‘The Mouth of the South,’ Ted Turner, Dead at 87

William Randolph Hearst was the media colossus of the first half of the 20th Century. For the second half there was an equally brash and sometimes irritating and sometimes contradictory Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III, who took his father's outdoor billboard company and transformed it into a media empire that forever redefined the business of television.

He changed the news business, he changed the entertainment business, he changed baseball and all the while still had time to win one of the greatest trophies in sports, the America's Cup, in 1977.

His Cable News Network (CNN) was derided when it launched, but it created the 24-hour news cycle. He took an obscure Atlanta independent TV station, WTCG, rebranded it Superstation WTBS, and put all 162 games of a very bad Atlanta Braves baseball team on it, offered them up to cable systems and made them "America's Team." He purchased the remains of MGM and created Turner Classic Movies. (A popular joke at the time said Turner was disappointed in his purchase, which included the classic Gone With the Wind, because the South still lost and it was already in color.) He created TNT and invested heavily in original dramas. In the '80s he would come close to grabbing CBS in a hostile takeover. He made millions of dollars, would then teeter on the edge of bankruptcy and roar back to millions - if not billions - time and again.

His personal life was just as chaotic. Married three times, he often took his mistresses to very public events. His third marriage to actress Jane Fonda lasted 10 years. Turner slipped out of the public eye in 2018 when he announced he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia.