There’s a version of history where the 24-hour news cycle was always going to happen — some inevitability of technology and appetite and American ambition.

Maybe.

And, to be fair, not everything wrong with cable news is Ted Turner’s fault. But the bickering, the infotainment, the hair-trigger volatility that has whipsawed American media for three generations — that has his fingerprints all over it. We should have seen it coming. He told us exactly what would happen. In Playboy. Nearly 50 years ago.

Ted Turner sat down with Playboy twice — once in 1978, once in 1983 — and managed, in the combined span of those two interviews, to tell us everything we needed to know to look into the future and predict what he would create. He managed to cheapen his America’s Cup win by comparing it to the crucifixion of Christ. He asked a woman at a Newport party whether she’d been laid lately. At one point, he ripped the tape recorder out of the interviewer’s hands. They were mid-flight. He threw it at the cockpit door.

The interviewer, Peter Ross Range, had accumulated nearly 800 pages of transcript from following Turner around. Part of that came from audio captured as Turner talked through an open bathroom door.

This was the man who invented 24-hour news.