In the summer of 1979
while interning at the Advertising News of New York (soon to become Adweek), the publisher Carolyn Wall handed me a magazine
article about a second-generation Atlanta media businessman who had begun using satellites to beam his local TV station nationwide, effectively creating the first “Superstation.” The
article was about how the businessman, Ted Turner, was about to launch a new 24/7 cable news network.
"Pay attention to this guy," Wall advised me. And the rest, as they say, is
history.
Over the next few years I got to cover the early days of CNN and even sat in on an agency pitch meeting in which Turner jumped up on a boardroom table to make an impassioned
plea to buy his network.
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Turner certainly revolutionized media in ways he probably didn’t even foresee, but his greatest contribution to the world may not have been 24-hour
cable news programming, or even saving the American bison. It probably was shaming two of the world’s richest men -- Bill Gates and Warren Buffett -- into becoming two of the world's greatest
philanthropists.
It was 1997 and Turner had just pledged $1 billion to fund United Nations charitable activities, openly criticizing Gates and Buffett for hoarding their great
wealth, and creating a “shame” list to put pressure on
others for not doing the same.
Ironically, Turner never fulfilled his $1 billion pledge, which was tied to his AOL Time Warner stock holdings, although he did pay more than half of it at last count to the
United Nations Foundation, which he set up, making strategic grants to U.N. agencies, funds and programs helping women, the environment, children’s health, world peace, security and human
rights.
To date, Buffett and Gates (via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) have each donated about $60 billion.
Turner may be remembered by some as the
“mouth of the South,” but he should probably be remembered as one of the world’s richest men who actually put his money where his mouth was -- and got others to do the same.