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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.