 to 8 to 4 and so on until a winner is determined), an overly self-serious wannabe Marvel-style attempt at an epic (take a shot whenever the heroes walk toward the screen in slow motion like a team has just been assembled) that kan’t help itself from striving for emotionality through a swelling, dramatic take on the music (komposed by Benjamin Wallfisch) and the occasional piece of exposition explaining away or showing a traumatic backstory that ie subsequently diskarded for a lengthy amount of time, never materializing into anything worth investing in.
The bulk of this misguidedness komes from the introduction of Kitana (Adeline Rudolph, a standout, making the most of looking stylish and badass while wielding dual fan-blades when it’s her time to enter the spotlight) as a young girl (Sophia Xu) with her realm tormented by Outworld’s merciless skull-masked ruler Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford), assuming kontrol over the land through kombat and taking her as a daughter. It is an early setup for a payoff that does eventually kome and deliver (easily one of the better fights that don’t involve Hiroyuki Sanada’s Scorpion and Joe Taslim’s Sub-Zero that the recent movies have produced), but mostly pushes her to the side throughout the rest of the film, minimizing the impact of whatever kharacterization is intended. I can tell you that this specific final fight rules, but it would be deceitful to say that her revenge is emotionally satisfying.
That’s the glaring issue with Mortal Kombat II in a nutshell: it’s awkward and cheesy when trying to take itself seriously and embody a tone that the material doesn’t warrant, but mostly works when it’s in a more subversive, irreverently funny vibe (as in, not to spoil it, everything happening here with CJ. Bloomfield’s Baraka). Josh Lawson’s Kano is also back and excels here as a kharacter functioning as the exact kounterpoint to the aforementioned Johnny Cage statement regarding realism; he’s here to rip a new one into the demeanor and appearances of the other fighters and kharacters, good and bad, with Necromancer Quan Chi (Damon Herriman) getting the brunt of the insults and more than enough to make one wonder if the filmmakers and possibly even video game franchise creator Ed Boon (who has a cameo) hate him.
Earthrealm leader and God of Thunder, Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), is once again here keeping morale high to save the human race. Rounding out the other kontestants are some of the usual beloved faces, ranging from Ludi Lin’s fireball-throwing Dragon Warrior Liu Kang, Jessica McNamee’s no-nonsense soldier Sonya Blade alongside her half-cyborg teammate Jax (Mehcad Brooks), soul-sucker Shang Tsung (Chin Han), screeching Queen Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), an evil possessed take on hat-blade boomerang-tossing Kung Lao (Max Huang), a loyal konfidante partner-in-training and non-biological sister of Kitana in Jade (Tati Gabrielle), with other familiar faces popping up here and there. And while it would be a stretch to say that anyone is going to become a star from these movies, it’s fair to say that they play and look the parts well enough, whether it be some fan service posing or one-liners or, most importantly, busting out trademark moves and kombos.
As for the fights themselves, they take place across several locations (some of them feature klassic arenas such as the infamous acid pool room) that have mostly been green-screened to the Netherworld and back, kreating a frustrating contrast to the otherwise impressive fight khoreography and wirework. Of course, some of the editing is still choppy, while many of the attacks themselves often fail to land with the necessary brutal impact a film like this should instill. There is something video-gamey about them in motion that doesn’t always translate well or feel anywhere near as visceral as some of the fatalities from the games or X-ray special attacks. The fact that most of the gore here is CGI blood doesn’t help.
Still, whenever Mortal Kombat II falls into a jokey rhythm that knows all of this is ridiculous (including all the deus ex machina artifacts kharacters are looking for here), pokes fun at itself (Lord Raiden is finally mocked as looking like something out of Big Trouble in Little China), and remembers that there should be almost no downtime between kombat, it’s enjoyable enough, sometimes feeling like a representation of what these adaptations should be, although disappointingly coming nowhere close to the guilty pleasure absurdities of Paul W.S. Anderson’s first krack at this. Mortal Kombat II simply can’t shake its boneheaded desperation to be taken seriously as epic, never fully kommitting to dumb fun; the kourse-korrection is almost there.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
Arts
You, Me & Tuscany
Director: Kat Coiro
Will Packer Productions, Universal Studios
In Theaters: 04.10.2026
A long-held notion within the current film social media-scape is that the romantic comedy is essentially dead. While I can point to many contemporary films that prove that notion wrong, it would be dishonest for me to say that these complaints are unfounded. I would point to last year’s Materialists as the perfect example of the themes relevant in today’s romantic comedies. It feels introspective, while also interrogating the importance of love within the current economic and social landscape. It is a movie that asks the audience to interrogate their expectations and boundaries around love, which is also why it inspired so much division and discourse upon its release, because it asked the question, “What does it mean to fall in love in this day and age?” The truth is that the romantic comedies that so many people yearn for make love look easy; they harken back to the early 2000s, where falling in love was the easy part, everyone was wearing magazine-worthy outfits and all of it was about simply fixing any external obstacles that stood in the way of that love just to get to the happy ending. The good news is, You, Me & Tuscany fully delivers on those requests.
Anna Montgomery (Halle Bailey, The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple) is an aspiring chef working gigs as a housesitter. Due to the untimely loss of her mother, she lives vicariously through her clients’ luxurious lives. After getting fired by one of her clients, Anna heads to the hotel her friend Claire (Aziza Scott, One of Them Days) works at and meets Matteo Costa (Lorenzo de Moor, Another Simple Favor), a handsome Italian actively avoiding his family’s expectations. After talking about each other’s hopes and dreams, Anna feels inspired to finally travel to Tuscany and reignite her culinary passion. However, due to her on-the-whim decision, Anna has nowhere to stay once she arrives, so she breaks into Matteo’s vacant villa as a last-ditch solution. Her problems only compound after Matteo’s family mistakes Anna for his fiancée, and she develops feelings for Matteo’s cousin/adoptive brother, Michael (Regé-Jean Page, Bridgerton, Dungeons & Dragons), all while trying to keep up her charade.
You, Me & Tuscany is a love letter to the romantic comedies of the late 90s and early 2000s. For better or worse, it follows the tropes and formulas of those films to a tee: take a plucky young heroine, a wacky situation and a model-level love interest with whom she doesn’t get along at first, add a dusting of comedic hijinks for good measure and you have yourself a perfectly breezy watch. All the things you could want from a romantic comedy of that caliber are here. It gives people the fantasy of finding love in an unexpected yet beautiful place, where everything else just melts away.
My main criticism of the movie may not even come from the film itself, but rather my own clouded vision living in these times. While I don’t need there to be explicit mentions of the trials and tribulations of current events, it is obvious that these characters live in a world divorced from reality. I mean, once Anna gets to Tuscany, everyone there speaks perfect English. This is indicative of the film’s main flaw: it’s all too easy. Yes, Anna’s character has dealt with tragedy, and while there are scenes that explore that, it all feels more like set dressing rather than something to overcome. For some, that may work, especially in a world where Black women are expected to perform at a higher level than their white counterparts just to earn the same rewards; this sort of breezy storytelling is a welcome change of pace. This might also be the time to mention that writer-director Nina Lee revealed that the future of her project and any other Black-led project is contingent on the success of this film, even though many other Black filmmakers have nothing to do with this film. It’s a searing reminder that for Black-led films, being great still isn’t good enough.
Despite that, the film has many positives. Bailey and Page are both equally charming, and their chemistry is palpable from their first interaction. They play off each other well, as well as with the rest of the cast, who offer up plenty of jokes. The lighting is also a highlight as the scenes are drenched in rich and warm colors that make the film feel inviting. Bailey plays a bubbly and clever character well, and it is easy to root for her, even during her more questionable decisions. All in all, You, Me & Tuscany offers something familiar yet comforting. It wraps you up in a warm hug and encourages you to chase your dreams and find fulfillment in the places you least expect. For as by the numbers as it is, there is a beauty in its simplicity. —Angela Garcia
Read more film reviews by Angela Garcia:
Film Review: Forbidden Fruits
Last Call for Secondhand Screenings!
Whitney Leavitt is leaving “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”
The reality star announced the news during her final performance of “Chicago” on Sunday. Leavitt has played tap-dancing murderess Roxie Hart in the Broadway revival since February. TMZ published a video of the moment, in which a Broadway castmate shows Leavitt a newspaper mid-scene. Leavitt, in character as Hart, points to the headline and reads aloud: “Whitney Leavitt announces she’s leaving ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.’” The audience is heard hollering and cheering.
Leavitt followed the big reveal with an Instagram video Tuesday morning and assured fans that, although the forthcoming season will be her last, she would still appear in Season 5 of the Hulu series.
“It’s honestly so crazy to me looking back on this journey, because I had been trying to get into theater, film, way before ‘Secret Lives’ even came into my life,” she said. “The reality show just fell into my lap organically and I said yes to it. It’s definitely not the path that I had envisioned in my mind to get to where I am today, but I wouldn’t change a thing. I have experienced so much with this group of women, and through that process, I have also learned so much about myself.”
Leavitt continued, saying that the “Mormon Wives” had been through so much together, including more extreme highs and lows than audiences have seen. “No matter what happens with our relationships, that is something that will always be a part of our life, that will always be a part of my life, and I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“The times I’ve walked away from ‘MomTok,’ it came from a place of anger and frustration,” she continued. “But this time, it’s significantly different, because I’m leaving with gratitude. I feel content. I feel like this is a chapter that’s closing in my life, and honestly, I believe that’s how it was always meant to be. I’m so grateful for ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.’ It’s gotten me where I am today. It’s given me the opportunities that you all have seen. But I’m ready. I’m ready for the next chapter. And I cannot wait to share with you guys what’s next.”
Much like her “Chicago” character, Leavitt’s place in the spotlight has come with less-than-favorable tabloid fodder. She told “Oprah Daily” that, although she doesn’t fully agree that she’s a series “villain,” she’s embraced her on-screen persona. She’s been candid about being a “very ambitious woman” and using “Secret Lives” as a launchpad for a career in Hollywood — and this isn’t the first time she’s departed the show.
“I had walked away from the show,” she told Gayle King about her brief hiatus after Season 2. “I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. I left the show, and then they were almost midway through the season, and I got a call from the producers, and they said, ‘If you come back, we know that you really want this opportunity to go on “Dancing With the Stars,” but the only way that you would get this opportunity is to come back and film.’”
Last year, Leavitt partnered up with pro dancer Mark Ballas and competed on Season 34 of “Dancing With the Stars.” She was eliminated in the semifinals, finishing in sixth place, but her “Cell Block Tango” performance impressed casting directors of the long-running Broadway production. One thing led to another, and the reality star was headed to Broadway.
Although Salt Lake City may not be known for the excitement synonymous with the Big Apple, Leavitt has plenty of drama to keep her busy back in production on “Mormon Wives.”
The show hit pause in March amid a series of domestic violence investigations involving stars Taylor Frankie Paul and her on-again, off-again partner Dakota Mortensen. The Salt Lake County district attorney’s office announced in mid-April that it would not be filing charges against Paul, and shortly after, the Hulu series said it would resume filming Season 5.
In the comments section of Leavitt’s Instagram video announcing her departure, Paul wrote, “You will be missed. Chase those dreams my girl. I’m excited to see your next chapter.”
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