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Text File | 1992-10-19 | 24KB | 466 lines

                â                                                            ╚MAN OF THE YEAR, Page 24

TED TURNER

History as It Happens


Linking leaders as never before, CNN has changed the way the
world does its business.

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- With reporting by Anne Constable/
London, Michael Duffy/Washington and William Tynan/New York,
with other bureaus


     On the night that the bombs began to fall on Baghdad,
Gilbert Lavoie, press secretary to Canada's Prime Minister,
Brian Mulroney, telephoned his counterpart Marlin Fitzwater at
the White House. "Marlin said, `Hi, what are you doing?' "
Lavoie recalls, "and I said, `I'm doing the same thing you are
-- watching CNN.' "

    So was virtually every other senior official in virtually
every government. In that respect, at least, the night of Jan.
16, 1991, was actually rather ordinary. From Rome to Riyadh,
London to Lagos, Beijing to Buenos Aires, Cable News Network is
on more or less continuously in the suites of a vast array of
chiefs of state and foreign ministers. It has become the common
frame of reference for the world's power elite. Boris Yeltsin
and Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush and Saddam Hussein -- the
headline sparring partners of the year just past -- are all
alert watchers. What a computer message can accomplish within
an office, CNN achieves around the clock, around the globe: it
gives everyone the same information, the same basis for
discussion, at the same moment. That change in communication has
in turn affected journalism, intelligence gathering, economics,
diplomacy and even, in the minds of some scholars, the very
concept of what it is to be a nation.

    Only a glint of thought to its founder, Ted Turner, a
dozen years ago, CNN is now the world's most widely heeded news
organization. British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd insists on
staying only at hotels that carry the network. Iraqi ministers
Tariq Aziz and Nizar Hamdoon would not so much as lower the
volume of the nonstop CNN in the background while granting
interviews to John Wallach, foreign affairs editor of the Hearst
newspapers' Washington bureau -- not even, Wallach says, for the
network's Hollywood Minute. When the name of his country was
inadvertently omitted from a news quiz about nations
participating in November's Middle East peace talks, Jordan's
King Hussein was watching and was so irritated that he had
palace officials immediately call CNN's Amman office to
complain.

    Singapore stockbrokers protested their government's
politically inspired ban on private satellite dishes, arguing
that access to instantaneous war news on CNN was vital for
anticipating fluctuations in world financial markets. The
terrorists who held Terry Anderson hostage in Lebanon used CNN
as the vehicle to release a videotape of his appeal for help.
CNN can be seen at the El Kabir Hotel in Tripoli, favored by
Muammar Gaddafi's associates. It can also be seen at the
Vatican, where Archbishop John Foley, president of the
Pontifical Council for Social Communications, rises by 6 a.m.
to watch and "know what to pray about."

    CNN has become the fourth most respected brand name in the
U.S., according to a recent poll of 2,000 people, ranked just
behind the Disney parks, Kodak and Mercedes-Benz and ahead of
Rolex, Levi's, IBM and AT&T. (ABC, NBC and CBS were not offered
by the opinion seekers.) As a source of knowledge in turbulent
times, CNN may be without peer. "Ted Turner is probably the
pre-eminent publisher in America today, maybe in the world,"
says Don Hewitt, founding producer of 60 Minutes on CBS. "When
there was a disaster, it used to be that people went to church
and all held hands. Then television came along, and there was
this wonderful feeling that while you were watching Walter
Cronkite, millions of other Americans were sharing the emotional
experience with you. Now the minute anything happens they all
run to CNN and think, `The whole world is sharing this
experience with me.' "*

    For most of the gulf war, CNN was the prime source of
news, information and up-to-the-minute political intelligence
for the U.S. government. President Bush is known to have said
to other world leaders, "I learn more from CNN than I do from
the CIA." That is apparently not a joke. Secretary of State
James Baker and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney turned to CNN
to find out what was happening in diplomacy or combat because
its speed and accuracy in newsgathering outstripped the work of
the National Military Intelligence Center and the CIA. Those
agencies remain geared to cycling paperwork up through chains of
command at a pace often too slow during a fast-breaking crisis.

    President Kennedy had six days to ponder what to do before
he went public about the Cuban missile crisis. During the gulf
war, the White House rarely had six hours to respond and
sometimes felt it did not have six minutes. In the face of this
urgent need to know, whenever CIA Director William Webster
received word via intelligence satellite that an Iraqi Scud
missile had been launched, he would tell National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft, "Turn on CNN to see where it lands."

    Perhaps CNN's biggest impact has been on diplomacy. There,
too, the stately march of paper via protocol has been
supplanted by spontaneity and pragmatism. The public press
conference has outstripped the private letter. No longer is the
performance just for show, while the real deal is done behind
closed doors. CNN's reach makes it a kind of worldwide party
line, allowing leaders to conduct a sort of conference call
heard not only by the principals but also by their constituents
across the planet. Says Richard Haass, a National Security
Council aide to President Bush: "You end up hearing statements
for the first time, not in diplomatic notes, but because you see
a Foreign Minister on the TV screen. By television, I really
mean CNN. It has turned out to be a very important information
source."

    When U.S. troops invaded Panama in December 1989, the
Soviet Foreign Ministry read its condemnation to a CNN crew
before passing it through diplomatic channels. During the
buildup to the gulf war, Turkish President Turgut Ozal was
watching a CNN telecast of a press conference and heard a
reporter ask Bush if Ozal would cut off an oil pipeline into
Iraq. Bush said he was about to ask Ozal that very question.
Moments later, when the telephone rang, Ozal was able to tell
Bush that he was expecting the call.

    THE FINAL EFFORT AT A PEACE ful settlement of the gulf war
epitomized the transition from the old diplomacy to the new.
Secretary of State Baker met for six hours with Iraqi Foreign
Minister Aziz but could not persuade him to accept a manila
envelope containing a private letter from Bush to Saddam
Hussein. As the meeting ended, both sides readied press
conferences blaming each other. Aziz let it be known he would
wait for Bush to appear, thus having the last word. White House
press secretary Marlin Fitzwater quickly telephoned CNN
correspondent Charles Bierbauer. Tell your bosses in Atlanta and
your man with Aziz in Geneva, said Fitzwater, that Aziz is going
to have to speak first "if we have to wait until Christmas."
Bush won. Says Fitzwater: "The whole thing took about five
minutes to settle. CNN was the midwife on both ends."

    CNN has also become a kind of global spotlight, forcing
despotic governments to do their bloody deeds, if they dare,
before a watching world. Sometimes they dare not, especially
when CNN can reach even a relatively few citizens within the
oppressed land and serve as a beacon of freedom. During the
failed Soviet coup in August, as key state news organs were
being taken over by supporters of coup leaders, Russian
President Boris Yeltsin showed himself in public atop a tank to
rally a crowd nearby -- and a far larger one throughout his
nation. He knew that CNN might still be seen by about 100,000
Muscovites and thousands of residents in other cities, a tiny
percentage of the population but enough to s