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In the style of the eminently quotable and confessional Ted Turner, the freewheeling and frankly told adventures of CNN have yielded entertaining books. Newly among them is Seven Days That Shook the World, a story of the Soviet coup that hit the stands in December, from CNN's corporate sibling, Turner Publishing, with photos by the Soviet agency TASS and an introduction by Hedrick Smith. Another recent book is the disjointed but richly anecdotal Live from Baghdad (Doubleday; $22), written by Robert Wiener, producer of CNN's wartime coverage from Iraq. Wiener's final words are "To broadcast, for the first time in history, live pictures to the entire world of a war in progress from behind enemy lines. Murrow would have loved it!"
Indeed, Edward R. Murrow, himself a wartime broadcaster from London rooftops, would have. And so did the whole watching world. The sense of shared experience is the vital starting place for building a consensus on every matter of global concern, from nuclear disarmament to environmental cleanup, from hunger to health care.
& What CNN viewers have seen in the past year is the awakening of a village consciousness, a sense that human beings are all connected and all in it together, wherever on the planet they may be. How else to explain Kenyans who lined up six-deep in front of electronics stores to watch footage of a war they had no soldiers fighting in? The full potential of the medium that televisionary Ted Turner bet the house on is just beginning to be realized. What we are seeing is not just the globalization of television but also, through television, the globalization of the globe.
FOOTNOTE: *CNN is owned by a consortium, in which Time Warner, TIME's parent company, has a 21.9% stake.