Since the death of Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner, outlets all over the world have broadcast accounts of his giant ambitions, his creation of the twenty-four-hour news cycle in which we all live today, and his work as an environmentalist. Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece has some thoughts about the essential Southernness that underlaid everything Turner did.

 

 

Salvation South

Chuck Reece: Ted Turner, the first Southern media mogul, began it all in 1970, when he bought a television station in Atlanta, WJRJ, Channel 17. The next year, the Texas songwriter Kris Kristofferson put out his second studio album, The Silver-Tongued Devil and I.

Turner’s recent passing got me thinking about Kristofferson and that album again. One reason, I suppose, is that Turner certainly was a silver-tongued devil in his own right. But the deeper connection for me is a song called “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.” In the chorus, Kristofferson sings about a man who’s “a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.”

There is no public record that Turner and Kristofferson ever met, but when Turner died, I thought of that line—how it seemed the perfect description for a man like Ted.

My first magazine job in New York was covering the newspaper industry. But I had a friend named J. Max Robins who covered the television business—which meant he was covering Turner, and kept on covering him for years. Max has written a remembrance of Ted for my magazine, Salvation South. He writes, “Ted Turner was a man of wildly swinging contradictions…. One day he was making nice with North Carolina U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, the ardent segregationist; the next, in a typical bait-and-switch, he was fishing with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.”

In other words, a walking contradiction. 

After years of trying, my buddy Max finally scored his first interview with Ted Turner. It was 1990, the tenth anniversary of CNN’s launch. Figuring he’d have a better shot if he didn’t ask for too much, Max requested just fifteen minutes of Ted’s time. In his story, Max writes…

Ted greeted me at the door warmly, jacket off, tie askew, in stocking feet. He grabbed my hand in a firm shake, put his other arm around me and said: “Max! Why ya only want fifteen minutes? What we gonna say in fifteen minutes that would mean anything to anybody?” For the next ninety minutes, it was all TCM; meaning Turner’s Classic Monologue…all fueled with his trademark savvy Southern salesman’s charm. 

Countless obituaries have praised—and, in some cases, damned—Ted Turner for creating the twenty-four-hour news cycle. But whether people loved or hated him—and plenty did both—Ted Turner was undeniably a Southern character through and through. Many of our region’s greatest characters, after all, are walking contradictions.

This Sunday, you can read Max Robins’s remembrance of Ted Turner at Salvation South.com.