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Ted Turner, the media baron who revolutionized TV news by launching CNN in 1980, died peacefully on Wednesday, surrounded by his family. He was 87.
The Ohio-born businessman built a media empire from his father’s billboard company after taking it over at age 24 following his father’s death by suicide. Turner created cable TV’s first superstation, bought the Atlanta Braves and Hawks and launched CNN—the first 24-hour news network. Critics called it “Chicken Noodle News,” but he proved them wrong, adding CNN2 (later HLN) in 1982 and CNN International in 1985, plus channels like TNT, Turner Classic Movies and Cartoon Network. He sold his networks to Time Warner for $7.5 billion in 1996.
Turner reinvented himself as a philanthropist after losing billions in the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger. He pledged $1 billion to the United Nations, became the second-largest landowner in North America with 2 million acres, and helped save bison from extinction with a 51,000-head herd. “What Ted made happen was just as important as the Internet revolution,” former Turner Broadcasting CEO Terry McGuirk told CNN.