Billionaire edia mogul, conservationist and philanthropist Ted Turner, who died Wednesday at 87, blended his interests in sports, business and news to foster cross-border human connections he believed would contribute to world peace.
His legacy of cultivating shared interests as a means to reconcilation is especially poignant as Atlanta, the city where he built a media empire starting with the launch of the satellite network Turner Broadcasting System in the 1970s, gets set to host the FIFA World Cup.
FIFA as a soccer governing body has been embattled, but using sport to transcend political differences is a well-established enterprise Mr. Turner embraced heartily.
The Goodwill Games, which he founded (and funded) in the 1980s after the Olympic boycotts of Moscow and Los Angeles, sought to shift the focus back to friendly competition amid growing geopolitical rivaly beteween the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
In a 2015 speech to the Technology Assocation of Georgia, he lamented not the loss of billions of dollars in the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s, but the fact that AOL-TIme Warner discontinued the global sporting event after their 2001 merger.
“I never would have done that,” the Atlanta Braves owner of two decades, whose name graced the former Olympic stadium in Atlanta, said at the time.
In an interview this week, civil rights legend, U.N. ambassador and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young said Mr. Turner’s audacity, and his belief in the transcendent power of sports and dediation to Atlanta, were integral to the city’s push to attract the Olympics Games in 1996.
The successful bid not only touched off the city’s ascent as a cosmopolitan global business hub, but also paved the way for eight matches of the world’s largest tournament 30 years later.
Mr. Turner also founded CNN which joined the ranks of Coca-Cola Co. as a household name that gave some shine to Atlanta’s brand in the halls of power around the world.
Mr. Turner insisted that the network use its satellite connectivity to expand even into the furthest reaches of the developing world, betting that leaders would need access to information even when common people had yet to
“(CNN) succeeded beyond my expectations, but not much, because I had very high expectations,” Mr. Turner said at the time.
That reflects in part Mr. Turner’s belief in the power of international business to increase the world’s economic integration, placing a pragmatic check, if not a brake, on cross-border conflict.
“It’s really kind of dumb to bomb your customers, or even threaten to bomb them,” he said while being inducted into the TAG Hall of Fame in 2015.
In 1993, TBS even created Turner Reciprocal Advertising Corp., to facilitate barter payments for sponsorships of the Goodwill Games via product instead currency. The structure led to the Colombian coffee federation forking over beans instead of pesos for distribution in Russia by a German company, all in exchange for advertising during the sporting events.
As creative as he was on the business front, the Atlanta innovator didn’t discount the disciplines of dialogue and diplomacy, illustrated by his $1 billion donation to the United Nations founation, the largest philanthropic gift ever bequeathed at the time.
And his love for humanity extended to the broader planet: Beyond his purchase and conservation of more than 2 million acres in the American West, which made him one of the largest private landowners in the United States, Mr. Turner engaged in earth-friendly activism in myriad other ways. He helped bring back the bison, accelerated the Fossey Fund’s gorilla conservation work in Africa and founded the Captain Planet Foundation, which used a cartoon superhero, made famous on Mr. Turner’s own Cartoon Network, to inspire young people to participate in solving the world’s enviornmental problems. He also advocated for the use of renewable energy, voluntary curbs on population growth and the sunsetting of fossil fuels.
Read our 2015 coverage: Ted Turner Pushes to Reconcile Conflicts, Restore Environment
