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                                                                                January 6, 1992

Man of the Year

Ted Turner: Prince of the Global Village



    Visionaries are possessed creatures, men and women in the
thrall of belief so powerful that they ignore all else -- even
reason -- to ensure that reality catches up with their dreams.
The vision may be the glory-driven daring of a Saddam Hussein,
who foolishly tried to extend his rule by conquest and plunder,
or the seize-the-day bravery of a Boris Yeltsin, who struggled
to free a society from seven decades of iron ideology. But
always behind the action is an idea, a passionate sense of what
is eternal in human nature and also of what is coming but as
yet unseen, just over the horizon.

    A generation ago, social theorist Marshall McLuhan
proclaimed the advent of a "global village," a sort of
borderless world in which communications media would transcend
the boundaries of nations. "Ours is a brand-new world of
allatonceness," he wrote. " `Time' has ceased, `space' has
vanished. We now live in . . . a simultaneous happening."
McLuhan underestimated the enduring appeal of the status quo and
the stubborn persistence of the petty side of human nature. The
fusion of television and satellites did not produce
instantaneous brotherhood, just a slowly dawning awareness of
the implications of a world transfixed by a single TV image.

    It took another visionary, and the band of dreamers and
opportunists he gathered around him, to demonstrate that McLuhan
was wrong only temporarily. In 1991, one of the most eventful
years of this century, the world witnessed the dramatic and
transforming impact on those events of live television by
satellite. The very definition of news was rewritten -- from
something that has happened to something that is happening at
the very moment you are hearing of it. A war involving the
fiercest air bombardment in history unfolded in real time --
before the cameras. The motherland of communism overthrew its
leaders and their doctrine -- before the cameras. To a
considerable degree, especially in Moscow, momentous things
happened precisely because they were being seen as they
happened.

    These shots heard, and seen, around the world appeared
under the aegis of the first global TV news company, Cable News
Network. Contrary to the dictum of former U.S. House Speaker Tip
O'Neill that "all politics is local," CNN demonstrated that
politics can be planetary, that ordinary people can take a deep
interest in events remote from them in every way -- and can
respond to reportage in global rather than purely nationalistic
terms.

    Back in CNN's infancy, when he was dismissed as
crackbrained and soon to be bankrupt, Ted Turner sensed the
wonders to come. "I am the right man in the right place at the
right time," he said. "Not me alone, but all the people who
think the world can be brought together by telecommunications."
The years since, and most especially the one just past, have
demonstrated how emphatically he was right. For influencing the
dynamic of events and turning viewers in 150 countries into
instant witnesses of history, Robert Edward Turner III is TIME's
Man of the Year for 1991.


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 t