NEW YORK (AP) — Ted Turner, a brash television pioneer who raced yachts, owned huge chunks of the American West and transformed the news business by launching CNN and introducing the 24-hour cable news cycle, died Wednesday. He was 87.
Turner died surrounded by his family, according to Turner Enterprises, the company that oversees his vast business interests.
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FILE - Ted Turner, owner of the Atlanta Braves, took over as manager of the Braves prior to the game, May 11, 1977, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo, File)
FILE - Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner watches his team in action against the St. Louis Cardinals during the first National League Championship game, Oct. 6, 1982, St. Louis. (AP Photo/Rusty Kennedy, File)
FILE - Actress Jane Fonda and CNN founder Ted Turner pose together at the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership Dinner, Nov. 6, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)
FILE - Ted Turner is seen at his desk inside the CNN Center in 1982. (Nancy Mangiafico/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
FILE - Ted Turner speaks during the CNN World Report Contributors banquet in Atlanta on May 4, 1995. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three women — most famously actor Jane Fonda — and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”
He once bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
He was slowed in later years by Lewy body dementia. Long out of the television business, he concentrated on philanthropy.
His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in 1996, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.
President Donald Trump, reacting to Turner's death, called him “one of the Greats of All Time.”
Turner’s signature achievement was creating the Cable News Network, the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980. In part, Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked past 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air.
He took a chance by starting the operation in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.
CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad but CNN stayed, capturing arresting images of a war’s outbreak.
Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.
“The mistake I made was losing control of the company," he later said.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University, Turner came to Atlanta to work for his domineering father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.
On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems across the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation.
TBS’ motley collection of old movies and sitcom reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted fans nationwide through their superstation exposure.
In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with skepticism. But the acquisition gave his company a library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks.
He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.
Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of southern Plains bison.
He had a net worth of $2.5 billion in 2023 but had dropped off Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money,” Turner once said.
Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus freaks,” later apologizing for both remarks.
Turner, the father of five children, grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to give $1 billion to United Nations charities.
He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
As he poured millions into nonprofits on a global scale, Turner was also fond of spreading his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a blaze on one of his ranches.
Bauder, a longtime media writer, retired from The Associated Press in 2026. Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.
FILE - Ted Turner, owner of the Atlanta Braves, took over as manager of the Braves prior to the game, May 11, 1977, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo, File)
FILE - Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner watches his team in action against the St. Louis Cardinals during the first National League Championship game, Oct. 6, 1982, St. Louis. (AP Photo/Rusty Kennedy, File)
FILE - Actress Jane Fonda and CNN founder Ted Turner pose together at the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership Dinner, Nov. 6, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)
FILE - Ted Turner is seen at his desk inside the CNN Center in 1982. (Nancy Mangiafico/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
FILE - Ted Turner speaks during the CNN World Report Contributors banquet in Atlanta on May 4, 1995. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
PRAIA, Cape Verde (AP) — Three cruise ship passengers with suspected hantavirus infections were being flown to the Netherlands for treatment Wednesday. Three people have died, and the World Health Organization says there are eight cases, five of them confirmed.
About 150 passengers are trapped isolating in their cabins aboard the Dutch ship at the center of the outbreak. The MV Hondius is near the Cape Verde islands off West Africa, waiting to sail to Spain’s Canary Islands. Officials say those on board show no symptoms.
Hantavirus is a rare, rodent-borne illness that usually spreads when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings. The Argentine government’s leading hypothesis is that a Dutch couple contracted the virus during a bird-watching outing at a garbage dump before boarding, according to two officials. The cruise ship departed Argentina on April 1.
The WHO says the risk to the global population from this outbreak is low, with the organization’s top epidemic expert telling The Associated Press, “This is not the next COVID.”
Here’s the latest:
The World Health Organization had previously confirmed three cases and five suspected ones.
Ann Lindstrand, the WHO representative in Cape Verde, said in a phone interview that a sample from the third patient evacuated from the ship is still being checked.
“So far of all the cases related to this boat, the eight cases, we now have five confirmed with laboratory testing for Andes virus,” she said. “So it’s quite a lot.”
Two passengers left the cruise ship in South Africa. One has died and the other remains hospitalized.
Health officials in that country have identified 62 people — airplane passengers, airport workers, health workers, hospital cleaners, port of entry officials — who likely had contact with those two patients.
So far, officials have tracked down 42 of them, and none tested positive for hantavirus. However, some of the 20 people still being traced may have now traveled overseas, the health ministry said in a report.
A plane evacuating two of the patients with suspected hantavirus infections from the cruise ship off Cape Verde is stopping at an airport in the Canary Islands to refuel, the Spanish health ministry said.
A flight tracker showed the small plane circling near the island of Gran Canaria where it is expected to make its short stop before continuing on to the Netherlands.
Samples taken earlier from the patients now evacuated from the ship were examined and also confirmed to be the Andes type, the World Health Organization said at a briefing Wednesday.
The WHO says the Andes virus is found in South America, primarily in Argentina and Chile, and can spread between people, though that’s rare and only through close contact.
The cruise ship will be leaving Cape Verde in around two hours and has gotten medical reinforcement after its doctor became sick and was evacuated, Ann Lindstrand, WHO representative in Cape Verde, said at the briefing.
“One medical doctor from WHO ... will be taking care of patients if there will be more cases on board,” Lindstrand said.
The World Health Organization’s top epidemic expert told the AP that the risk to the public is low, and the Andes type of the hantavirus is known — even if the WHO has never seen a hantavirus outbreak on a ship.
“This is not the next Covid, but it is a serious infectious disease,” Maria Van Kerkhove said. “Most people will never be exposed to this.”
For those on the ship, access to clinical care is important, she said, because infected people can develop severe acute respiratory distress and need oxygen or mechanical ventilation. The hantavirus incubation period can be one to six weeks, or more, she added.
Two Argentine officials investigating the origins of the hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship that sailed from southern Argentina say the government’s leading hypothesis is that a Dutch couple contracted the virus during a bird-watching outing in the city of Ushuaia before boarding.
They said the couple visited a landfill during the bird-watching tour where they may have been exposed to rodents carrying the infection.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media, with the investigation ongoing. Previously authorities said that Ushuaia and the surrounding province of Tierra del Fuego had never recorded a case of the hantavirus.
— By Isabel DeBre
Oceanwide Expeditions says they are being taken by specially equipped planes to “locations able to provide specialized care and appropriate medical screening.”
A Dutch hospital has confirmed it will take one of the people, and German authorities say they are preparing to pick up a second from the Netherlands.
The Dutch company says two of the people medically evacuated “remain in a serious condition.” The third has no symptoms but was “closely associated” with a passenger who died May 2.
The company also says that it is “expanding medical care on board with two infectious disease physicians, arriving today by plane from the Netherlands.”
The Leiden University Medical Center says the department where the patient will be seen is well prepared.
In a statement posted on its website, the hospital said, “In addition to isolation rooms for patients, all protective equipment for our staff is available. Treatment takes place in strict isolation, following the applicable protocols. The LUMC has specialized isolation facilities."
It also seeks to reassure other visitors to the hospital, saying patients or visitors “run no risk of infection. You do not need to take any special measures. You can continue to visit as usual.”
In Germany, the Düsseldorf University Clinic said that one of the three passengers who was evacuated from the ship and is being flown to the Netherlands, who was in contact with one of the hantavirus cases on board the ship, would be brought to the hospital for testing later Wednesday.
It said in a statement that the person would be brought to Düsseldorf from an unspecified Dutch airport with the help of specialists from the city’s fire service.
The hospital stressed that the patient is asymptomatic and that the testing is a precaution.
The arrival of the boat “won’t represent any risk for the public,” Spanish Health Minister Mónica García said.
She said that the boat will arrive at a secondary port on the island of Tenerife, which is located 10 minutes from an airport. From there, the roughly 140 passengers will be repatriated to their home countries.
García said that the operation to send the passengers and crew home will be overseen by the European Union’s civil protection program.
The 14 Spaniards who are on board will be flown by military plane to the mainland, where, if necessary, they will be kept in quarantine.
The regional president of Spain’s Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, said Wednesday that the Hondius had requested permission for the ship to dock on the island of Tenerife on May 9.
Clavijo, however, expressed his surprise that the passengers were being forced “to travel for three days” instead of flying to their homes from the airport in Praia.
He also complained that central authorities in Madrid had not informed him of the details of the circumstances on board the vessel, a situation that limited local health officials’ ability to prepare for its arrival.
“We still don’t know the status of all the passengers,” he said. “There is no protocol for this.”
Oceanwide Expeditions said Tuesday evening that two specialized aircraft were flying to Cape Verde to evacuate two people who need urgent medical care and one person who was traveling with a German woman who died on board Saturday. They were to be taken to the Netherlands, though exactly when that would happen was not immediately clear.
Once the medical evacuation happens, the ship plans to sail to the Canary Islands, either Gran Canaria or Tenerife, a voyage of some three days, the company said in its statement, adding that “discussions are ongoing with relevant authorities.”
Spanish health officials had said in an earlier statement that they were monitoring and that “the most appropriate port of call will be decided. Until then, the Ministry of Health will not adopt any decision, as we have informed the World Health Organization.”
The World Health Organization has said the ship had an itinerary that included stops across the South Atlantic Ocean, including mainland Antarctica and the remote islands of South Georgia, Nightingale Island, Tristan da Cunha, St. Helena and Ascension.
The cruise company has only announced some details of two stops: at St. Helena, where the body of the Dutch man suspected to be the first hantavirus case on board was taken off the ship. His wife also left the ship at St. Helena and flew to South Africa, where she died.
The company said a British man was later evacuated from the ship at Ascension Island and taken to South Africa, where he is in an intensive care unit.
The company has not said if other people left the cruise ship at those or other locations.
The cruise ship will be welcomed to Spain’s Canary Islands, according to Spanish authorities, as the vessel waited off the coast of West Africa for a third day Wednesday for sick passengers to be evacuated.
The regional president of Spain’s Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, said Wednesday that he was worried the arrival of the ship could put the local population at risk and demanded an urgent meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
“Neither the populace nor the government of the Canary Islands can rest assured because it is clear that the danger to the population is real,” Clavijo told Onda Cero radio.
South African health authorities said they identified the Andes strain of hantavirus in two passengers who were on the ship, and Swiss authorities said they identified the same virus in their affected patient.
The World Health Organization says the Andes virus, a specific species of hantavirus, is found in South America, primarily in Argentina and Chile.
The Andes virus can be spread between people, though this is rare and the spread of the disease is typically contained because it would spread only through close contact, such as by sharing a bed or sharing food, experts say.
The South African Department of Health said its results came from tests performed on the passengers after they were removed from the ship and flown to South Africa.
One of the passengers, a British man, is in intensive care in a South African hospital. Tests were performed on the other passenger posthumously after she died in South Africa.
The cruise ship at the center of a deadly hantavirus outbreak and which is stuck off the coast of Cape Verde with nearly 150 people on board was waiting Wednesday to head to Spain’s Canary Islands. Meanwhile, health authorities in South Africa and Switzerland identified a strain of the virus that can be transmitted between humans in rare cases.
Three passengers have died and several others have been sickened by hantavirus on board the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius cruise ship. Hantavirus usually spreads by inhaling contaminated rodent droppings.
The ship left Argentina on April 1 on an Atlantic cruise and was scheduled to include stops in Antarctica, the Falkland Islands and other locations. However, the itinerary appears to have changed because of the situation on board.
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said three patients with suspected hantavirus cases have been evacuated from the ship and are on their way to the Netherlands.
An air ambulance takes off with evacuated patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship from the airport in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
The MV Hondius cruise ship is anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
