There’s a version of history where the 24-hour news cycle was always going to happen — some inevitability of technology and appetite and American ambition. 

Maybe. 

And, to be fair, not everything wrong with cable news is Ted Turner’s fault. But the bickering, the infotainment, the hair-trigger volatility that has whipsawed American media for three generations — that has his fingerprints all over it. We should have seen it coming. He told us exactly what would happen. In Playboy. Nearly 50 years ago.

Ted Turner sat down with Playboy twice — once in 1978, once in 1983 — and managed, in the combined span of those two interviews, to tell us everything we needed to know to look into the future and predict what he would create. He managed to cheapen his America’s Cup win by comparing it to the crucifixion of Christ. He asked a woman at a Newport party whether she’d been laid lately. At one point, he ripped the tape recorder out of the interviewer’s hands. They were mid-flight. He threw it at the cockpit door.

The interviewer, Peter Ross Range, had accumulated nearly 800 pages of transcript from following Turner around. Part of that came from audio captured as Turner talked through an open bathroom door.

This was the man who invented 24-hour news.

Turner died Wednesday at 87, and the obituaries are landing the way they always do for complicated figures. Mostly, they’re a careful blend of awe and revisionism that smooths out the rough edges and packages the legend into something palatable. They call him a visionary and a trailblazer. They note his philanthropy. How he was a conservationist, a rancher and owned more land than almost anyone in America. His tabloid-level marriage to Jane Fonda. 

What they say more carefully, if they say it at all, is that Ted Turner also lit a fuse when he created CNN. That fuse has been burning ever since, and the thing it’s attached to is the state of American political discourse in 2026.

I worked at CNN. Not in the early days — Turner had already cashed out by the time I got there — but his ghost was everywhere. His history was recounted to me by a top executive on my very first day. It reminded me of a memorized speech you might get on a college tour. The building on Techwood Drive, where CNN launched in 1980 with 300 employees and a dream that most of the television industry considered ridiculous, had a mythology unto itself. Back then, the network was nicknamed “Chicken Noodle News.” Journalists who went to work there were considered to have made a lateral move, at best. By 2012, when I arrived, it still had some of that bootstraps-startup feel, even though it had grown to rival the largest news organizations in the world, employing over 2,000 people. Stories about Turner sleeping in an office above the newsroom with a pull-down Murphy bed still reverberated down the halls.  

That detail has always stuck with me because it captures the ethos of CNN. (And later, all of cable news.) It’s a place built on audacity. In its first year, CNN had 35 employees, reported $600,000 in revenue, and losses of $900,000. But Turner was not deterred. He had already survived worse. He’d taken over his father’s billboard company at 24, after his father died by suicide, and turned it into the only billboard company you still recognize. He’d bought a last-place baseball franchise (The Braves) and a last-place basketball franchise (The Hawks) and turned them into winners. He had, as he told Playboy in 1978, considered his purchase of the Atlanta Hawks to be “like taking over the Confederate Army on the steps of Appomattox Court House.”

The man was not calibrated to be circumspect. Not with professional risks, or personal ones. 

One particular story that loved to be told was the one about Turner wandering through the newsroom at 4 a.m. with Raquel Welch, both of them in bathrobes, introducing her to the folks working the overnight shift. It’s the kind of story that circulates in newsrooms for decades, passed down through generations of staffers who weren’t there but feel like they were, because it captures something true about the place. CNN, in its DNA, was always slightly unhinged. It was built by a man who thought the rules didn’t apply to him, in a city that wasn’t New York or Washington, staffed by journalists who didn’t get jobs at the networks. And somehow that combustible combination produced the most significant innovation in broadcast journalism history.

The idea was almost embarrassingly simple: News doesn’t stop, so why should coverage? Before CNN launched on June 1, 1980, Turner announced they wouldn’t be signing off until the world ends. No, actually, that’s not right. It was that they would cover the end of the world live. That, and only that, would be their last event. He commissioned a recording of “Nearer My God to Thee” to be held in the vault for that occasion, just in case.

As a CNN employee, I had recurring dreams about that. Many of us did. This was the kind of newsroom that attracted journalists with that much adrenaline, that much devotion to the incessant beast of news. It can totally consume you, if you’ll let it.

Turner built something that changed everything about how Americans receive information. CNN helped fundamentally alter the format and speed of TV news, laying the path for competitors like Fox News and MSNBC. And therein lies the problem. Turner’s original vision — relentless, global, nonpartisan coverage — was a genuine attempt to shrink the world and hold power accountable. What it actually created was the infrastructure for its own corruption. A 24-hour cycle is a beast that needs to be fed, constantly. And the easiest way to feed it is outrage. Conflict. The same tension, recycled every 48 hours with a new chyron.

Turner himself seemed to understand this danger better than anyone. He wanted CNN to reflect news and not ideology. He believed — perhaps naïvely, perhaps not — that if people around the world could see each other’s stories, they might stop wanting to kill each other. By the time Fox News launched in 1996, Turner was already losing his grip on his network. He called Rupert Murdoch a warmonger and challenged him to a fistfight in Las Vegas. Murdoch declined. Of course he did. Murdoch didn’t need to fight. He had already won the year before when Fox surpassed CNN in the ratings. 

The 1978 Playboy interview is worth reading in full, not because Turner says anything particularly profound, but because of what he reveals without meaning to. He is restless and self-aware and completely without filter. He is a man who knows he is performing and can’t stop anyway. He frets about the difference between being colorful and being an asshole. He quotes the poet, Omar Khayyám, in the middle of a conversation about baseball. The second interview, five years later, ends with him destroying a tape recorder at 30,000 feet.

He is, in other words, exactly the kind of person who would decide that America needed news on television 24 hours a day. Because the world, to Ted Turner, was never something that could be paused.

Now, 46 years later, we are living in the world he made. The partisan bickering, the endless cycle, the algorithm-friendly outrage machine that cable news became — none of it would exist without Ted Turner. Neither would the footage of the Berlin Wall coming down, or the Gulf War broadcast live into American living rooms, or a generation of journalists who learned their craft in a newsroom that took the whole thing seriously enough to never turn off the lights.

Ted Turner was a lot of things. He was never boring. And in the business of news, that turned out to matter more than anyone expected — for better, and for worse.