Ted Turner died on May 6, 2026. He was 87 years old, and he had done more to reshape the media landscape of the twentieth century than almost any other single individual.

The obituaries wrote themselves in the hours after the announcement: the man who invented 24-hour news television, who built CNN from nothing into a global institution, who demonstrated that news did not have to stop at the close of the evening broadcast. At a time when media was defined by the three major American broadcast networks and their half-hour nightly news programs, Turner had an idea that seemed absurd to almost everyone who heard it: a channel that would broadcast news, all day, every day, around the clock.

CNN launched on June 1, 1980, and within its first decade it had made Ted Turner into an icon and transformed how major events - wars, elections, disasters, crises - were covered and consumed. The Gulf War of 1991 was CNN's defining moment: the network's live coverage from Baghdad, with reporters broadcasting in real time as air raids began, showed the world what continuous news coverage could do. It was must-watch television in a way that nothing like it had been before.

Turner was not just a broadcaster. He was a force of nature in multiple industries - he took the Atlanta Braves baseball team from perennial losers to World Series champions, launched Turner Classic Movies, created the Cartoon Network, and eventually merged his empire with Time Warner in one of the largest media deals of the era.

His personal life was equally colorful. His marriages, his public statements, his environmental activism, his buffalo ranch in Montana - Turner was always more than a businessman. He was a character, in the fullest sense of the word.

He was not without controversy. His public statements were frequently provocative, and he made enough enemies over the years to fill a small city. His personal relationships with employees were sometimes rocky. And the CNN he created evolved, after various ownership changes and the rise of digital media, into an organization he sometimes barely recognized.

But the core idea - that news is important enough to deserve continuous coverage, that major events should be watched as they happen, not reported after the fact - that idea changed everything. Every 24-hour news channel, every news website, every live blog, every news notification on your phone can trace its lineage back to what Ted Turner built.

He was, as one longtime media critic put it, "the man who made the world smaller, and noisier, and better informed, all at the same time." At 87, he had earned his rest.