Ted Turner: Of Two Minds and Two Worlds
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The American media mogul and icon Ted Turner has died at age 87. Although he was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, his family soon moved to Georgia. He will long be remembered as the “Mouth of the South,” who instigated a revolution in 24-hour news, raising the bar with CNN and christening the era of cable news.
Turner was a most complex figure who suffered from schizophrenia and took large doses of lithium to combat it. He led a life of manic depression, caused in part by the suicide of his own father at 53 and difficulties inherent in combating mental illness. That should serve as both a warning and a compliment, as his achievements are balanced with his defeats.
Ted was a bombastic soul who developed a business no one thought possible. He was also a great sailor and won the America’s Cup. He owned the Atlanta Braves and took them on to win the World Series. I knew and worked with him back in the days when he was talking about what he called “building the integrated global economy.” He saw where the world was headed and became an early disciple of globalization before it was all the rage. He half-jokingly said he (CNN) won the first Gulf War with their constant and inside coverage. It transformed news forever.
What Ted fell for was a mistaken view of what all that coming change meant. It went on to become an anti-American stance (supported by his third wife, Jane Fonda) that globalization needed to morph into the left-wing ideology we now know as globalism. Ted, however, was not as accomplished at running organizations as he was at starting them, so he sold out too early and, in the process, lost a fortune.
With what he had left, he went on to fund silly forms of environmentalism, the reintroduction of bison, and most concerningly, the United Nations and its push for world government. He gave the UN a billion dollars, a large part of his wealth, before he died. That is for an organization that stinks so clearly of corruption from the top down. Ted could be naïve even if he was also clever and entrepreneurial. He was also erratic: In one moment, loving and praising someone, while in the next, throwing a telephone at that person while using seven F bombs in a single sentence.
Still, he was able to take his father’s regional billboard empire and, through innovation, acquisition, and sheer force of personality, turn it into a media giant. He helped revive America’s interest in classic films through Turner Classic Movies, even as his colorization efforts were controversial. He produced films, too, such as the Civil War classics Gettysburg and Gods and Generals. Like his sailboat in the America’s Cup, he was nothing if not Courageous.
A brash personality, Turner was savvy and visionary, but in the end, he was also a failed tycoon. He went from liberal to progressive to globalist over a span of two decades, and in his later years was seldom seen or heard. I liked and enjoyed Ted’s company, with his wily grin and pencil mustache. He was good at a quip, often funny, and insightful, but he lacked intellectual rigor and often spoke what can only be called nonsense.
To cite just one instance, in public, his anti-religious views cast him as the ultimate skeptic- unbeliever. He wondered out loud whether there was a God and whether the Ten Commandments would have been better framed as “suggestions.” Turner was a bundle of contradictions in that regard. Perhaps he embodied the Old West pioneer spirit alongside the new-fangled globalism of recent decades—imagining some “idealized” world he longed for but would never be. That ideal he imagined is a distant stretch from the realism we all witnessed in the failure of the new world (dis)order.
Ted Turner was of two minds and two worlds.
RIP.
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