Ted Turner died on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, after a period in hospice care. He was 87. The founder of CNN, owner of the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks, America's Cup winner, environmental crusader, and one of the largest private landowners in the country had been living with Lewy body dementia since his diagnosis in 2018.
For downtown Atlanta, Turner's death marks the loss of the person most responsible for giving the city center a global identity. When Turner chose the Omni International complex on Marietta Street as the headquarters for his upstart 24-hour cable news network in 1980, he was making a bet on downtown Atlanta that almost no one else was willing to make.
The CNN Decision That Changed Everything
On June 1, 1980, CNN's first broadcast reached 1.7 million cable television subscribers. The television industry was centered in New York and Los Angeles. The idea of a 24-hour news channel based in Atlanta — launched by a man the industry called "the Mouth of the South" — was treated as a curiosity at best.
Turner didn't care. "The doubters said we couldn't pull it off," he wrote in a 2023 letter read to alumni gathered at CNN Center. "But with grit, tenacity and perseverance, we endured."
At its peak, Turner Broadcasting's more than two dozen branded networks and services reached two billion people in 200 countries. The CNN newsroom in downtown Atlanta became the stage for some of the most consequential moments in broadcast journalism: live coverage of the Tiananmen Square protests, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Gulf War — which drew one billion viewers worldwide.
Tom Johnson, former president of CNN, recalled Turner's approach to news. "I said, 'Ted, what are your rules about news?' He said, 'Tom, one rule: Be fair.' I said, 'What else?' He said, 'That's it.'"
A Downtown Atlanta Life
Turner's connection to downtown Atlanta ran deeper than a corporate address. He owned the Braves, who played at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in the heart of the city. He owned the Hawks, who played at the Omni Coliseum next door to CNN Center. He became a visible presence in the district — a figure who walked the same streets and ate at the same restaurants as the residents who lived in his building's shadow.
Robert Edward Turner III was born November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His family moved to Savannah when he was nine. At 24, after his father's suicide, Turner took over the family billboard business and began the relentless expansion that would define his career: TBS, CNN, TNT, the Goodwill Games, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and a land conservation portfolio that made him one of the largest private landowners in the United States.
He hunted, fished, won the America's Cup, knew Fidel Castro and Jacques Cousteau, and spoke without a script. He was, as CNN's Wolf Blitzer once toasted, "the original maverick."
The Building He Left Behind
CNN Center — the building Turner chose for his headquarters — was sold in 2021. CNN completed its migration to the Techwood campus in Midtown. The building sat in transition for several years before reopening on May 21, 2026, as The CTR: a mixed-use landmark with restaurants, artist murals, and residential floors. It will serve as Atlanta's official World Cup volunteer headquarters this summer.
Turner did not live to see The CTR open. But the building's transformation — from a bold bet on downtown in 1976, to CNN's global headquarters, to a reimagined cultural anchor for a city preparing to host the world — is a story that only exists because Ted Turner decided Atlanta's city center was worth believing in.
He is survived by his children Laura, Teddy, Rhett, Jennie, and Beau, his grandchildren and great-grandchild, and former wife Jane Fonda.
Original reporting by GPB News Staff, Pamela Kirkland, and Kristi York Wooten, Georgia Public Broadcasting, May 6, 2026.
