Ted Turner, the billionaire media owner who has died at age 87, was famous, when not actually notorious, for a range of achievements and characteristics equalled by few humans. Reticence was not one of his virtues and he more than earned his nickname, The Mouth of the South, a sobriquet he loathed.
There were famous public battles with other media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch. Turner called Murdoch a “scumbag” and “Schlockmeister”. Murdoch’s News Corp responded by calling Turner a cultivator of dictators who had “sold out to the establishment in his declining years”. But on the day of his death in 2026, Murdoch said Turner was “a great American and friend”.
For most it would have been achievement enough to create a multibillion-dollar media empire from unpromising origins in the southern US city of Atlanta. Yet Turner also decided to take the risk and endure the inevitable mockery involved in setting up the world’s first 24-hour television news channel, which changed the way news is reported and perceived.