Ted Turner, who died on Wednesday at 87 after a long battle with Lewy body dementia, was one of the last well-meaning liberal media barons. But almost every reform he attempted produced the opposite of what he intended. The empire he assembled now sits, piece by piece, in the hands of the Right-wingers he opposed his whole life. From cable news to professional wrestling to the studio vault to the internet itself, nearly every reform Turner championed wound up as infrastructure for MAGA.

With CNN, Turner believed a 24-hour cable news network would democratize information and broaden American horizons. What he built instead was the prototype for fragmented, partisan “newstertainment” television, which helped accelerate political polarization in the United States. CNN now occupies a diminished center ground, squeezed between more overtly partisan networks and podcasts such as Tucker Carlson’s, which routinely draw per-episode audiences far larger than CNN’s primetime line-up.

It is also set to come under the influence of David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance. Larry Ellison, David’s father and one of Donald Trump’s largest backers, is personally guaranteeing roughly $45 billion of the financing, and the elder Ellison reportedly gave Trump assurances of major changes at CNN, including various steps taken to rein in “fake news” once the deal closes.

His other media forays yielded similar results. Turner bought the Atlanta Braves in 1976 to anchor his fledgling superstation TBS. He then used the team as programming backbone, broadcasting Georgia Championship Wrestling alongside Braves baseball into homes across America with access to satellite television. Over the following decade, that hybrid sports-and-wrestling strategy evolved into what became World Championship Wrestling. By 1996 and 1997, WCW had grown into a genuine rival to Vince McMahon’s WWF, outdrawing it for much of that period.

After the AOL–Time Warner merger absorbed Turner Broadcasting in 2000, WCW was shut down in March 2001 and sold to Vince McMahon for under $5 million. WWE took its roster and video archive, effectively consolidating the multi-billion dollar industry. In September 2023, WWE merged with UFC to form TKO Group Holdings, valued at $36 billion and now led by UFC president Dana White, who spoke at the 2024 Republican convention and is a close ally of the President. Linda McMahon, Vince McMahon’s wife and former WWE CEO, currently serves as Secretary of Education in this administration.

The AOL Time Warner merger of January 2000 was Turner’s last and boldest swing of this kind. He thought traditional media could shape the internet by absorbing it. The idea was to pair Time Warner’s old-media editorial authority with AOL’s vast digital distribution. But what ended up happening was that AOL’s metrics-and-eyeballs logic ate Time Warner from the inside before the dot-com crash hollowed out both. He voted for the deal against his own better judgment, and watched the merged company post an absurd $99 billion loss in 2002. Over that two-year period, he saw roughly 80% of his wealth vanish.

Married to ardent Leftist Jane Fonda, and a billion-dollar donor to the UN, Turner also created soft-edged liberal fare like Captain Planet. He genuinely believed that expanding access to news, sport and film would yield a more informed and less parochial American public. At the same time, he hoped that it would diminish the power of Right-wing corporate oligarchs to whom he steadfastly contrasted his own benign Left-of-center management style.

This did not happen; the functional literacy of the American public has regressed and we are more polarized than ever. Unfortunately, his legacy is a country where even his loudest pro wrestlers (“rasslers,” as he called them) would struggle to be heard above the din.

---

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

MoustacheClubUS

---