By Okoh Aihe
Global TV avatar, Ted Turner, whose audacious reasoning and business brinksmanship gave the world CNN, a pioneering effort in 24-hour broadcasting, passed last week at the age of 87. The global community has been talking about the man who displayed esoteric bravery and bravado to point the way forward and has left us with so much to talk about achievements that can be cramped into a single lifetime.
In parabolic terms, he was a media elephant who could hardly be described from a narrow perspective. But at another level, he maintained the speed of a gazelle and soared like the eagle; he soared so high that he homogenised the world with one smart move. CNN.
CNN is the Cable News Network. When it started out in the 80s, they pooh-poohed the station as the Chicken Noodle Network, a befitting parody of a broadcast business that was expected to fail in no time.
Robert Edward Turner 111 did not fail. He was a maverick; a business stunt man whose capacity for risks mocked failure and even death in the face. The world expected a fall at any time that would eclipse a loud-mouthed fellow. That fall didn’t happen.
When he died on May 6, 2026, the world knew it had lost one of the very best, a comet whose light would blaze into eternity. First Lady of global television, Christiane Amanpour, herself one of the biggest living creations of CNN, called him Ted Turner, the Globalist. This, for me, remains a beautiful but simple appreciative epitomisation of the world that Ted Turner influenced with a strong image from a very troubled background, telling the story of the world from America’s point of view.
From this part of the world, we were only more acquainted with his globalism and little about his background which, for me, looks quite significant because of the way it would shape his entire life.
His father, Robert Turner Jr., ran the Turner Outdoor Advertising company in Georgia where Ted had worked during the holidays as a student of Brown University before he was dispatched from the school following a history of bad behaviour, including bigotry, excessive drinking and womanising.
Ted had all the vices in his pouch but he learnt from his father whose life was tempestuous; an alcoholic and a serial drug abuser. Having fallen into debt, he got depressed and committed suicide in 1963.
The dark side of the real world opened up to 24-year old Ted Turner who felt lost and insecure. He too became suicidal and never really thought that he could live to the age of his father before he would commit suicide. But fate works in different ways. In spite of living life on the edge and courting death and disaster always, providence was kind to him, decorating him with good credentials.
Against advice from his father’s friends, he refused to sell his father’s outdoor advertising business but ran it with youthful strength, energy and creativity. But the results were not the best. In 1970, he bought a small TV station in Atlanta which he renamed WTCG. It was the beginning of a life that would change the history of television broadcasting globally.
He was heavily into sports – Yachting, bought the Atlanta Braves in 1976, Atlanta Hawks in 1977, and much later, in 1984, promoted the Goodwill Games in response to the Olympic boycotts of 1980 and 1984, and to heal the frosty relationship between the US and Soviet Union, following the Cold War era.
He was truly a globalist but it is the broadcast part of his life that fascinates us here. In Ted Turner, you see the rambunctious exemplification of Marshal McLuhan’s concept of the global village, a time when electronic media technology would destroy barriers and boundaries and reduce the world into a small whole with instant communications. McLuhan’s prediction was in the 60s; in the 80s, Turner made it an intrusive reality.
At the beginning, CNN haemorrhaged red ink, losing $2m monthly. Turner stayed on. You know what they say, about the patient dog eating the fattest bone? Not that he was patient anyway, he was totally restless in his ways but what seems to be his madness and chaotic living had a pattern. In all this, he had his eyes fixed on the world and Nigeria became a beneficiary.
In 1990, the Gulf War broke out starting with the attack on Kuwait by the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain. A coalition led by the US rallied together to defend the small country and protect other neighbours like Saudi Arabia that would be immediate target. I was fortunate to be working in one of the prestigious newspaper houses in Nigeria and even more fortunate to have influenced the installation of a satellite dish to receive direct satellite TV signals. It was a rare moment for the voice of a rookie reporter to be heard in such a significant decision, and it was a win-win for everybody.
In those days, Media houses depended a lot on NAN, AFP, Reuters and the Network News of NTA at 9pm. The coming of CNN overwhelmed these other sources nearly into insignificance. Sitting in front of the television in the newsroom, the reporter could almost fancy himself/herself at the war front, almost a Peter Arnett reporting from Baghdad, except that the CNN reporter was confronting a terrible situation instead of the realtime live movies we were watching in the newsroom[.
At the time, the newspapers depended on copy sales and advertising to run operations and pay salaries. During the Gulf War, copy sales tripled. Instead of two editions of the Newspapers – Northern and Two Lagos West editions, with one of the editions featuring the very latest news on the War. People were only too happy to buy copies as satellite dishes were a preserve of a tiny class; erroneously canvassed and accepted that only the rich could afford them!
Ted Turner may have been making losses with CNN in far away United States but for some newspapers in Nigeria, it was harvest time, a boom season occasioned by one man’s vision buoyed by ever unfolding technology.
Since then so much have happened. Global TV became a huge success. Ted Turner took TV broadcasting into homes and hotel rooms. Among top hotel brands that I have been privileged to patronise in different parts of the world, whether in Europe, Middle East, Asia, North America or even South America, CNN is a constant factor, a primary demand by customers.
CNN was at Tiananmen Square in June 1989 to broadcast live the taking down of students who had led a seven-week bruising pro-democracy protests, demanding for reforms from the Chinese authorities. The government sent in soldiers to clear the Square not minding the bones that would be broken or the deaths recorded. It was typical China where trauma could be introduced to protect the state.
In the final hours of Mikhail Gorbachev in office in December 1991 signalling the death of the Soviet Union, CNN was present to document it for its global audience and for posterity. When Gorbachev’s pen failed to write and he stretched his hand for help, it was the network’s President Tom Johnson who handed his pen to him to sign away the control of the nuclear suitcase. That was how close they were. CNN had earned a name; respected by governments, authorities and even eccentric statesmen, among others.
The boom came for Turner who was now respected and courted at home and abroad. He married Holly Wood siren, Jane Fonda, whose fame reduced him to a number two in their social ranking. The marriage lasted 10 years. She was the third in the series.
CNN went into merger and acquisition until it was finally acquired. Billions rolled in for Turner who put his money to good use. He became a philanthropist, a Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons advocate. In 1997, he donated a whopping $1bn to the United Nations at $100m annually. He wanted to do something that could alleviate the plight of the weak, the helpless and the endangered around the world.
Turner set out as a man desperate to live life at the fullest. He achieved that and left so much more for the world to be grateful for. His global television leaves us with a mirror to assess our contributions to the peace of the world in our small corners or in high political offices. But I will always remember the business boom he brought to our newspapers in the 90s.
May his soul find a perfect place in eternity even as his memories remain perpetually assured in this part of the divide.
