In 1995, protesters took to the streets of New Delhi when they learned that the U.S.-based television news network, CNN-International, would be aired over a government television outlet. The demonstrators were against what they called intrusive western propaganda.

Accusations of bias against CNN are nothing new. Although the network was widely praised in the U.S. for its 24-hour on-site coverage of the Gulf War in 1991, anti-war demonstrators were appalled that year when a massive January 26 march was totally ignored by the network.

The Washington demonstration drew so many people that the Washington Post reported on the following day that opponents of the Baghdad bombing "appeared to march in a continuous parade 30-people wide for more than three hours." Yet CNN opted instead to show a dozen war supporters in the southern U.S. city of Atlanta, Georgia who had gathered under a banner that read: "Kill a mullah for Allah."

Atlanta is the home base of CNN and of its controversial founder, Robert Edward ("Ted") Turner III. Turner is a man who holds strong -- and many would say strange -- opinions. He claims to reject racialism and -- in hindsight, at least -- the cold war, too. But he also despises communism and is openly contemptuous of Islam and other things conspicuously non-western. And he has been known to boast that the real goal of his media empire is to give a boost to his own bizarre ideology.

"My main concern," Turner is quoted in one biographical reference, "is to build up a global communications system that helps humanity come together, to control population."

In an interview with Audubon Magazine published in late 1991, Turner confessed that he spends much of his time worrying -- "worrying about the population explosion, worrying about poverty and the Third World, worrying about deforestation, worrying about the oceans, worrying about the rivers, the streams, the lakes -- I'm telling you, I worry so much I literally, the last five years, have spent half my time sick -- I mean, physically ill."

During the same discussion, Turner announced that "there are just way too many people on the planet," and said he longed for a world in which people had "only one child" and where world population would eventually drop from the present 5 billion to only 250 or 350 million .

More importantly, he told the publication that he hoped to turn his vision into reality "through mass communications."

Turner considers himself the ultimate environmentalist. But environmentalists come in different varieties. Some are concerned with promoting clean drinking water and sanitation and curbing wasteful consumption. But others see the natural world as a vast, unlimited playground for the western leisure class, a pristine wilderness to be "rescued" from the clutches of black and brown-skinned peasants who, they insist, haven't the time to appreciate it. Such noxious bigotry has led critics to use the term "eco-fascist" to describe the environmental movement's more extreme members.

Turner's media holdings are substantial. He controls two major national news stations in the U.S., along with six other entertainment and information channels and numerous international broadcasting operations, including CNN-International. He owns at least two production companies and in 1986 acquired a major motion picture studio.

But Turner is not your stereotypical refined American millionaire. He is hopelessly inarticulate and speaks with an quaint accent generally associated with rural white poverty -- leading one advocacy group to denounce him on the internet as an "evil hillbilly" who acquired a media monopoly through "unethical and illegal predatory business practices."

Turner's outrageous and often dense vulgarity has made him a laughing stock among the U.S. press corps, as well.

In early 1991, when popular television comic Johnny Carson told a joke about an Iraqi propaganda operation, CNN mistakenly passed it on to viewers as fact.

And to commemorate the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro, Turner proudly signed a pledge promising to "add no more than two children to the Earth" -- only to find that he had to publicly acknowledge the fact that he already has five adult children -- Beau, Rhett, Jennie, Laura Lee, and Robert Edward IV.

Speaking at a September 1994 meeting of the National Press Club in Washington, Turner lamely protested not finding his picture among an exhibit of famous journalists. "My picture doesn't seem to be on the wall outside and there is a lot less luminary folks than me out there," he told a puzzled audience. "I mean, you know, you got a bunch of bozos up there, you know, haven't done near as much, you know...."

A few minutes later, he lurched into a crude attack on Egyptian culture in which he repeatedly used obscenities to describe the female anatomy. This was followed by an equally tasteless remark about his competitors in the broadcasting field and a lame joke about castration of children.

Asked by a reporter what how he understood the term "American cultural imperialism," Turner replied, "I hate it... But I'm part of it." He boasted that he "gave $200 million away last year" for "population and environmental stuff." To this he added a puzzling quip to the effect that journalists should be among "those of us that go to hell" because they "know too much."

On 10 May of 1996, Turner further irritated the American press by telling a conference of 100 broadcasters in Atlanta that "the United States has got some of the dumbest people in the world." In the words of a Washington Post report, Turner "was complaining that not enough people are as worried as he about overpopulation."

While behavior like this makes it easy to think of Turner merely as social misfit who need not be taken seriously, it would be a mistake to under-estimate his personal influence and the influence of his news network.

In November of 1995, Atlanta's daily newspaper, the Journal-Constitution , reported that Turner planned to dump $350 million into his five year old Turner Foundation -- already capitalized with nearly $150 million.

And a 22 September 1991 Washington Post article compared the global impact of CNN-International to that of the CIA in years gone by. "The CIA worked hard in the old days to draw foreign newspapers and magazines into its web," the Post article said. But according to Ted, CNN, with its global coverage of the news, "helps America's interests more than all the besotted Third World 'media assets' of old could ever have imagined,"

That, of course, is precisely what led to popular protest in New Delhi. And as Turner himself has noted, it is relatively easy with satellite communications to use a number of audio tracks simultaneously with the same video, making it possible to broadcast to the world in several languages at once.

And the debate about Turner's ambitions will undoubtedly grow hotter as he reportedly explores the possibility of expanding CNN-International's global coverage to the elite of the entire developing world. As he remarked before the Press Club gathering in 1994, "basically all it costs us is a few million dollars to get out there and stake our claim to the video highway that will someday cover the world."