By Stephen Smoot
Ted Turner died last week at the age of 87.
For better or worse, Ted Turner served as the father or grandfather of so much of the modern media environment though little of it in 2026, perhaps none of it, would have met his approval.
Turner was one of the last major figures to truly live in the belief of the Whig theory of history. This ideal, first articulated by a Cambridge don named Herbert Butterfield in 1931, created a category that described a historical movement that few recognized until him.
Butterfield examined the 19th century historical luminaries of Britain, including G. M. Trevelyan and Thomas Macaulay. He saw in their, and several other notables, common threads about their examination of English and British history. For the most part, their works portrayed a Britain emerging from the Middle Ages into modernity as elements of progress battled and overcame those of reaction or dangerous radicalism.
Trevelyan, for instance, explained the rise of the English middle class as coming from relatively massive concentrations of wealth in the hands of the nobility many centuries ago. Over time, the dissolute members of such families overspent. Commoners used their skills to satisfy the desires of the nobility for goods and services.
He explained that commoners’ work for the nobility effected a massive, if gradual, transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor. Exceptional businessmen endeavored to expand their commerce abroad, also helping to create English, and later British, maritime power.
Whiggish historians also focused on the actions of “great men” such as King Henry II, Sir William Blackstone, even British enemies such as George Washington. They saw their initiative as one of the driving forces of history. Whiggish historians were countered on the right by Lord Acton and on the Left by A. J. P. Taylor who, for different reasons, found that vision overly simplistic despite its compelling argument.
Turner did not merely believe in that ideal of history. He lived it through a series of endeavors that he felt would help a better world emerge from the late Cold War world.
He shared with President Ronald Reagan a determination to exorcise nuclear weapons from the globe, though the men differed greatly on how to accomplish that. The President wished to create technology that would make the weapons useless. Turner focused instead on disarmament. The world now has much less of such armaments and also the technology to intercept them, so both men partially won out, which both would see as great progress at least in that field.
Turner also tried to counter the intense competition between the free world and the Communist in the Olympics by founding a rival “Goodwill Games” that focused on common humanity over international rivalry.
Born in Ohio, but later called “the Mouth of the South” after setting his home base in Atlanta, Turner bankrolled two films about the Civil War. These two truly epic films focused on the nobility of the men fighting for both the Union and the Confederate States. Fellow passionate liberal Martin Sheen and then Robert Duvall gave two masterful portrayals of the great Robert E. Lee. in the films that focused on Gettysburg and also the service of Harrison County native Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
The work he supported also starred Jeff Daniels, Stephen Lang, Mira Sorvino, and featured United States Senator Robert C. Byrd as Brigadier General Paul J. Semmes (CSA).
Turner’s projects almost always had a common theme of bringing opposing sides together, whether it be Civil War or Cold War antagonists, for understanding rather than picking apart their differences and looking for enemies to punish.
His real stamp on history comes in how he utterly transformed the media landscape permanently.
Until the 1970s, television came from the three major networks via broadcasts of their affiliate stations. Then came the innovation of television brought direct to the home via cable. When combined with communication satellites, it provided the opportunity for a media outlet to broadcast live almost anywhere.
Turner purchased a television station in Atlanta and renamed it WTBS. He bought the rights to Atlanta Braves baseball and worked on getting WTBS in every cable system with the promise of baseball multiple nights a week. Sure, the Braves performed poorly in most of the early years, but baseball starved fans tuned in. WTBS also started rolling out popular syndicated reruns of classic favorites.
That was only the appetizer, however. Turner’s next big dream was to bring understanding to the world through 24 hour news. He established Cable News Network (CNN) for in depth coverage. Headline News was initially a repeating 30 minute segment of top headlines that would change when necessary through the day. One did not have to wait for the 6:30 network “national news” anymore.
Critics noted a liberal bias, but that was the passive type articulated by Bernie Goldberg of CBS News. Goldberg explained that a newsroom that is ideologically the same will see themselves as the “center” and interpret the news accordingly. That was not Turner’s intent; he trusted in the ideal of journalistic objectivity.
For a time, CNN had a monopoly on such news. Then came two newcomers in the 1990s that both offered a conservative alternative. Few will remember the conservative years of MSNBC when Tucker Carlson was their main draw, but Fox News regularly topped both in the ratings, which pushed MSNBC to the left of CNN.
Turner’s honest idealism did not quite fit neat ideological bound aries because those did not define him so much as his own sense of purpose and drive to better the world in any way he could.
His magnum opus (as Charlotte the spider would translate, his “great work”) led to the proliferation of news all day, creating “news junkies.” The emergence of online news, forecast in the 1980s to great ridicule by Louisville Courier-News publisher Barry Bingham Jr., would build on the “news now” model. The public grew impatient to wait for explanations of breaking news, leading to disastrous mistakes created by rushing the news to the fore too soon, creating real negative impacts.
History, however, extends much longer than a few decades. The Whiggish historian would state that there is naturally a sorting out period for something so new and that future generations will tire of chaos and prefer standards to the Wild West style of journalism today.
It does not matter, however, that those who came after Turner turned the ideal of the permanent news cycle into something negative and even destructive. He gave people the tools. It was their choice on how to use them. Meanwhile, the ripple effects have widened the gaps between right and left, between cities and the countryside, and in many other ways.
Do not remember Ted Turner for that. Remember Ted Turner as the “Mouth of the South” with a big heart for humanity in both his wisest moments and also his sometimes excessively hopeful efforts at peace crafting.
