THOMAS HAZLETT: Ted Turner, Entrepreneur of His Age.
In 1970, cable TV service was essentially outlawed in 90 percent of American households. The powerful VHF stations, dominated by the NBC-CBS-ABC triopoly, ruled the world. Weak UHF stations were virtually worthless, given their stunted reception under FCC rules, though cable operators wanted to retransmit their signals to homes in crystal clarity.
Turner’s simple vision was to think of a world with such stupid rules gone. Then a nothingburger outlet in Charlotte could be delivered via cable, ending its “UHF discount.” Then a losing proposition like WTBS could bounce its product to 30,000 communities via satellite, produce its own popular programs, and compete head-to-head—against the choice set of My Mother the Car, Hello Larry, or SuperTrain—in households everywhere.
Turner picked just the right time. What the TV insiders (and Malcolm Gladwell) decried as a sop to Turner was officially labeled the “deregulation of cable TV” at the Carter-era FCC. As The New York Times softly described them, these 1980 rulings “reversed 15 years of emphasis placed by the commission on protecting broadcast stations from significant inroads by the cable companies. They opened the possibility that broadcasters and cable TV outlets would be able to compete more equally for viewers and advertisers.”
Gladwell finished his exposé by condemning Ted Turner as a business simpleton. “Turner has played embattled entrepreneur, television savior, right-wing point man, and—for his own whims—communications peacemaker. What he really wants to do is make a lot of money.”
Yes. That’s the beauty of the system.
In his sweeping 1980 book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler predicted the coming world of “The De-massified Media:”
All these different developments have one thing in common: they slice the mass television public into segments, and each slice not only increases our cultural diversity, it cuts deeply into the power of the networks that have until now so completely dominated our imagery. John O’Connor, the perceptive critic of The New York Times, sums it up simply. “One thing is certain,” he writes. “Commercial television will no longer be able to dictate either what is watched or when it is watched.”
What appears on the surface to be a set of unrelated events turns out to be a wave of closely interrelated changes sweeping across the media horizon from newspapers and radio at one end to magazines and television at the other. The mass media are under attack. New, de-massified media are proliferating, challenging—and sometimes even replacing—the mass media that were so dominant in all Second Wave societies.
The Third Wave thus begins a truly new era—the age of the de-massified media. A new info-sphere is emerging alongside the new techno-sphere. And this will have a far-reaching impact on the most important sphere of all, the one inside our skulls. For taken together, these changes revolutionize our images of the world and our ability to make sense of it.
Ted Turner, with all of his manic energy and his goofy and contradictory political views got there early and created the media world of the 1980s. And helped preserve the media world of the past, to boot:
If Ted Turner had done nothing else in life but found this channel ⬇️, it would've been a worthwhile life. https://t.co/jU0jLdDg6l
— Joel Engel (@joelengel) May 10, 2026
