Creating an Entertainment Giant : TED’S MOMENT : Ted Turner Recasting U.S. Media

It used to be hard figuring who was the real Ted Turner: the mustached Southern mogul with the big mouth or the visionary who could dream up such innovations as Cable News Network.

Though the talks over selling his company to Time Warner proved Turner has not lost his talent for surprise, Turner long ago toned down the “Captain Outrageous” act.

Today he’s a silver-haired fixture of the international business community, a figure whose name arises in any discussion of the mega-mergers that have come to define the media business.

As chairman of Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting System Inc., Turner, 56, oversees a nearly $2.8-billion enterprise that includes seven major cable television networks, two professional sports teams, a pair of hit movie studios, the quadrennial Goodwill Games and real estate.

Though Turner’s oft-stated goal of owning a broadcast network has eluded him, the Time Warner deal announced Friday, if completed, would put him smack on the leading edge of the new media revolution.

The path there has sometimes been bumpy, never dull.

“People say he’s calmed down these days,” says Reese Schonfeld, a cable television executive who helped Turner launch CNN. “I never worked for Ted when he was calm.”

After his domineering father committed suicide in 1963, Turner began his business career by taking over the family billboard company. He got into TV when he bought an independent UHF station, Atlanta’s Channel 17, in 1970.

Six years later he was beaming the station’s motley collection of reruns and old movies to cable TV systems across the country as a pioneer of the now common “superstation” concept.

He bought the Atlanta Braves in 1976, even donning a uniform to manage them for one game (they lost). One of baseball’s perennial doormats, the Braves still gave Turner abundant--and relatively cheap--programming for his cable station. By the ‘90s the Braves had become one of baseball’s most respected and successful organizations.

In 1977, TBS expanded its professional sports holdings by acquiring a limited partnership in the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks.

Turner’s star began to rise more rapidly after he started CNN in 1980. Initially greeted with skepticism and smirks, the all-news network has profoundly affected journalism.

The network’s reputation was cemented with its saturation coverage of the Persian Gulf War, and CNN is now seen in 140 countries. These days, the network is burrowing its way further into the nation’s psyche with its full-time coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial.

Also in the ‘80s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM. That move, too, was greeted with skepticism. But the acquisition gave the company an enormous library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. TBS later acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which further boosted Turner’s stock of programming and led to the launch of the Cartoon Network.