President Turgut Ozal of Turkey tells of glancing at the television screen just in time to see and hear President Bush saying he was about to call him up. The Turkish president walked into his office and picked up the ringing telephone. It was Bush. That's the way it often is in the Persian Gulf confrontation. Cable News Network's constant, live broadcasts from scenes of crisis and diplomacy lets leaders a world apart look over one another's shoulders as events unfold. In another era, information on crisis situations moved to diplomats and warriors over secret, coded, back channels. The world knew only what these movers and shakers wanted known. The Gulf crisis is broadcast around the world in color, often live, 24 hours a day on CNN. Among the most avid watchers are the world leaders who make the news, including Britain's Margaret Thatcher, France's Francois Mitterrand, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. CNN staffers in Washington are reminded of this by a photograph tacked to their bulletin board. It shows President Bush and his top advisers watching an Iraqi newscast, the CNN logo prominent in one corner. ABC's Ted Koppel, broadcasting from Baghdad, paid a rival the ultimate compliment by saying that the Iraqi foreign ministry was following events by watching CNN. And Turkey's Ozal, a key player, says he has kept his television tuned to CNN since Iraq troops crossed into Kuwait Aug. 2. An Associated Press reporter arriving for an interview recently found the president chuckling over a brawl between the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies. Each morning, Iraqi television sends CNN's Atlanta headquarters two or three messages advising what stories it plans to carry. Such a message might advise that ``at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time, Iraqi TV will be carrying a message from President Saddam Hussein to President Bush.'' Television has become a weapon in this war of nerves, just as it was when the Ayatollah Khomeini allowed U.S. camera crews to film frenzied mobs of Iranians denouncing ``The Great Satan'' America during the 1979-1980 hostage crisis. And it's getting on President Bush's nerves. Bush complained to reporters this week that they were asking harder questions of him than of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Ed Turner, CNN's executive vice president for news gathering, said the network tapes most Iraqi TV offerings and screens them before they are put on the network. But on Thursday, when Hussein appeared on television for 50 minutes with a roomful of English-speaking hostages, CNN stayed with Iraqi TV the entire time. The other American networks showed excerpts of the bizarre, profoundly disturbing scene. Turner, no relation to CNN founder Ted Turner, shrugs off any suggestion that the network is being used for propaganda by the Iraqis. ``The technology that permits all this is not going to be disinvented,'' he said. ``When we worry about being used or manipulated, or becoming a part of this story as opposed to being chroniclers, it seems to me that since the technology exists, it's a question of using it responsibly.'' Robert MacNeil, co-anchor of ``The MacNeil-Lehrer Hour'' on the Public Broadcasting service, said television is doing what wire services and newspapers have been doing for more than a century. ``It's just that television has speeded it up,'' MacNeil said. ``It's a kind of television version of the hot line that Kennedy and Khrushchev set up after the Cuban Missile Crisis.'' The international audience for CNN's broadcast is awesome. The network's broadcasts are seen in 95 countries, including 25 in Europe, 3 in the Middle East and 10 in Africa. ``We're virtually the primary source of news for many people, including many principals involved in the current crisis,'' said Peter Vesey, director of CNN International. ``It's gratifying, but it emphasizes once again our responsibility as journalists not only to get it fast, but to get it right.'' Ted Turner began with 1.7 million domestic subscribers and now has over 55 million. At any given time the evening newscasts of the other three commercial networks out draw CNN 10-to-1, but that is not a valid comparison since the cable network's audience is spread over a 24-hour day. Vesey estimates that CNN has nine million subscribers worldwide, but its audience is far larger, since the service is available unscrambled to people who have the right kind of equipment, but don't pay. The network observed its 10th anniversary last month and Newsweek, describing a celebration, headlined its piece ``CNN is the network of the new world it helped create.'' National Public Radio's Daniel Schorr, who was with CNN at the start, called it ``The world's intercom.'' CNN took out a three-age advertisement this month in the industry publication, Electronic Media, to brag about how far it's come. ``They laughed when we decided to create an all-news network,'' said the first page. ``Nobody's laughing now,'' says the second.
