Ted Turner saw the cost of the news revolution he launched with CNN

Eugene Scott, a journalist based in Washington, D.C., and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University SNF Agora Institute, is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.

Decades after creating CNN, media mogul Ted Turner, who died Wednesday at age 87, had a significant revelation: Constantly covering war might be beneficial to him financially, but society as a whole might ultimately be worse off.

Turner founded CNN, the world’s first 24-hour news network, in 1980 with the goal of making viewers more informed about the world in which they lived by providing information about it at all hours of the day.

A little more than a decade later, nearly 40 countries were embroiled in the Gulf War, and CNN was able to cover the global conflict in real time, resulting in what was then record viewership.

But more than 10 years after that, as the United States was headed into another conflict with Iraq, a reflective Turner was aware that covering war 24/7 may have come at a cost for society as a whole.

“War has been good to me from a financial standpoint, but I don’t want money that way,” he said in 2003, while reflecting on his career. “I don’t need blood money. … I don’t want to profit on the death and misery of other people. If it comes my way and it’s the only way I can get it, I’ll take it because what else could I do?”

One thing Turner did with his wealth was to become philanthropic, including helping fund the Nuclear Threat Initiative to decrease the danger of nuclear weapons worldwide. He gave $1 billion to create the United Nations Foundation, a charity that partners with the United Nations to address gender inequality, public health issues, and environmental concerns around the world.

But by the 21st century, the business model Turner pioneered — news broadcasts all day — had been adopted by other media outlets, much to Turner’s chagrin. To regularly consume cable news meant to be routinely exposed to images of war. And a frustrated Turner took jabs at industry peers who he thought were making the medium he created worse. He even went as far as to label longtime rival Rupert Murdoch, creator of Fox News, a “warmonger” for how his network — which was regularly beating CNN by this point — covered the conflict in Iraq.

Nearly 50 years after the creation of CNN, where I was a Washington correspondent for a couple of years, global war remains a leading subject of cable news coverage. And given that the subject matter has recently led to bumps in viewership, there is little indication that cable news leaders will change course.

But being good for ratings does not always translate into being good for viewers’ well-being.

According to Dr. Shairi Turner, chief health officer at the Crisis Text Line, a global nonprofit providing free mental health care through text messaging, viewers need to find ways to remain informed without being constantly exposed to images that can make people feel like the world is more dangerous than it is.

“Images of death, destruction, [and] people in distress can put us into fight or flight mode,” she recently said on CBS New York. “And with these repetitive news cycles, it can make us feel unsafe, which activates our stress hormones and then really negatively affects our mental health and well-being.

“Long-term exposure to distressing images — especially war-related content — can lead to chronic stress or secondary trauma,” Shairi Turner added. “And people start to feel increased anxiety, irritability, trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating, or some people just feel helpless or even numb.”

And it appears that younger viewers are keenly aware of this as they prioritize their mental health when making decisions about media consumption. I observed this firsthand as a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics during the 2024 presidential campaign.

After being surrounded by campus protests about the war in Gaza and consumed in classroom discussions about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, students weren’t eager to consume more information about the war from news outlets. Instead, they gave their attention to media that addressed other issues — both serious and light-hearted. If cable news hopes to attract more of these viewers, offering more diversity among the subjects that they cover would be a wise move.

If the cable news industry is both a business and a public service, then it is the responsibility of media executives to pursue ways to keep viewers informed while causing the least amount of harm to their well-being.

Covering global conflicts in a manner that leaves viewers enlightened while limiting their exposure to unnecessary stress and anxiety is not an easy feat. But it is a conundrum worth attempting to address for the mental and emotional health of a global society — even if it ultimately eats into the bottom line.