Media mogul Ted Turner, who pioneered the modern 24-hour news culture when he launched the CNN channel, has ⁠died ‌at ​the ​age of ‌87.

The outspoken and often outrageous television pioneer — and former husband of actress Jane Fonda — transformed an obscure Atlanta television station into the first satellite-based “superstation”, Cable News Network, in 1980.

He was slowed in later years after a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia in 2018.

Current CNN CEO and chairman Mark Thompson told the BBC Turner was “the giant on whose shoulders we stand, and we will all take a moment today to recognise him and his impact on our lives and the world”.

Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated $US1 billion ($A1.4 billion) to United Nations charities.

He married three women and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South”.

“If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect,” he once bragged.

Fonda once described Turner as her “favourite ex-husband”.

They married in 1991 but a month later the actress found out he had been unfaithful. They stuck it out until their divorce in 2001, and remained on good terms afterwards.

Turner and Jane Fonda were married for a decade. Photo: AAP

Long since out of the television business, Turner concentrated on philanthropy and his more than 800,000 hectares of property, including the US’s largest bison herd.

His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen.

By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.

Turner’s signature achievement was creating CNN in 1980.

Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator.

He often worked past 8pm — after the US nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC had already gone off the air — and was in bed by the time his local stations did their own newscasts at 11pm.

He took a chance by starting the operation sometimes derided as the “chicken noodle network” in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.

“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the [broadcast] networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Academy of Achievement.

“But they didn’t have the imagination.”

CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991.

Most television journalists had fled Baghdad, warned of an imminent US attack.

CNN stayed, capturing arresting images of a war’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking across the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.

Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner for $US7.3 billion in stock but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.

“I made a mistake,” he later said.

“The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”

-with AAP