Photo: Getty Images, Everett Collection; Photo Illustration: Dillen Phelps

Over twenty years ago, Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg published a biography of Ted Turner called Citizen Turner: The Wild Ride of an American Tycoon . It wasn’t the first time that the Southern-born media mogul got compared to the fictional newsprint colossus co-created and incarnated by Orson Welles. Welles and Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz based their 1941 film character on real-life magnate William Randolph Hearst, who was arguably a more venal character than his fictionalized analog or his real-life inheritor Turner.

In certain ways Turner, whose death was announced yesterday , lapped both Hearst and Kane in not just overall achievement but by succeeding in fields neither of those personages ever dreamed of. Hearst owned a bunch of yachts but never personally raced them and won the America’s Cup doing so; nor was Charles Foster Kane much of a sportsman.…