Ted Turner, Founder of CNN, Passes Away Aged 87

The media landscape is in mourning following the announcement that Robert Edward Turner III, known globally as Ted Turner, passed away on 6 May 2026, at the age of 87. While his legacy as the founder of CNN and a pioneer of cable television is secure in the annals of history, his impact on professional wrestling remains one of the most transformative and disruptive forces the industry has ever seen. Without the intervention of the man affectionately known as Billionaire Ted, the modern era of sports entertainment would be unrecognisable.

Ted Turner’s relationship with professional wrestling began as a matter of survival for his fledgling television station, WTCG, which later became the Superstation TBS. In the 1970s, wrestling was the cheap, high-performing content that kept the lights on, but Turner’s involvement deepened in 1988 when he purchased Jim Crockett Promotions. Renaming the entity World Championship Wrestling, Turner provided the financial backing and national platform necessary to challenge the near-monopoly of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation. This purchase was not merely a business transaction; it was the declaration of a decade-long war that would push professional wrestling into the cultural mainstream.

The defining moment of Turner's wrestling legacy arrived in 1995 during a now-legendary corporate meeting. When asked by Eric Bischoff what was required to truly compete with the WWF, Turner famously bypassed the bureaucratic hurdles of his own executives and ordered the creation of a live, prime-time show on TNT. The launch of Monday Nitro directly opposite Monday Night Raw ignited the Monday Night Wars, a period of unprecedented creativity and commercial success. Under Turner’s ownership, WCW famously defeated the WWF in the television ratings for 83 consecutive weeks, proving for the first and only time that a rival promotion could not only compete with McMahon but fundamentally beat him at his own game.

Turner’s impact extended beyond the balance sheets and television ratings. By providing a secondary national home for talent, he revolutionised the earning power of professional wrestlers, introducing guaranteed contracts and forcing a radical improvement in working conditions across the board. He was a hands-off proprietor who took a genuine, almost paternal interest in the "rasslin" on his networks, often referring to it as the foundation of his media empire. Even as he became a target of McMahon’s on-screen parodies, Turner was known to enjoy the spectacles he funded, viewing the chaos of the wrestling world as a perfect fit for his rebellious, anti-establishment brand of media.

The end of Turner’s influence in the industry came not through a lack of passion, but through the corporate machinations of the AOL-Time Warner merger in 2001, which ultimately led to the sale of WCW to its rival. Despite this, the ripples of his tenure are still felt today. The high-production values, the emphasis on guaranteed talent contracts, and the very existence of a competitive landscape in North American wrestling—currently mirrored in the rivalry between WWE and AEW—all trace their lineage back to the risks Turner took in the late 1980s and 90s. As the world remembers the philanthropist and the media mogul, the wrestling community remembers the man who was brave enough to give the industry a second seat at the table.