CNN and Mars

Mars stayed his bloody hand on Nov. 14. Never before has the god of war so based his actions on the small screen.

Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of President Clinton's last minute decision not to attack Iraq earlier this month. But the decision highlights the amazing importance of the modern communications industry and, particularly, of cable TV.

Insider accounts revealed that less than 60 minutes before H-hour, with the planes armed and on the runway and the missiles ready to launch, Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser, answered an urgent phone call at home. Iraq was reversing its field, the caller said. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was trying to cry uncle before his tortured country reaped the whirlwind again. A letter to that effect had just been dispatched.

How did Berger's contact know this? Had the letter been received? Or had the Iraqis dropped a dime?

No. The contact had seen it on CNN.

Berger then located the letter, distributed it to key administration policy-makers and launched a wild 45-minute policy reconsideration featuring phone calls to policy-makers scattered around the globe-including Vice President Al Gore and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Minutes before the attack, the president reversed the policy. At least for now, Iraq was spared a devastating blow from American forces. Mars picked up the sword but stayed glued to the tube.

The key channel of communication during this global crisis was not government-to-government, or government-to-UN-to-government, or even a shadowy Kissingerian "back-channel." At the critical moment, the critical channel was Ted Turner's folly.

This incident marks a milestone in diplomatic history. Even during the Gulf War, key policy information was communicated directly by governments to one another, and only subsequently put into the electronic megaphone and shared with the world.

Of course, communications companies and personalities have influenced policy for more than a century. Newspapermen as different in time and personality as Horace Greeley and Walter Lippman played fundamental roles in creating and executing policy during the long period when newspapers ruled the competitive communications battlefield. In the 1960s, the TV networks changed what had been a ground war into an air war.

During the Vietnam era, CBS news patriarch Walter Cronkite visited Saigon to see the U.S. war effort firsthand. He then aired a series of reports critical of the goals and conduct of the war. Those reports, many think, doomed President Lyndon Johnson's policy and re-election hopes, and thus, directly led to the election of Richard Nixon. Vietnamization-the slow withdrawal by the U.S. ground forces-followed in due course. After several more painful and bloody years, the Republic of Vietnam collapsed in agony.

In the '90s, the TV networks have ceded priority to cable and its crown jewel, CNN. CNN lacks a Cronkite figure, a single central personality who not only dominates the audience's attention, but also has its total respect.

One theory holds that the Internet eventually will consign CNN-and all cable channels-to the secondary role currently played so effortlessly by CBS. CNN does well in part because there are so many communications channels these days. CNN's dull, omnipresent format is dependable in an era of overload.

However, the theory holds, the Internet is multiplying channels beyond the point where any single channel can establish a central role. Cable will become just another channel, as easy to click off as CBS.

I disagree. The cable guys are smart, though perhaps not as smart as they say they are. They already have jumped onto the Web. They will succeed in marrying their programming skills to the nuances of the Web and become bigger than ever.

No other industry segment-long-distance, ISP, Bell-can hope to duplicate the cable industry's strong skills in this area.

If CNN ever develops a Cronkite figure effective in both cable and Web environments, it will make previous examples of communicators influencing policy look as dated as a Greeley editorial.

As long as Turner is around, that will never happen.