Cable TV pioneer Ted Turner faces the last major challenge: dementia

Ted Turner has never hesitated to take up the challenge. He won the America's Cup races, rallied the World Series winning baseball teams, transformed a simple billboard company into a global media empire, and brought attention to environmental crises around the world.

Now, Turner faces a new challenge, perhaps the most formidable and the most personal of all: dementia.

In an interview with CBS on Sunday morning, Turner, 79, told Ted Koppel that he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia.

"It's a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer's," Turner told Koppel on his Montana ranch. "It's like that. But not so bad. Alzheimer's is fatal. "

"Thank God, I do not have that," he said, adding that at that time he could not remember the name of his condition. "It's dementia, I do not remember what my illness is," he said.

Lewy body dementia is a progressive brain disorder that affects approximately 1.4 million Americans. His symptoms resemble those of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

It's the same form of dementia that Robin Williams was diagnosed with before his death that affects vision, which can lead to hallucinations and delusions. Symptoms of the disease also include muscle rigidity and difficulty balancing. Turner said that he is often exhausted and forgetful.

His diagnosis was shocking to many who worked with him – and considered him invincible.

"Ted has always been larger than life," said Steve Stahl, a former CNN technical operations manager who has known Turner since 1984. "He had great ideas, he had several lengths ahead of all the others. .

Pioneer of cable news 24 hours a day

Turner was one of the first in 1977, when he captained the yacht Courageous, winning the America's Cup.

The victory comes shortly before Turner launches the Super Station, a cable television channel he created in the 1970s. The television channel, known as WTBS, was an offshoot of the television industry. advertisement that Turner had inherited from his father, who had committed suicide at the age of 24.

Turner has filled his offer with a combination of TV reruns, old movies and baseball games. Turner owned and loved the Atlanta Braves baseball team and played their games almost daily.

Seeing the interest generated by the night games, Turner began to explore the idea of ​​launching a cable channel dedicated to sports, 24 hours a day. He was disappointed to learn that Capital Cities was already working on the same idea, in the form of ESPN, launched in 1979.

It was at this point that Turner was looking for something else that would support the interest of viewers up to 24 hours a day, eventually deciding on a new station.

On June 1, 1980, he launched the Cable News Network, now known as CNN. Its 24 – hour coverage has paved the way for the 24 – hour news cycle today.

With a tight budget, CNN Headquarters shared space in an old downtown Atlanta home with Turner's Super Station – and with the professional Turner wrestling matches broadcast on WTBS.

Stahl says it was not unusual for some of CNN's early newscasts to be interrupted by the thud of the wrestlers' bodies hitting the carpet on the ground. "You can not invent that stuff," Stahl recalls with a laugh. "It was an audio nightmare."

The first CNN staff members also remember the days when Turner was crossing the newsroom in a bathrobe after sleeping in the apartment he had kept upstairs.

"Everyone is laughing at us," recalls Richard Roth, CNN's senior correspondent for the United States and the network's first bureau chief in Rome. "We were called Chicken Noodle News."

In the early 1990s, CNN had more than 20 offices and launched other news networks, including Headline News and CNN International, which allowed CNN to reach more than 100 countries. During the first Gulf War in 1991, CNN began broadcasting images of missile and correspondent fire under gas masks scattered from the Kuwait desert.

Roth was one of the correspondents sent to the region.

"We were the only world media in Baghdad to let the world hear and then see the beginning of the war develop for months," he said.

As CNN became a global name, Turner's friends included world leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Fidel Castro.

S & # 39; engage in a personal battle

Turner has repeatedly said that he will never give up control of his media empire. After two mergers in the latter part of the 1990s, first with Time Warner, then with AOL, Turner was forced to leave the company he had built.

In his interview with CBS on Sunday, Turner continued to express his dissatisfaction with what he said became CNN after Turner. "I think they're a bit too much of politics," he said. "They'd better have a more balanced program. But that's, you know, the opinion of one person.

This follows with his first vision for the channel. "It was not just about getting people on the air so they could shout at you," said Sean Callebs, CNN's long-time correspondent. "CNN will always make headlines, but Turner was there when CNN wrote the story."

Those who know Turner and have spent time with him recently claim that he now has good and bad days. His irascible spirit, obviously, remains intact, as does the admiration of his former colleagues.

We do not know what will be his life in the face of a disease that threatens to silence him. But those who worked with him predict that he will approach his illness as he has approached it in all his colorful career, bravely and on his terms.

"Ted Turner is a fighter," said Barbara Pyle, a former vice president of Turner's environmental policy, who began working for him 40 years ago. They maintain a close friendship.

"No matter what happens, he will fight and win," she said.