Ted Turner, founder of CNN and pioneer of 24-hour cable news, dies at 87

Ted Turner launched CNN on June 1, 1980, at a converted Jewish country club in Atlanta, making it the first continuous, all-news television network in the United States. The network broadcast news around the clock from that point on and built a global array of bureaus, according to NPR. Turner, born Robert Edward Turner III in Cincinnati on November 19, 1938, had entered media at age 24 by taking over his father's billboard company after his father's suicide in 1963, then branched into television in 1970 by acquiring a struggling Atlanta UHF station, according to CNN and AP.

Turner transformed that station into cable TV's first superstation — TBS — by beaming its signal via satellite beginning December 17, 1976, according to AP. He acquired the Atlanta Braves baseball team to secure content for the channel, and the team went on to appear repeatedly in the World Series during the 1990s. In the 1980s, Turner went into debt to acquire MGM's library of more than 4,000 films, a move that eventually led to the launch of TNT and Turner Classic Movies, as well as the Cartoon Network after he acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, according to AP and CNN.

CNN's profile rose sharply during the Gulf War in 1991, when it was the only U.S. network broadcasting live from Baghdad as the conflict began. Turner was named Time magazine's Man of the Year that same year. In 1996, he sold Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner for approximately $7.3–$7.5 billion in stock — a deal he later said he regretted, telling an interviewer, "The mistake I made was losing control of the company," according to AP. A subsequent merger with AOL in 2000, which Turner opposed, resulted in a record $99 billion loss and is considered one of the worst mergers in U.S. corporate history, according to CNN and NPR.