HOW TO MAKE A BILLION AND BRING PEACE ON EARTH

Anne Applebaum visits the headquarters of the world's

first global television news network, and sees Ted Turner, Jane Fonda and Bill Clinton getting together to save the world

Atlanta ON MOST evenings — after the fast food restaurants have closed, the Hallmark greeting-card shop has emptied, the walk- ing machines in the health club have fallen silent — the only sound in the shopping mall attached to CNN Centre is the sound of clicking heels, the noise made by busy CNN producers on their way to take the overnight shift. But, on one night last week, the floor of the mall was filled with Rus- sians and Ugandans, Cubans and Finns, Argentines, Kazakhs, and the odd ITN executive: Ted and Jane were hav- ing a party.

Ted is Ted Turner, the founder of Cable News Network who gave the following speech to his then ragged staff in 1980, a few days before the world's first 24-hour news channel went on the air: 'I just want to welcome y'all to CNN and wish you the best of luck,' he said. 'See, we're gonna take the news and put on the satellite, and then we're gonna beam it down to Russia, and we're gonna bring world peace and we're all gonna get rich in the pro- cess! Thank you very much!' He staked his entire fortune on CNN, and was mocked at the time; as statesmen and advertisers clamour to appear on CNN, no one mocks him now.

Jane is Jane Fonda, Ted's wife. Jane, who is as old as one's mother, is at first unrecognisable. This is because, with her waist-length blonde hair, black leather mini-skirt, black beret, fist-sized gold ear- rings and body of a shape not found in nature, she resembles one's younger sister. But Jane cannot be mocked at CNN either. Tell someone that you find her appearance peculiar, and 'you know, she's really good for Ted' will be the least shocked response. Ted and Jane — endless money and eter- nal youth, America's living proof that any- one can make a billion dollars and never grow old — are standing in a corner. Peo- ple are slightly afraid to approach them, the way people are slightly afraid to approach royalty, so they converse at great length with a delegation from China who don't appear to know they are supposed to be slightly afraid. A Cuban looks on admir- ingly. Ted and Jane have been to Cuba sev-

eral times, he tells me; 'Ted and Jane are very open-minded.'

Ted's gaze is wandering wildly; perhaps this is due to his much-publicised use of drugs to cure his manic depression. When Time magazine, the voice of American con- ventional wisdom, made Ted 'Man of the Year' in 1991, the leading article listed all Ted's accomplishments — buying the MGM movie library before anyone knew what it was worth, inventing CNN, the Chicken Noodle Network which became the television channel of record — and then wrote solemnly that Ted's biggest accomplishment was not to have killed

himself at the age of 53 like his father had. Instead he was 'alive and well, stabilised by medication and psychiatric counselling'. Tell someone at CNN that you find this peculiar, and 'you know, the drugs have been really good for Ted' will be the least shocked response.

What's good for CNN might or might not also be good for the world. Mistakenly dismissed in Europe as something for busi- nessmen to watch in hotel rooms, CNN has slowly become the most important source of 24-hour television news for the world's English-speaking elites: American politi- cians watch CNN, American journalists watch CNN — and therefore the United Nations watches CNN, most world leaders watch CNN, many foreign journalists watch CNN. CNN is also just about the only source of 24-hour news. Two out of the three major American networks have stopped trying to cover foreign news at all.

Only BBC World Service television is worth mentioning as an international com- petitor, and the BBC hardly competes any- where except India. While no one knows exactly who else is watching and when, CNN does reach 200 countries; nearly a fifth of the world's 800 million televisions can tune into CNN if they want to. Even those who prefer the new Hindi music channel or news in Spanish will switch to CNN if something, particularly something that concerns America, is happening.

CNN is a formidable power, and is fully recognised as such in America. Not long after Ted and Jane's party, President Clin- ton paid a visit to CNN. I stared as he walked through the smoke-free newsroom, looking much taller and wider than he does on television, shaking hands and waving at the cameras while his aides sidled up to producers and writers, asking just who around here decides what goes on the air anyway. A better question is just who around here is more important. A few months ago, when the State Department learned that the first pictures of an Ameri- can soldier in captivity in Somalia were about to appear on television, the White House rang CNN and asked them to delay airing them, so that the President would have time to prepare a statement. CNN refused. Across the room, Dee Dee Mey- ers, the President's spokeswoman, is intro- duced to one of the CNN news presenters. `I feel like I know you,' she tells him, see your face in my office every morning.' The feeling is not mutual.

Yet even while the CNN 20-year-olds revel in their new-found power CI like to think that at any moment 50 million people might be watching me') CNN executives express openly contradictory feelings about the idea of themselves as the conduit for a new form of diplomacy. On the one hand, CNN uses quotes from world leaders CI heard it on CNN') along with film of tanks and marching Iraqi soldiers (curious, for an institution that believes in world peace) in its infuriatingly repetitive self-promotions, while CNN executives like to tell stories about their international presence. One boasts to me that a whole department in the Chinese foreign ministry is dedicated to monitoring CNN, while another recalls proudly that George Bush once said that he learned 'more from CNN than from the CIA' and a third says that the network is like another member of the UN Security Council: 'We have that kind of impact at the UN.'

On the other hand, CNN executives are equally quick to deny that their monopoly On instant news translates into actual politi- cal influence. 'We are observers and not participants . . . our mission is to inform and after that it is up to the viewers what to do with the news they have heard' is what Ed Turner (no relation), CNN's wonderful- ly titled Executive Vice-President for Newsgathering, recently told worried Con- gressmen. It is true that CNN's aggressively bland news bulletins have no bias in the traditional sense. One writer for the net- work recalls the time he described the Bosnian Serbs 'making a mockery' of a UN safe haven. His script was changed, on the grounds that the phrase 'making a mock- ery' sounded too critical.

But it is also true that because CNN is not a traditional news medium, it does not influence political events in a traditional way: it is not CNN's political content which is influential but rather its form, its use of satellite technology, its 24-hour demands, and above all its need for a certain kind of news story, 'a good CNN story'. Ratings always go up when 'a good CNN story' is unfolding (and often collapse afterwards, as they did after the Gulf war), and the desk knows it. Every so often Tom John- son, CNN's president, walks around the newsroom and asks, 'What have you got for me?' You've got to have an answer,' says one producer, 'you can't just say that you're letting the news happen.'

A good CNN story is easy to spot: it must be happening live, it must be filmable live, it must make full use of CNN's satellite technology, and it helps if it is of direct interest to Americans. It also helps if rele- vant 'experts' can be phoned from Atlanta, pre-interviewed from Atlanta. (When, for one fleeting moment, I was such an expert even the taxi taking me from my London office to a London studio was booked by telephone from Atlanta.) The Gulf war was a good CNN story; massacres in Rwanda are not. Americans invading Somalia was a good CNN story; the tribulations of the British Prime Minis- ter are not. Bosnia can sometimes be a good CNN story, as it was last February, on the day that CNN 'went live' after a mortar landed in the Sarajevo market-place, killing several dozen people. Madeline Albright, America's ambassador to the UN, has said that she spent that day 'watching television, telephone in hand'. While denying that CNN's coverage affected the substance of the UN's decision-making, she agrees that it 'accelerated the process': soon after- wards, Nato issued the ultimatum which forced the Serbs to withdraw from Saraje- vo. And who decided to alter CNN's pro- gramming that day, shifting coverage to Sarajevo and thereby 'accelerating the pro- cess'? A weekend desk editor, who says simply that it looked like a good CNN story'.

Knowing how to recognise 'good CNN stories' is important to all of us, because even when they don't lead to a UN ultima- tum, CNN's decisions about what news to run and how big to run it helps to set the American foreign policy agenda — and therefore the world's foreign policy agenda — in a very simple way: good CNN stories are on the agenda, bad CNN stories are not.

This is what Ray Seitz, the former Amer- ican ambassador in London, has called the `CNN curve'. Bosnia is high on the CNN curve, and therefore high on the American agenda, at least some of the time: Sarajevo, a place which at least some Americans have heard of, is relatively easy to reach an hour's flight from Vienna — relatively civilised, and relatively easy to cover live. Equally vicious ethnic wars in Nagorno- Karabakh, Angola and Liberia are not hap- pening in places with familiar names, are not easy to reach, are not civilised, and are very expensive to cover, requiring portable satellite stations which are easily destroyed. These wars are not high on the CNN curve, and therefore not high on the American agenda.

CNN is not, of course, alone in making such news judgments, and it is not the com- pany's fault if the absence of its cameras from Armenia or Angola has encouraged the American government to look the other way.

Of course CNN's use of technology affects not only what it covers, but also the way that it covers it. By chance, CNN's Moscow bureau is across the street from the Russian parliament, so the network's multiple cameras, sound teams and live interviewers had an excellent vantage point last year when Boris Yeltsin started firing on his MPs. But despite CNN's many attempts to 'provide context' — there was some blurry footage of people firing shots at one another in the dark around the tele- vision station, and the usual parade of `experts' — most Americans seem to have retained the impression that Yeltsin fired on his parliament without much provoca- tion. That there was a coup attempt, that there was an attack on the Moscow mayor's office, all of this has been forgotten because CNN didn't have pictures of that.

Part of the problem with 'the Russia story' was also that Boris Yeltsin is not 'a good CNN person'. A good CNN person speaks English, looks healthy and hand- some on television, answers questions in brief, quotable sentences, and is easily available for interviews which can later be excerpted and put on the news. The leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, oddly enough, is a good CNN person; Bill Clinton is a good CNN people, even an excellent CNN person.

The availability of 'good CNN people' is doubly important to the company because, in fact, the ability to bring events 'Live on CNN' is not the only thing the company does which is different from what other television networks do: CNN also does `interactive television', television which links up good CNN people, wherever they may be, to a live audience of CNN's choos- ing.

Bringing politicians together, in satellite space if not in real space, can be a tricky process, as the politicians don't always co- operate. One afternoon while the interna- tional journalists were in town last week, for example, CNN linked them up to Yass- er Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. A man from Canadian television stood up and asked Arafat if 'you and Mr Rabin are friends', and 'does there need to be some sort of personal chemistry between world leaders to make accords and so on?' The reply was indistinct; afterwards, someone from CNN complained that Arafat 'didn't seem to be speaking to the global audience'.

Misunderstood though it might be by the Palestinian leader, interactive television is the CNN speciality which comes closest to the ideals of Ted and Jane. This might explain why Ted and Jane were in the audi- ence last week when Bill Clinton, a few hours after his waltz through the news- room, appeared on a CNN international press conference, taking questions from journalists in Sarajevo, Seoul, Johannes- burg and Jerusalem, as well as Atlanta. Good, no, excellent CNN person that he is, Clinton proved extremely adept, skipping from subject to subject with ease, flattering a journalist from Uganda (`That, sir, is a brilliant question') who asked how the pos- itive lessons of Somalia can be applied else- where in Africa, taking umbrage at a question put by a journalist in Sarajevo (`There have been no constant flip-flops, madam'). A Cuban asked Clinton about American sanctions — Jane nodded vigor- ously — a journalist from China asked about trade policy, a Trinidadian asked about Haiti.

Suddenly Clinton turned to the camera, and spoke as if for all the world from his heart: 'I believe we may have North Kore- ans watching us tonight. I say to you, the United States wishes to have friendly and open relationships with you. We wish to have a constructive relationship.' He did this, someone explained later, because a CNN team recently filmed in North Korea, where they learned that the North Korean leadership (but not, of course, the North Koreans themselves) watch CNN. Thus Kim II Sung talks to CNN, CNN talks to Clinton, Clinton talks to Kim II Sung while speaking on CNN. Afterwards, an awestruck CNN producer wonders aloud if `a new form of diplomacy' has been creat- ed: what if the North Koreans respond? Will they do it on CNN?

All of these staged conversations are good CNN stories — bringing enemies together, getting them to talk, getting them to overcome their differences, getting it to happen live. Perhaps that is what con- tributes to the optimism that makes CNN feel like such a peculiar place: outside all may be chaos, but inside the shopping mall, inside CNN Centre, the global village, that weary relic of the 1960s, seems to be emerging at last.

Watching CNN, though, one begins to worry about the arrival of the global vil- lage. Somehow, it doesn't seem, as in the original conception of Marshall McLuhan, that the global village resembles a real vil- lage, where everything is open, every story is told, where Americans watch what is going on in rural Africa and vice versa. The global village, as it is coming into being, doesn't even resemble the real world. The global village has room only for stories which can be translated into good CNN stories, and for people whose motives can be explained on CNN. Because decisions within the global village have to be made quickly and publicly — they must, after all, be transmittable live — it also has room only for people who accept the basic rules of the game: people who believe that prob- lems can be solved through rational dis- course, preferably in English.

And watching CNN, one also begins to worry about all the people out there who are not members of the global village. Arafat and Rabin may be able to speak to one another on CNN, for example, but some of the people whom they purport to represent cannot. The motives of Rwandan murderers or the ideals of disgruntled Rus- sians will not come over very well on inter- active television either; it doesn't seem, somehow, as if they will fit well into the world of Ted and Jane.

Dictators and murderers do sometimes agree to appear on CNN — but that is pre- cisely when one begins to ponder the illu- sory nature of television pictures. Not long ago, CNN's highly respected Beijing corre- spondent talked his way into North Korea, where he met Kim II Sung. The Great Leader, he reported back, had proved to be a doddering old man, who enjoyed hunting bears tracked down by his soldiers, and who denied possessing nuclear weapons. It is hard to know whether or not to feel relieved: is Kim Il Sung a member of the global village? If we can see him and talk to him, if he likes bears and says he means no harm, does that also mean that he believes that rational discourse solves prob- lems — or have we been deceived?

Satellite television is not going to go away; on the contrary, CNN executives are right to point out that there will be more telephones in the future, more televisions, `We'd better get some drugs in!' more satellites, more interactive pro- grammes, not all manned by them. But, because it is new, and because it can do some good — because it can bring informa- tion to closed societies, because it can make enemies talk to one another doesn't mean it can't do harm as well, and doesn't mean that its effects don't bear examining. Technology itself is neutral. It might bring endless money and eternal youth to some; it might distort reality for others.