How CNN Phoned Home

NBC's Tom Brokaw was envious as well as curious. "How did CNN manage to stay on the air?" he asked Bernard Shaw, the cable network's anchorman, in an unusual intermural interview. Shaw hesitated. "Let me take a pass on your question," he said. "The next time I see you I'll explain."

The professional jealousy was understandable. The vivid first-person accounts that Shaw and his colleagues transmitted during the initial bombing of the Iraqi capital -- while other reporters in Baghdad were cut off from the world -- amounted to the TV coup of the week. The feat was possible because CNN was able to gain phone access that the Iraqis had denied other news organizations. The three major U.S. networks were left fuming. NBC reporter Tom Aspell complained on air that Baghdad had given CNN "preferential treatment."

In fact, CNN's tour de force was the result of months of advance planning and shrewd lobbying. Last September it became the only news organization to win Iraq's permission to use a "four-wire," a highly reliable two-way overseas telephone connection that requires no operators or switching connections and can continue working even when local power lines are cut. "We went door to door, day after day," says Ed Turner, the cable network's executive vice president. "We became the biggest nuisances the Iraqi government ever saw until the arrival of the U.S. Air Force." By U.S. standards, the exclusive access was a bargain. It cost CNN just $16,000 a month to maintain the wire out of Baghdad and the satellite relay from Amman, Jordan, to the network's headquarters in Atlanta.

What accounts for CNN's admittedly VIP standing with the Iraqi government? The network's importance as a supplier of news in 103 countries around the world has a lot to do with it. As is now well known, its viewers include Saddam Hussein; during the gulf crisis, many Middle Eastern leaders, as well as many officials in the U.S., have relied upon CNN as a sort of instant 24- hour messenger service.

That fact did not prevent the Iraqis from closing down the CNN line 16 hours after the first cruise missile landed in Baghdad. But one of the network's intrepid reporters was the first back on the air the next day when the broadcasts -- this time censored -- were resumed. And when two CNN correspondents decided to depart Iraq (leaving a crew of three behind), CNN's new prestige was made clear. Not only did the Iraqi authorities ease their way to the Jordanian border, but Jordan's King Hussein himself called his border guards and ordered that the two men be passed through quickly and without difficulty.