CNN founder Ted Turner: Network ‘sticking with politics a little too much’

CNN founder Ted Turner says his former network now focuses “too much” on politics, and that he wishes the company would strive for more “balanced” programming between politics and other news.

In an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning,” Turner told veteran anchor Ted Koppel that he rarely follows the news, and only watches his former news channel occasionally.

{mosads}“I think they’re sticking with politics a little too much,” he told Koppel. “They’d do better to have a more balanced agenda.”

“But that’s, you know, just one person’s opinion,” he added.

Turner left Time Warner, the company that owns CNN, in 2006 after the company bought the cable network 10 years earlier. Turner launched CNN in 1980, and grew it to become a global news network viewed in hundreds of countries.

In the same interview with Koppel, set to air this Sunday, the 79-year-old billionaire revealed that he has Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease similar in effects to Alzheimer’s.

“It’s a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer’s. It’s similar to that. But not nearly as bad. Alzheimer’s is fatal,” he tells Koppel in the interview, according to CBS.

He also discussed his past deliberations about running for president, which he said occurred during his marriage to then-wife Jane Fonda.

“Well, the closest I came to running for office was when I was married to Jane Fonda. And when I discussed it with her — she was married to one politician,” Turner says in the interview. “And she said, you know, ‘If you run for, for office, you run alone.’ “