The Bad News Bearers at CNN Have Whipped the Networks in the Gulf War, but Will They Get Zapped When The Scuds Stop Flying?

IT’S DAY FIVE OF “WAR IN THE Gulf,” and Zola Murdock, CNN’s official “ear on the world,” doesn’t like what she’s hearing. Since the fighting began, Murdock and her staff of viewer-response telephone operators at CNN headquarters in Atlanta have answered roughly 2,000 calls a day; positive, supportive calls, for the most part, give or take a few wackos. But lately she’s been getting some negative feedback she thinks top management should know about. - When a retired Army colonel calls from Texas with a plan for winning the war by poisoning the mistress of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, that’s business as usual. However, when irate mothers all across the country start phoning in a panic, saying that their children think the world is coming to an end--that’s a problem. “Kids are afraid,” Murdock explains, sounding pretty upset herself. “The mothers say they’re crying and really frightened.” - But it’s not just the war that’s got them so scared. It’s much worse than that. It’s CNN! - The source of the growing worry, it seems, is a special opening “bumper” that features a flaming red and yellow “War in the Gulf” graphic, accompanied by a thudding drumbeat that sounds like the theme from “Jaws.” - By noon, Murdock is writing a memo to CNN President Tom Johnson, outlining the crisis. Sensing the threat to young minds as well as to CNN’s record double-digit ratings, management springs into immediate action. Within hours after the complaints reach the upstairs executive offices, a toned-down version of the war theme is dubbed, previewed and playing on the evening newscast. Net result: one potential PR disaster averted.

But on the front lines downstairs, events are moving so fast there’s no time for pats on the back.

The control room this day is so full it’s difficult to see what’s going on in the world. The walls are lined with monitors showing feeds from everywhere news is happening. On one, the British House of Commons is debating a wartime censorship proposal. On another, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams is briefing the media in Washington, D.C. On yet another, Brian Jenkins, one of CNN’s Saudi Arabia correspondents, is combing his hair, getting ready to go live with a report on the latest Scud missile attack in Dhahran.

“Twenty seconds, Brian,” executive producer Bob Furnad announces into a microphone connected by satellite linkup to Jenkins’ earpiece. But Jenkins, nonchalantly checking his appearance in a mirror, doesn’t seem to hear a thing.

“Can he hear me?” Furnad shouts, sending a palpable stress ripple through the already tense control room.

“Yeah, he can hear,” someone replies, at which point Furnad grabs the gooseneck mike in front of him with both hands.

“BRIAN!” he yells, and Jenkins’ head snaps back as if he’s just been blindsided by a Jimi Hendrix riff. “You’re on in 10 seconds!”

Morning anchorwoman Mary Anne Loughlin, who stayed on the air for 13 hours straight during the Challenger explosion in 1986, is telling viewers that a live satellite feed of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s press conference from Moscow is coming up in one hour. “But now,” she says in grave anchor tones, “we have more on that Scud missile attack from Brian Jenkins in Saudi Arabia . . . Brian?”

Jenkins, whose ear must be ringing in stereo, delivers a flawless rehash of how three Scuds aimed at the Dhahran military base were shot down by American-made Patriots. The all-clear has sounded, and life in that part of the desert is returning to normal. “Brian Jenkins, CNN in Saudi Arabia.”

Furnad, a dapper, take-charge guy who always commands the control room in crises, is known around CNN as a genius at putting news on the air; he’s also known for blowing his stack when things don’t come out exactly his way. This looks like one of his good days, says a staffer at 11 a.m. But by noon, he’s in a rage.

During the first few days of the war, CNN lost a considerable amount of income by dropping commercials to make room for increased news coverage. But as ads gradually crept back into the schedule, commercials that were tacky during peacetime suddenly became tasteless in time of war.

When a report on a Scud alert in Tel Aviv is followed by a commercial for the Time-Life history of the Vietnam War, showing firefights and grim footage of body bags being loaded onto helicopters, the burning fuse on Furnad’s temper hits powder.

“Where the hell did that come from?” he screams, throwing his arms in the air. “Don’t run that damn thing now. People out there are gonna go crazy.”

In the middle of his tirade, he stalks around the control room looking for someone to blame, and noticing the huge buildup of onlookers, he throws a bigger fit. “There are too many people in here! Anybody who doesn’t belong--out! No visitors! All non-essential people out of this room-- now !”

Later, after calming down, Furnad apologizes to a reporter he meets in the hallway, explaining, “Everybody’s under a lot of pressure. The thing with all this publicity is that you tend to lose sight of why we’re really here in the first place.”

IT’S “THE FRONT PAGE,” “BROADCAST NEWS” AND “Animal House” all rolled into one. America loves high-energy underdog stories, and that’s what CNN is: a late-breaking, they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done triumph of little-guy nerve and advanced technology.

But more than that; it’s pure news, 24 hours a day of current-events programming that gives viewers the same urge to stay tuned and get involved as a Jerry Lewis telethon. There is a sense watching CNN’s newscasts that the audience is part of the production team, actually participating in the editorial process. The open phone lines, the raw footage, the rush to get news on the air as it happens--all combine to make CNN different and addictive.

The fact that it took a laser-beam war to showcase what the network does best has only made more people tune in. But it’s also made some industry insiders and media critics wonder whether CNN can maintain the pace, let alone manage to capitalize on its incredible success. Can the same network that gave the Kitchen Magician a new lease on life finally get rid of its Hee Haw-land reputation, overcome charges that it is broadcasting unverified reports and Iraqi propaganda, and be crowned the news-gathering organization of the 1990s?

“You can tell Saddam Hussein watches Cable News,” comedian Jay Leno wisecracks on “The Tonight Show.” “Why else would he think he could get land for no money down?”

To the casual viewer, everything advertised on CNN must seem as if it costs $19.95. There are $19.95 steak knives, $19.95 vegetable slicers and $19.95 upholstery-repair kits. Slim Whitman albums are $19.95, a miniature ’58 Buick is $19.95 and a lifetime supply of oven cleaner is $19.95.

CNN advertising executives are hoping that the current flood of good publicity will translate into not only increased ad revenues but some high-rent ads as well. The station’s increase for commercials since the war started--from $4,000 for 30 seconds of air time to $20,000--could help. (The big networks charge in the mid-to-high five-figure range.) Some sponsors have pulled their spots during the Middle East fighting because they don’t want their products associated with war, says Steve Haworth, CNN publicity director. However, Cable News executives believe that in the long run, their war coverage will boost revenues as well as image. Still, if the network can’t maintain its strong ratings, it will remain a haven for the bottom feeders of the commercial world, the wrong environment for fancy brand names, and a reminder to everyone of CNN’s corn-pone origins.

What CNN was supposed to be in the first place was a failure. When it began operation in 1980, experts gave Ted Turner’s brainchild six months to bankrupt him. Now it’s the other networks that are hurting. And rather than worrying about Chapter 11, everyone at CNN is wondering how they’ll handle success. Each week, Cable News reaches 20 million households worldwide, and in a 1989 Times Mirror poll, it ranked second behind the Wall Street Journal in terms of U.S. public trust.

CNN’s rise in respectability is not without precedent. In the early ‘80s, the newspaper USA Today was also a running joke. But it wasn’t long before color weather maps, news-you-can-use features and the ubiquitous USA Today “we” began to appear in other papers.

Like USA Today, CNN has built its success on an unabashedly low-end package. What’s in that package, save for a few celebrity talk shows, is a ‘round-the-world version of American local news, complete with a weatherman named Flip. Instead of a warehouse fire down by the railroad tracks, it’s a tanker spill in the North Sea; instead of a wreck on the interstate, it’s a plane crash in Germany, and instead of a crime wave in the bad part of town, it’s War in the Gulf.

Already, there are signs that the network is putting on airs, or at least trying to be more upscale. On weekday nights, opposite ABC’s “Nightline” on the East Coast, anchorman Bernard Shaw hosts a dispassionate discussion of war issues called “Gulf Talk.” (“That’s ‘Gulf’ not ‘golf,’ ” says a publicity spokeswoman.) Even when CNN’s attempting to be classy, it comes off sounding a little like the community access station in Macon, Ga.

People tend to forget, but CNN’s mastermind and owner, Ted Turner, traces the beginnings of its breakout to a couple of days in 1987. The network had received its highest ratings that year when it covered the rescue of a little girl who had fallen into an open well in Texas, Turner said two years ago after receiving a media award in Kansas City. He then quoted a former Turner Broadcasting executive as having joked that “we oughta put candy bars at the edge of wells across America.”

More recently, while talking to advertisers in New York shortly after CNN’s new commercial rates were announced, Turner hit on his favorite theme: “I have to say, ‘I hate my competitors. I don’t like ‘em and I’m not supposed to like ‘em.’ ” The man still considered by many as CNN’s founding flake cites another Times Mirror poll in which 61% of those questioned said CNN had the best war coverage, contrasted with 12% for ABC and 7% each for NBC and CBS.

On the first day of the war, CNN had a 19.1 prime-time rating and a 25.3% market share of America’s 60 million cable-equipped households. (Two days before the war, it had a 2.7 rating, with a 4.0% share.) In terms of actual viewers, CNN’s audience shot up from an average 1.5 million to nearly 12 million in 48 hours. At the start of the second week of fighting, CNN was still showing consistently high ratings.

By the end of January, the network was registering a 4.2 average monthly rating, contrasted with a 0.7 average in December. Each rating point represents 568,000 households.

Writing soon after the start of the war, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter said, “The Gulf War may not create a new world order, but it could signal a new television order. . . . Some called Jan. 16, only half jokingly, ‘The Night the Networks Died.’ ” With all the praise CNN was getting after the bombing started, when George Bush and Saddam Hussein were both saying they had watched the coverage, it was not surprising that the big network news shows, in their desperate search for viewers, turned into cable-news copycats.

CBS, the network with the biggest problems, started using punchy, CNN-like on-screen headlines the first day of the Gulf conflict, and by the middle of the second week, the other networks had not only extended their prime-time broadcasts to one hour but were also throwing in the video- verite quick cuts between anchors and correspondents--pure CNN.

In Atlanta, where most of CNN’s 1,700 employees work, there is a clear and present sense that David, if he isn’t beating Goliath, is certainly making him sweat.

CNN PEOPLE PRIDE THEMSELVES ON THEIR ABILITY to make mid-course corrections, as they proved on what they sometimes inadvertently call Opening Night, when the network’s famous “four-wire” phone line to Baghdad was humming through the first hair-raising hours of the war. All news organizations like to believe they flow with events, but CNN flows nonstop--in all directions. One producer says working in the Atlanta newsroom is “audio-video stunt-flying,” and, some veterans say, a few times lately it’s felt like the building was airborne.

The onslaught began the moment CNN’s principal anchorman, Bernard Shaw, pinned down in Baghdad by “smart” bombs, uttered the first meaningful words of the war--”Something is happening”--and there’s been no letup since.

The philosophy at CNN, says Ed Turner (no relation to Ted), vice president of news gathering, “is get the news on first, and get it right.” The Cable Network, Turner says, lived up to that principle the first night of the war, when millions of Americans, even many without cable who watched on news stations that had switched to CNN, sat riveted to their sets as CNN correspondents described the first hours of fighting.

Critics hailed it as extraordinary television, which it was, but the most important part of CNN’s newscast on the night of Jan. 16 actually wasn’t TV at all. It was radio . With only a phone line connecting Baghdad to Cable News Network headquarters in Atlanta, and the only pictures provided by words, the start of war in the Gulf sounded more like a late-night call-in show than live TV.

In a medium that’s supposed to reduce everything within camera range to visual images and sound bites, CNN correspondents were talking for hours about the outbreak of war, hotel room service and anything else they could think of. It was battlefield news from the point of view of the target, and with other TV reporters safely locked in a basement bomb shelter by helpful Iraqi guards, Shaw, Peter Arnett and their colleague John Holliman had an exclusive franchise on the hottest breaking war story since the invasion of Normandy.

A few hours into the fighting, CNN scored an even sweeter coup. Turner graciously offered his hated Big Three rivals limited access to history in the making. While ABC and CBS, which Turner had once tried to buy, said no thanks, NBC took him up. In Atlanta, staffers and top brass alike could hardly contain themselves. After 10 years in the business, 10 years of insults and ridicule, not to mention 10 years of earning peanuts, they were finally being treated as equals, and somebody in New York was publicly admitting what millions of viewers already knew--CNN owned the war.

NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw praised Shaw for his enterprise and courage, after which he swallowed hard and said, “CNN used to be called ‘the little network that could.’ It’s not a little network anymore.”

Only one thing could top that, and another hour into the war, the ultimate tribute arrived.

“Hi, Bernie,” said Walter Cronkite, the living corporate symbol of big-time network news. “Boy, you’re sitting in a hot spot.”

It was the same soothing we’re-all-in-this-together tone Cronkite had used when talking with Mercury astronauts and men on the moon, which was how far away Shaw seemed at that moment. Yes, it was a hot spot, Shaw agreed. “And it sure doesn’t feel good.”

The famous phone line went silent. Doesn’t feel good? It wasn’t hard to read Cronkite’s mind. He was there in World War II when the bombs were falling, right beside the legendary Edward R. Murrow, and they never said it didn’t feel good, at least not on the air. Walter Cronkite was miffed, and, from the comparative well-being of the Upper East Side, he let Shaw know it.

“Doggone it,” Cronkite lectured. “We are the front lines of the people’s right to know, and we’ve got to man that front line no matter what the dangers may be.”

“Well, Walter,” Shaw replied without the slightest hint of irony, “thanks for joining us from your apartment in New York.”

The war of words had entered a new phase. The question starting to be asked, as kudos died down and the fighting continued, wasn’t why Cable News correspondents had put on a better performance than the competition but how they had managed to have the whole show to themselves. No sooner had Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell given CNN’s war coverage a free plug at a Day One Pentagon news conference than rival correspondents started complaining.

“One American television network, CNN, is getting preferential treatment from the Iraqi government,” charged Tom Aspell, a British stringer with NBC, one of many reporters ordered out of Baghdad after hostilities began. Rumors were rife that CNN was giving baksheesh to secure most-favored-network status with Hussein. New York magazine’s media critic Edwin Diamond went so far as to accuse CNN of making “a pact with the devil.”

Especially during the first days of the war, CNN’s need to fill the screen caused embarrassments. Wolf Blitzer, reporting from the Pentagon, was widely quoted--then roundly ridiculed--for reporting that Iraq’s Republican Guards had been “decimated.” Like at least one other network, CNN wrongly reported that one of the first Scud attacks on Israel contained chemicals. Newsweek chided Charles Jaco, CNN’s main man in Saudi Arabia: “Easy, fella! Your CNN gas mask dramatics almost gave the world a coronary.” More seriously, CNN has been faulted for being mesmerized by “filmable” versions of the war--bombing videos, briefings and more briefings, however unnewsworthy--rather than the impossible-to-photograph cultural and political context of the conflict.

By mid-February, the major networks had stopped allowing CNN to use on-camera pool reports filed by their correspondents. While ABC wouldn’t think of putting a CBS reporter on its evening newscast, CNN had been using the names, faces and voices of network reporters. Now they would be limited to using only the video and script of pool reports. CNN’s rivals said they voted the restrictions after seeing their own correspondents broadcast on CNN first.

Back in Atlanta, CNN staffers are attributing their rivals’ actions to “the bitterness factor.” “We beat the other networks by out-planning them,” boasts Eason Jordan, CNN’s 30-year-old managing editor for international coverage. “It’s fair to say we got preferential treatment, but we got it by bugging the Iraqis to death.”

In a well-rehearsed speech, Jordan, who epitomizes the youthful can-do spirit on CNN’s Atlanta non-union news staff, says he started work on setting up a “four-wire” telephone link to Baghdad in mid-August. The four-wire would keep communications open when regular phone lines failed, because it requires no operators or switching connections and can function even when local power lines are cut. At the time, the Iraqis told him that it couldn’t be done. But he persisted. One problem was solved when CNN paid the Jordanian government $30,000 a month to operate a satellite earth station outside Amman. “Reporters knew about the four-wire two months before the war started, and nobody complained about it then,” Jordan says. “We’re no geniuses. We just try harder.”

While Jordan defends the cost-effectiveness of his communications feat, Gail Evans, the head of booking, pops in to tell him she can arrange an interview with Sheik Ahmed Yamani, a former Saudi Arabian oil minister. Evans has what could be the biggest Rolodex in the civilized world. Finding experts to appear on CNN is her specialty. But keeping them is another story.

“They learn how to sharpen their performance skills with us and then the networks steal them,” Evans says. A case in point, according to CNN’s Washington bureau, is retired military expert Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., whom Cable News hired to help analyze the Gulf conflict. But along comes NBC, which triples his pay, and Evans is back to her Rolodex. “It happens all the time,” she says with a sigh.

The problem with the Yamani interview is that he is in Switzerland, and it will cost $4,000 for satellite time to put him on the air. Besides, what can he do for CNN? Jordan, who says he’s never heard of the guy, thinks about it for a few seconds and decides it’s not worth the expense.

FROM THE BEGINNING, TED TURNER PUT HIS MONEY on a no-frills plan to make a fortune in television by doing what no one else was doing. CNN, as he conceived it, would be a tight-budget daily feed of up-to-the-minute news, weather and sports scores--a private, in-house wire service for every subscriber. In its original form, CNN wasn’t news for serious-minded people who read the Wall Street Journal and enjoyed knowing more about how a bill becomes a law. It wasn’t for the well-informed or the well-bred. It was 24 hours a day of talk, trauma and cute-guy /cute-gal anchor teams. CNN was news for people who had nothing better to do than watch television.

In the early days, there were daily segments called “Staying Fit,” “Home Handyman” and “Your Astrological Day.” John Holliman, one of the stars of Baghdad, read farm reports when the network premiered June 1, 1980.

Before CNN took over the Omni Hotel complex in downtown Atlanta, its base of operations was a dilapidated two-story house in the suburbs that looked like something Sherman forgot to burn on his way to the sea. The initial work force was a mixture of zanies and zombies, recall old-timers, who like to brag that everything back then was planned three to five seconds before it went on the air.

Once, they rolled the morning temperatures in front of pictures from the Atlanta zoo that showed monkeys mating in a tree. Then there was the correspondent who reported that scientists were trying to grow “genetically engineered orgasms.” And who can forget the time a studio light exploded and ignited reporter Daniel Schorr’s pants?

“Here is news, alive with all its wonderful technical warts and missed cues,” noted Variety several days after programming began, “and it all worked.” And even if it didn’t work, it hardly mattered as long as it took up air time.

But Ted Turner, who owns three other cable networks, was no global-village idiot. He knew that because CNN was satellite television, it could develop material and markets far beyond the scope of ordinary networks. Ten years later, its broadcasts reach 108 countries; to some viewers, even Vegematic commercials look futuristic. (The only area that doesn’t get Cable News is the northeast corner of Siberia.) CNN has become a global institution--and a highly profitable one at that. It entered the black for the first time in 1985 and in 1989 earned $134 million on revenues of $342 million. Today, Cable News is often the only place in some countries to turn for news--or to make it. CNN is not just a news channel; it’s a diplomatic channel. Heads of state can use it to plead their case, test world opinion or just get a flash of personal publicity. And with 24 hours to fill, air time is never a problem.

These days, Turner talks about the medium’s ability to solve problems and bring people together. “My television,” he says, “is geared to try to change people’s attitudes, to make them like and love each other more and think like neighbors rather than enemies.”

That’s the touchy-feely philosophy, but the down-to-earth formula is really quite simple: Dish up and air virtually everything and anything that is on television anywhere in the world.

At any minute of the day or night, CNN engineers can punch up pictures and sound from feeds anywhere and have them on the air in seconds. Of course, the networks could do this if they had CNN’s technical personnel, earth stations and satellite linkup capacity, which they don’t, and CNN’s time, which they don’t. Unimpeded by deadlines, strict production formats or prime-time shows, CNN can scoop the networks on large, medium and small stories all day long and send everything to any cable-equipped household. Forget “Film at 11”: CNN’s got the news instantly. “I am dazzled by the technology,” says Washington Post television critic Tom Shales. “That’s what makes CNN different.”

“Quite simply, CNN spends more money annually on renting satellite time around the world than the other three networks combined,” says Richard Hart, high-technology reporter for KRON television in San Francisco. It’s not that they have access to technology that others don’t, he says; it’s simply that they buy it.

The networks earn their money from entertainment programs, not from news, where operating budgets in recent years have been stripped to the bones. Despite comparatively meager overall resources, CNN, unlike its rivals, has been able to concentrate its spending on news production, and for millions of viewers, the difference shows. At the outbreak of the war, CNN had 90 people working in the Gulf, contrasted with 40 each for the other networks. It spent about $10 million on Gulf coverage last year between August and December and projects a $20 million bill during the next six months if hostilities continue.

“CNN isn’t the alternative to the networks,” says Don Hewitt, executive producer of “60 Minutes,” adding that it’s just the alternative to network packaging and delivery. “I’ve always thought we should sell news directly to the consumer,” Hewitt grumps. “That’s what CNN does.”

With an appeal based largely on its fast-break, news-on-the-run quality, CNN considers itself reporter-driven, not anchor-driven, and often it seems that CNN anchors are not the great analysts their network counterparts pretend to be, but more like live segues between deja vu accident footage. In an industry famous for showing pretty faces, nobody has more to choose from than CNN, which shuffles them in and out of the anchor desk every hour like a sit-down chorus line of Ken and Barbie dolls.

“I’m not overly impressed with CNN’s anchors,” Shales says. “Most of them are network rejects or local-news types who simply lack the depth to handle anything big. I don’t want to name names, but I’m just not dazzled by the on-air personnel.”

Dazzling or not, the constant exposure of war coverage has given many CNN personalities a certain star quality. “Viewers think Bernard Shaw is God,” says Zola Murdock, giving a rundown on how callers rate CNN’s on-camera talent. “Peter Arnett is Mr. Respect.” True, there are those who feel his reports from Iraq are tainted by propaganda; however, everyone thinks he’s “a very brave man,” she adds. When Arnett was attacked by Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) for being an Iraqi “sympathizer,” calls to the network were overwhelmingly pro-Arnett.

Trying to counteract charges of favoritism that arose because Arnett was for weeks the only reporter in Baghdad broadcasting back to America, Ed Turner says: “CNN will look through any window made available to us to see--even if darkly--something of what is going on.” But the networks continue to claim that CNN made a secret deal with the Iraqis to have the airwaves all to itself. It’s a charge CNN denies, although its executives do admit that they let Iraqi officials use CNN’s equipment to make phone calls out of the country--calls they insist were limited to relaying other journalists’ requests for visas.

The war has made big names out of correspondents such as Wolf Blitzer and Charles Jaco. Several women have even called in, wanting to take Jaco to bed. “He wins the romantic-lead contest,” Murdock says. “And nobody comes in a close second.”

For Ted Turner’s executives, this is proof that their more-for-less economic game plan is working. Turner notes that he has 800 more employees than his fat-cat competitors but gets by on a much smaller budget largely because “we’re non-union” and don’t pay people “to sit in the studio and look attractive.”

What does CNN pay? Employees won’t get specific, but they agree on one thing: The company is cheap.

“Maybe I’m old-fashioned,” Ed Turner says with a smile, “but I don’t happen to think you need to spend $2 million a year on an anchorman.”

That attitude has helped foster an underdog bravado on the staff. “What does Dan Rather get paid?” asks David French, who, substituting for Shaw, gained a footnote to video history as the person who cut away to Baghdad on opening night of the war. “Let’s say Brokaw, (ABC anchorman Peter) Jennings and the rest make two or three million. Well, it felt damn good to make one-fortieth of that and beat their butts.”

Veterans say the mood at CNN central has always been anti-Establishment, a feeling that comes from Turner, who got it from his father, a Georgia billboard executive who wrote to his son during his first year at Brown University: “You are in the hands of the Philistines, and dammit, I sent you there. I’m sorry. Devotedly, Dad.”

Turner’s performance at a 1989 media awards ceremony suggests where some of his reporters get their inspiration. The occasion was the presentation in Kansas City of the Paul White Memorial Award--the national Radio and Television News Directors Assn.’s top honor--and Turner was there to accept the accolades for CNN.

In a scene reminiscent of the notorious, three-sheets-to-the-wind news conference he held after winning sailing’s America’s Cup Trophy in 1977, Turner waved to Shaw at the head table and said, “Hey, Bernie! Has a black guy ever won this award? NO ? Well, stick around . . . you’ll be the first!”

WHAT HAPPENS AT CNN WHEN the bombs stop falling and the lead story of the day is the Canadian election or the GATT talks?

Those who tune in for real-life high drama will probably change the channel. “What CNN needs is a long war,” Tom Shales says. “If the war keeps up, so will their ratings.” Of course, no one at CNN would ever say anything like that. To them, the war is business as usual, even if it is the best business they’ve ever done.

The powers that be at CNN say there’s a critical mass of current-events addicts out there that can grow substantially if properly nourished on a steady diet of domestic scandals and catastrophes delivered with the same intensity as CNN’s Gulf coverage. The surge in cable subscriptions during the first weeks of the war--which one cable industry official attributes largely to a hunger for CNN’s war watch--presented them with an unprecedented opportunity to prove it.

“The war will certainly pay dividends in the short run,” says financial analyst Dan Wexler, vice president of Capitol Securities Management, a Washington-area investment firm. “This is a growth opportunity for the cable industry in general, but CNN will be the real beneficiary if it can create a sense in the public’s mind that it’s the place to turn to whenever something important happens.”

The network’s aim is not simply to sell news around the globe. It’s to sell commercial time around the news. On the strength of their war ratings, CNN officials in Atlanta are now confidently courting big-ticket advertisers. During the second week of the Gulf conflict, for example, they were leading home-town Coca-Cola company executives through the newsroom.

“Coke,” beamed someone from CNN’s publicity department, “never advertises on news shows.”

But CNN’s rush to capitalize on its popularity could backfire, says Charles Bachrach, a senior vice president at Rubin Postaer and Associates in New York. “The problem CNN has had in the past--and now--is their price structure. They have what we call a ‘price structure du jour ‘--a price scale based on demand. They raised their rates tremendously because they saw high ratings. But what’s going to happen is that when the war ends and things settle down, advertisers will remember who stuck it to them. There is no question that there will be more viewers, but I’m not so sure about more advertisers.”

Still, says Bruce Hoenig, president of the Network Broadcast Division of Western International Media, whose clients have advertised on CNN in the past, “what the war coverage has done is to make people more aware of CNN’s personality and what it can do,” he says. “I think that will translate into more advertisers. The prestige advertisers might start to look at CNN more positively. CNN already has a very fine reputation, but the problem has always been the numbers: They just couldn’t deliver the demographics that our clients are looking for.

“The name recognition helps,” Hoenig says, “putting personalities with the name. Before, we had no idea who was on CNN. After the war, maybe CNN will have a name they can identify to the advertisers.”

Planning has already begun for filling the empty hours when the war ends with news and opinion that stack up with anything on the other networks. And don’t be surprised to see some familiar personalities. In recent weeks, former CBS and current PBS commentator Bill Moyers has been hosting an occasional series on CNN, adding notable class and depth. “Serious” and “hard-hitting” are the words CNN uses to describe its new investigative team headed by senior correspondent Pam Hill, a defector from ABC, and populated by big-name reporters like Ken Bode, formerly of NBC, and Brooks Jackson, formerly of the Wall Street Journal.

With the networks reducing news staffs and news budgets, expect to see more and more name reporters showing up at CNN glad to have jobs, if not their former salaries. And, some insiders say, expect those low, low salaries to rise a bit, too. The cameras at CNN may work by remote control, but the personnel are living, breathing talent--talent with egos. When those egos are inflated, as they have been in recent weeks, their owners may take a second look at the salaries Turner has been paying and want a little more recognition themselves.

“What’s fair is fair,” comments Washington bureau chief Bill Headline, who predicts that CNN paychecks will inevitably go up but never match the big networks’. “People should get what they deserve,” he says. But pay, he admits, has never been the force driving CNN’s staff. “Sure, you make more money at the other networks, but the other networks are in shambles. They’re cutting back. We’re growing. I worked at CBS for 20 years and I never felt the sense of participation there that we have here.”

Postwar days may give CNN staffers a chance to participate in projects such as that 18-part series on education Ed Turner describes to a listener, giving every impression he means it. “We have the resources and the time to do some very exciting work,” he says.

There’s talk of better coverage of live trials and disasters, using the same skills reporters learned in the war. When it’s over over there, Americans are going to see news in a whole new way. What earning money was to the ‘80s, watching the news may well be to the ‘90s. CNN will convey it--and not always on television.

Now, for the first time, when people hooked on CNN can’t get to a TV set, they can call a special 900 number and be patched into the regular on-air broadcast. In the past, other networks have used 900 telephone lines to conduct viewer surveys, but never before has anyone ever delivered the news by phone and charged 25 cents a minute.

Most of the staffers and talent who work in Atlanta are too busy just keeping up with the news to think about how the war in the Gulf and the one among the networks will affect their future, financial and otherwise. “I’ve thought about it quite a bit lately,” says a longtime employee, roaming the shopping mall at the center of Atlanta’s CNN Tower. “This is a business where you rarely get out what you put in. Some people will find better jobs, with more pay. But a year from now, most of us will be here, doing what we’ve always been doing, covering news only a news junkie could love.”

For CNN stalwarts such as Earl Casey, managing editor for national news, there’s a crazy pull about this upstart organization. Casey never stops moving. Even when he’s sitting down, he’s ready to take off. The burnout rate is “probably above average,” he speculates, citing himself as an example. He quit CNN a year ago but returned when he realized he couldn’t stand life without constant activity.

“I’m one of the strongest human beings I know, and this job was killing me,” he says. “Life around here is all-consuming; nothing ever ends, the day never ends, deadlines never end. It’s a strange feeling. I got up yesterday at 8 o’clock and didn’t know whether it was a.m. or p.m. After you work at CNN for a while, you lose all sense of being in one place at one time. If it’s 10 o’clock in Baghdad, it’s 2 o’clock in Atlanta and 11 on the West Coast. It’s funny. We plan everything right down to the second, but time itself is meaningless.

“You don’t get many rewards on a wheel that never stops turning. After you get off, though, you miss going around in circles. Don’t ask me why. For that, you’ll have to read Kafka.”