The Mouth of the South: Bill Brioux on Ted Turner at 87

Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift · May 7, 2026 · 8m

Ted Turner passed away at 87. Bill Brioux says he was a yachtsman who won the America's Cup, a broadcaster who turned small TV stations into a media empire, and a conservationist who ended up owning more than two million acres and 45,000 bison.

The MGM library purchase in the eighties was the move that made everything else possible. He paid $1.5 billion, kept all the films, and used that content to launch Turner Classic Movies and the Cartoon Network, which ran on the Hanna Barbera and Warner Brothers library he now controlled. CNN came out of Atlanta and changed how news was distributed…