Greta Wire Shorty: A Ted Turner Tribute with One Very Funny Wolf Blitzer Story
5/6/20269 min
This episode is a short, affectionate remembrance of Ted Turner that doubles as a funny behind-the-scenes story from Greta’s CNN years. After learning of Turner’s death, Greta decides to share an old memory that captures both the strange energy of early CNN and Turner’s larger-than-life presence. She reflects on how beloved he was inside the network, how unconventional he could be, and how completely he changed television news by turning CNN into a 24-hour operation when many people mocked the idea. The main story centers on a White House Correspondents’ Photographers Association dinner shortly after Turner married Jane Fonda. Greta and Wolf Blitzer both wind up in an awkward tug-of-war over the same chair after Jane privately tells each of them they must sit next to her because she “has to tell” them something. Greta wins the seat, spends the entire dinner feeling guilty, and then discovers afterward that Jane had told Wolf the exact same thing and never said a word to either of them all night. The result is a light, funny media-world anecdote that also serves as a small tribute to the odd, memorable world Ted Turner created at CNN. Got a comment or question? Send it to EmailGreta@newsmax.com and it may be used or answered on an upcoming episode. You can watch the video version of the “Greta Wire” podcast on NEWSMAX social media channels, plus YouTube and Rumble, on the same afternoon the audio version launches. Listen to Newsmax LIVE and subscribe to our entire podcast lineup at http://Newsmax.com/Listen Don’t miss Greta every weekday on “The Record with Greta Van Susteren” at 4 PM ET, only on NEWSMAX TV. Watch the show anytime, anywhere with NEWSMAX+. Get your 15-day free trial of NEWSMAX+ at http://NewsmaxPlus.com Follow Greta on Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greta/ X/Twitter: https://x.com/greta Instagram: https://Instagram.com/greta TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greta.com Follow NEWSMAX on Social Media: Facebook: http://nws.mx/FB X/Twitter: http://nws.mx/twitter Instagram: http://nws.mx/IG YouTube: https://youtube.com/NewsmaxTV Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/NewsmaxTV TRUTH Social: https://truthsocial.com/@NEWSMAX GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/newsmax Threads: http://threads.net/@NEWSMAX Telegram: http://t.me/newsmax BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/newsmax.com Parler: http://app.parler.com/newsmax THANKS FOR LISTENING! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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First 90 secondsGreta Van Susteren· Host0:00
Okay, you know I've launched Greta Wire again, and I have my longer podcast, and I have something called Shorties. And I coincidentally taped a Shorty yesterday that I was gonna hold for a couple days because it couldn't breathe. It d- it's, it really didn't have a date on it. But then after today, when I learned that Ted Turner died, I thought, "You know what? This Shorty needs to go up because it involves Ted Turner." I gotta tell you, there are very few of us who are on the air who worked in the old Ted Turner CNN days. There's Wolf Blitzer, Stuart Varney, Bill Hemmer, and me. Ted Turner, what a hoot. Everybody loved Ted. Ted was the greatest. He was wild. He was a visionary. They used to call C- CNN Chicken Noodle Network when we first got started. They used to make fun of us until we blasted off and, and did, uh, exceedingly well. But this podcast today is about Ted Turner and his wife, or then wife, Jane Fonda. And I gotta tell you, this was one of the weirdest experience I ever had with, um, with a colleague. It was with Wolf Blitzer, it involved Ted Turner a- and, uh, Jane Fonda, so I want you to see it. But I also want you to know, Ted Turner, he, he was so well-liked among us that when he would say outrageous things, things today that he would get chopped up and spit out, um, if he said, we, we knew that they were sort of wild, but we'd say, "Oh, well, what Ted really meant was..." You know, we were always excusing Ted because Ted was really that fun. He was that much