With his swagger, his audacity, his sheer will, Ted Turner changed the world. And today the world is reflecting on what he achieved.
Turner, the founder of CNN, died this morning, surrounded by family.
"A legend, he revolutionized the television business by creating the first 24-hour news channel right here at CNN," Wolf Blitzer said as he announced Turner's death on the air.
"We're all here doing this because of Ted," Blitzer's co-anchor Pamela Brown said.
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There will be so much to say about Turner in the coming days. Our CNN.com obit, which Ann O'Neill started writing many years ago, and I updated in recent months, is 2,496 words, and it's just the beginning. It is almost impossible to distill Turner's life into a paragraph.
Beyond his media empire, Turner was also an internationally known yachtsman, a philanthropist who founded the United Nations Foundation, an activist who sought the worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons, and a conservationist who became one of the foremost landowners in the United States. He played a crucial role in reintroducing bison to the American West. He even created the Captain Planet cartoon to educate kids about the environment.
But it was his extraordinary vision to deliver news from around the world in real time, at all hours, that really made him famous — once his idea finally took off.
Turner saw a chance to challenge the Big Three broadcast networks and beat them at their own newsgathering game.
Banks scoffed at his Cable News Network plan. Potential partners rejected him. Newspaper owners mocked the idea. But he persevered and won.
After CNN, "everything was a copy, if I dare say so myself, and not the best copies," Christiane Amanpour said on the air during our special coverage this morning. "He was the original. He made us all proud, he made us all hopeful, and he made us all strive for his vision of a better world."
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Turner lived with Lewy body dementia for nearly a decade. In recent days, I'm told, he transitioned to hospice care. As family gathered by his bedside, I re-read his memoir "Call Me Ted," and some of his past essays and speeches. He once explained his success with CNN this way: "We put journalism first, and that's how we built CNN into something the world wanted to watch."
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'The presiding spirit of CNN' |
So many thousands of people owe their careers and livelihoods to Turner. And we're hearing from many of them this morning — as well as friends, mentees, competitors and biographers.
"I truly loved the guy," a close friend of Ted's, former CNN president Tom Johnson, told Blitzer by phone.
"We just need his type today," former CNN CEO Walter Isaacson said a few minutes later. "People who don't fear power but want to cover it."
Current CNN CEO Mark Thompson said in a statement, "Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement. He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand, and we will all take a moment today to recognize him and his impact on our lives and the world."
Indeed, there is much to learn from Turner, especially today.
Mark Lazarus, a former head of Turner Sports who now runs Versant, wrote on LinkedIn, "I saw firsthand his willingness to take risks and his belief that media could be something bigger and more impactful. He pushed all of us to think beyond what was comfortable. His legacy is not just in what he built, but in how he inspired others to build. The industry will be served well if we can all 'find our inner Ted.' He will be remembered for generations."
As fellow media mogul John Malone once wrote, CNN was Turner's "most beloved property of all." Turner regretted selling, and he worried about the network even into his octogenarian years.
But through it all, through all the changes in ownership, CNN endures. When I walked into CNN's Burbank bureau the other day, whose face was on the wall in the lobby? Turner's face. There was also a famous quote of his on the wall: "Do something. Either lead, follow or get out of the way."
Turner created something that outlasted him. That's his legacy. His immortality. And today, especially, the CNN staff feels that obligation to carry it forward.
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You can read our obit here and live-stream CNN's special live coverage here.
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Trump's imaginary CNN poll |
With President Trump, sometimes a seemingly random aside can reveal something much bigger about his media consumption and understanding of the world.
"I am at, according to CNN, 100% approval within the Republican Party," he said yesterday.
There is no such CNN poll. But Trump, during a photo op with schoolchildren, said, "I'm at 100% approval. Did you see the CNN poll? Nobody talks about it."
Nobody talks about it because it's not real. But Trump invoked this stat repeatedly in March, April and now May, apparently reacting to a segment that CNN's Harry Enten led back on March 18. He showed a poll by NBC News, not CNN, that showed him with a 100% approval rating among self-identified MAGA voters.
To Trump's fans, that poll crosstab is proof of loyalty. To critics, it's a sign of a cult. To most people, it's probably not worth a second thought. But that clip of Enten from March made quite an impression on the president. "CNN, I think the people that did that poll probably got fired," he said yesterday.
Again: It wasn't a CNN poll, it's not a new poll, and his depiction is not an accurate recitation of what the poll said. Just another day in trying to translate Trump-speak...
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Losing the 'normie Republicans' |
Jake Tapper picked up on Trump's misportrayal and pointed followers to a new CNN feature by Aaron Blake, Amy O'Kruk, Koko Nakajima, and Ariel Edwards-Levy charting "how Trump became a historically unpopular president."
Between March 2025 and March 2026, Tapper noted, Trump support among Republicans "has gone from 90% to 80% and strong support from 64% to 43%."
Kristen Soltis Anderson captured this phenomenon in an NYT essay titled "Trump Is Losing Normie Republicans" earlier this week. She wrote that most of these "normies" "report watching Fox News, and most hold deeply unfavorable views of the Democratic Party and its most prominent voices. They are, by and large, voters who think of themselves as conservative and Republican — firmly so." But they're GOP-first, not Trump-first, she wrote, and "have displayed increasing disaffection with the direction of the country under his leadership."
The Fox News mention is really important IMHO. While Fox "has largely remained in lockstep with the administration," as Natalie Korach wrote for Status the other day, many other outlets on the right increasingly seem willing to break with the president on certain issues.
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Given what the polls are actually saying about the public's mood, it's no wonder that Trump is glomming onto a "100%" claim.
One of today's top stories on NPR's "Morning Edition" was a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll showing Trump "more unpopular than he ever has been" for some specific reasons, including fallout from the war with Iran. "With gas prices continuing to surge, more than 8 in 10 Americans said pain at the pump is putting a strain on their household budgets — and a strong majority blames President Trump," according to the poll.
The price of gas is a cold, hard fact for every driver — not a scandalous news headline that can be spun, not an anonymously sourced report that can be rebuffed, not a damning allegation that can be both-sides-ed away.
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>> "The Operation Epic Fury is concluded," Marco Rubio said yesterday. "For the White House, the insistence that the war was over was the latest rhetorical leap in an effort to put a war that has created the greatest political crisis of Mr. Trump's presidency in the rearview mirror," David Sanger wrote. "But the mere proclamation does not make it true." (NYT)
>> KFILE found that Dr. Nicole Saphier, the Fox News medical contributor Trump just picked to be surgeon general, deleted a bunch of tweets attacking Trump and RFK Jr.'s health policies and claims. (CNN)
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Disney's first earnings report card under new CEO |
Liam Reilly writes: Disney shares are up about 7% this morning after the House of Mouse reported its Q2 earnings. The company "posted strong results" for the quarter, "beginning the Josh D’Amaro era with a bang," Deadline's Dade Hayes writes, noting "total revenue increased 7% from the year-ago period to reach almost $25.2 billion."
>> CNBC's Lillian Rizzo noted that "the company’s experiences segment, which includes Disney’s theme parks and cruises, reported nearly $9.5 billion in revenue, up 7% year over year."
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Fewer earnings reports, fewer Q's? |
As Wall Street regulators clear the way for companies to "switch from quarterly to twice-annual earnings reports," media giants could use the change to "smooth out financial woes," the aforementioned Alex Weprin points out:
"If companies like Netflix, Disney or Paramount choose to report semiannually instead of quarterly (it will be a choice, the SEC notes), datapoints like subscriber numbers (both streaming subscribers, but also pay-TV subscribers as reported by cable companies), as well as ad sales trends, could be shielded from view, or choppiness could be smoothed out."
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A Murdoch makes a play for NY Mag |
James Murdoch has spent years distancing himself from his family's media empire. Now, he's making a bid to build one of his own.
Murdoch's investment company,
Lupa Systems, is in talks to acquire New York magazine and Vox Media's podcast network — home to shows like "Pivot" and "Today, Explained" — for $300 million or more, per two people with knowledge of the discussions.
The WSJ's Jessica Toonkel broke the news of the talks yesterday. It's unclear whether other bidders are actively engaged at this point.
>> "Buying 'New York' would be more akin to being a steward to one of the magazine world’s last standing giants — and it's a publication that was also owned by his father for a 15-year run until Rupert's News Corp divested of its holdings in 1991 sale," THR's Erik Hayden writes, noting "there’s a 'Succession' and media dynasty element to the potential deal as well."
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EEOC files suit against NYT |
Liam Reilly writes: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit against The New York Times yesterday on behalf of a White male employee who claims he was denied a promotion because of his race and gender. The Times said it "categorically rejects the politically motivated allegations." Read my story here.
>> The EEOC's lone Democrat, Kalpana Kotagal, said she feared that the lawsuit was driven "not by the merits, but by a desire to advance the administration's political agenda."
>> NYMag's Charlotte Klein says "reporters at the paper have been scrambling to figure out the employee's identity, driven in part by bafflement that one of their own colleagues would sell out the paper to the administration, which has used tools of the federal government to attack the press." The person being named as the one who instigated the complaint has not commented, as far as I can tell...
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In other NYT news today... |
The New York Times Company "now has 13.1 million subscribers, the company said on Wednesday, after adding about 310,000 digital-only subscribers in the first quarter of the year," Katie Robertson reports. Here's her full earnings recap... |
Taibbi's suit against a journalist gets dismissed |
Matt Taibbi’s defamation case against Eoin Higgins and Hachette was dismissed on Tuesday. The case revolved around Higgins' book "Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left."
"From what I can tell, this case wasn't filed to win," Higgins wrote, but, rather, to "harass me to cost me time and money and to make publishers think twice about working with me in the future" and to put "other would-be critics on notice that if you come for Taibbi, he'll make it cost you." Taibbi has yet to weigh in on the court's ruling...
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Publishers sue Meta over AI training |
Another major book industry challenge to large language model training: "Five major publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage — and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg," the NYT's Alexandra Alter scooped yesterday.
>> A Meta rep said it would "fight this lawsuit aggressively" and framed the matter this way: "AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use."
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🐝 Making the National Spelling Bee even better |
Best casting news of the week: ESPN reporter "Mina Kimes is taking over as television host of the Scripps National Spelling Bee," The AP's Ben Nuckols reports. Scripps "has also brought in a new production team for the broadcast, led by Michael Davies — currently the executive producer of 'Jeopardy!' — as it seeks to reverse a decline in ratings." Kimes said, "My goal in this is to give it the big-game feel..."
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