This was the man who invented 24-hour news.
Turner died Wednesday at 87, and the obituaries are landing the way they always do for complicated figures. Mostly, they’re a careful blend of awe and revisionism that smooths out the rough edges and packages the legend into something palatable. They call him a visionary and a trailblazer. They note his philanthropy. How he was a conservationist, a rancher and owned more land than almost anyone in America. His tabloid-level marriage to Jane Fonda.
What they say more carefully, if they say it at all, is that Ted Turner also lit a fuse when he created CNN. That fuse has been burning ever since, and the thing it’s attached to is the state of American political discourse in 2026.
I worked at CNN. Not in the early days — Turner had already cashed out by the time I got there — but his ghost was everywhere. His history was recounted to me by a top executive on my very first day. It reminded me of a memorized speech you might get on a college tour. The building on Techwood Drive, where CNN launched in 1980 with 300 employees and a dream that most of the television industry considered ridiculous, had a mythology unto itself. Back then, the network was nicknamed “Chicken Noodle News.” Journalists who went to work there were considered to have made a lateral move, at best. By 2012, when I arrived, it still had some of that bootstraps-startup feel, even though it had grown to rival the largest news organizations in the world, employing over 2,000 people. Stories about Turner sleeping in an office above the newsroom with a pull-down Murphy bed still reverberated down the halls.
That detail has always stuck with me because it captures the ethos of CNN, Sarah Ganim writes.
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