[文学研究]第五单元英美报刊选读.docVIP

Unit Five Cable News Network and Telecommunication Text A History as it Happens Linking leaders as never before, CNN1 has changed the way the world does its business. By William A. HenryⅢ On the night that the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, Gilbert Lavoie, press secretary to Canada’s Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, telephoned his counterpart Marlin Fitzwater at the White House in Washington. “Marlin said, ‘Hi, what are you doing?’” Lavoie recalls, and I said, “I’m doing the same thing you are ?watching CNN.” So was virtually every other senior official in virtually every government.2 In that respect, at least, the night of Jan. 16, 1991, was actually rather ordinary. From Rome to Riyadh, London to Lagos, Beijing to Buenos Aires, Cable News Network is on more or less continuously in the suites of a vast array of chiefs of state and foreign ministers.3 It has become the common frame of reference4 for the world’s power elite. Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush and Saddam Hussein ?the headline sparring partners of the year just past ? are all alert watchers.5 What a computer message can accomplish within an office, CNN achieves around the clock, around the globe; it gives everyone the same information, the same basis for discussion, at the same moment. That change in communication has in turn affected jurnalism, intelligence gathering,6 economics, diplomacy and even, in the minds of some scholars, the very concept of what it is to be a nation. Only a glint of thought to its founder, Ted Turner, a dozen years ago, CNN is now the world’s most widely heeded news organization.7 British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd insists on staying only at hotels that carry the network. Iraqi ministers Tariq Aziz and Nizar Hamdoon would not so much as lower the volume of the non-stop CNN in the background while granting interviews to John Wallach, foreign affairs editor of the Hearst newspapers Washington bureau ?not even, Wallach says, for the Network’s Hollywood Minute