Anchorwoman Mary Alice Williams broadcasts from new cable TV news network CNN's studio, during set construction in the World Trade Center lobby, New York, New York, May 31, 1980.

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There is no one in American history who has done more to change how the world gets its news, for better or for worse, than Ted Turner.

His bold, audacious bet to launch CNN completely transformed the news business, busting the tightly curated delivery platforms that came before it and opening the floodgates of news to the people.

News used to be defined by scarcity: Limited physical space in newspapers and magazines, limited time on the airwaves for broadcast news. Turner ushered in an era of news abundance, where anyone could get the headlines at any time. Perhaps even more importantly, the creation of CNN meant that stories that would have otherwise been left out of the news products in print and broadcast TV found a way to reach the wider world.

The Overton Window of what qualified as “news” got bigger and wider, likely for the better.

As CNN showed during the Gulf War, news could be raw, and visceral, and uncertain. Anchors weren’t telling you what had happened, but showed you what was happening. That was a sea change for news, and we are all living in that world, even if the delivery system has moved toward digital platforms.

Or as Rupert Murdoch said Wednesday: “Ted Turner’s vision for 24-hour cable news transformed the media industry and gave viewers everywhere a front seat to witness history unfold.”

To be clear, that legacy is more nuanced now. As the floodgates of news opened, and evolved into a flood of takes and opinions, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by everything that is happening in the world, and to want to turn it off at times. The 24-hour news cycle that Turner created is still with us, and it sometimes can be too much, especially when the news is coming at us in real-time and at breakneck speed.

But the speed of news today in a way represents exactly how Turner lived his life.

“This man shared everything in real time, and then some. And he did it regardless of whether you were looking to hear his thoughts,” the media mogul John Malone, a friend of Turner’s wrote in his memoir Born to be Wired. “This made me admire Ted’s daring escapades even more. There was no stopping him.”

But Turner also popularized the news in a way that may not be appreciated today.

It’s no secret that trust in journalism and news outlets is at an all-time low, a stark contrast to when Turner still ran the show at his media company. In fact, the mogul was a true populist.

When CNN launched, “the news” was edited and curated by ivy leaguers in New York, gatekeepers in the classic sense, using their power to decide what was and was not newsworthy.

Turner shifted the nexus of news away from New York and to Atlanta, opening the aperture and giving opportunities to people and stories that the old guard simply would not have allowed. There may have been a Ted’s Montana Grill in Manhattan, but Turner himself was more at home in Montana proper.

Through it all though, Turner always made it clear that the news was the star, and he held a deep belief that bringing the world into our TV sets would make us all better informed and lead to a better future for humanity.

Since he left CNN, of course, the channel has been sold and re-sold many times (and it is about to be sold once again, to Paramount and CEO David Ellison). Its influence has waned as the flood of news has largely left TV for the other screens in our lives.

But the very idea of what Turner launched, the core bet of CNN in the first place, was that people should not have to wait until 6:30 p.m. or open the paper in the morning to find out what happened the day before.

And people shouldn’t have to be told what was news by voices of god. The news should be available whenever and wherever we want, and the spectrum of what news is should be wider, not smaller, reflecting more of America and the world, not less.

“He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN,” said Mark Thompson, the current CEO of the cable news channel.

And the world will live with what Turner wrought.

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