Ted Turner Interview

CNN Founder Ted Turner was just one of the stars who turned up to honour Mikhail Gorbachev at his birthday celebrations in London, and he spoke to us on the Red Carpet.

The American media mogul said: “It is a great honour to be here. I’ve always admired President Gorbachev, and so it’s great to see him at this big party.”

The billionaire believes Gorbachev’s best achievement was “ending the Cold War and letting the Soviet Union democratically split up without hardly any loss of life or war.”

However, he urged that the world should concentrate on today’s problems and declared “Let’s get rid of Nuclear Weapons next”.

Turner was himself honoured at the Gala event and was one of the first to be honoured with the Gorbachev Awards.

He was presented with the award for glasnost, or openness, due to his role in transforming the world’s media with his 24-hour global news operation.

The other winners selected by Gorbachev were Timothy Berners-Lee, the British physicist and computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web; and Evans Wadongo, a Kenyan engineer who invented a solar lamp that would become a clean, healthy alternative to wood fires as a source of light for tens of thousands of Africans. Wadongo was also named a CNN Hero in 2010.