January 16, 6:30 p.m. The Fireworks Suite
Just as CNN reporter John Holliman prepares to plunk down in
Baghdad for his first snooze in two or three days and CNN senior
executive producer Bob Furnad in Atlanta picks up his attaché case to
go home, the allies bomb Iraq.
In CNN's Atlanta newsroom, Caudill is sitting at the supervising desk when someone yells, ''It's happening!'' Caudill leaps up, vaults over the desk, and races to the control booth, and CNN begins the broadcast that itself will immediately become historic.
In Baghdad, and on dozens of screens in the Atlanta control room, Holliman, Arnett, and Shaw ''hunker down,'' as Arnett puts it, bereft of electricity or water, unable to flush the toilet, yet surreally provided with regular maid service. Even without a camera, they become the world's eyes and ears. Diving under tables and into closets to elude Iraqi authorities, who pack all the other journalists into a basement bomb shelter, they emerge to peer astounded out the window, thrusting their microphones into the perilous air to capture the roar and thunder. They report not only the facts outside, but their own emotions, ping-ponging from panic to elation. ''This feels like we're in the center of hell,'' says Shaw; on another occasion, he quips, ''If this is a surgical bombing, I don't like being this close to the operating table.''
Competitors who weren't able to get their own special phone lines may feel CNN got some preferential treatment from the Iraqis, but there could be a remarkably simple explanation: Arab leaders tend to watch CNN, not CBS, NBC, or ABC. Saddam got to watch himself patting hostage kids on the head last August — a spectacle mocked by one television critic as ''Iraq's Funniest Home Videos'' — and that's possibly why he favored CNN this time around.
In Atlanta, the war alert, broadcast over beepers and cellular phones, brings more than 200 employees to the newsroom within 15 minutes. Tom Johnson, so slow and courtly in his movements on a normal night, sprints down the hallway.
Just after midnight, the start of the morning of January 17, Shaw is heard on a newsroom monitor saying, ''I apologize if I sound scruffy around the edges — I've been up for two days.'' Nobody at mission control is complaining, although everyone looks as exhausted as he sounds. Discarded scripts overflow wastebaskets, and sugary doughnuts litter the desktops. ''I've been here 16 hours now,'' says Caudill. ''We've been going in waves, we've had this war plan in effect. We may have been shouting and screaming, but it was controlled chaos. But the real heroes are our people in Baghdad.''
Twenty minutes later, while Saddam appears on CNN venting his outrage over what he considers foreign aggression against his regime, Alec Miran fumes in the control booth. ''Okay, be aware this is a Eurovision feed. We have no idea how long it'll go.'' Eventually, Saddam says, ''Allah Akhbar, Allah Akhbar, Allah Akhbar.'' CNN's in-studio translator chants, ''God is great, God is great, God is great,'' and Miran exclaims, ''He's wrapping! He's wrapping! He's wrapping!'' Patrick Emory comes on-screen, murmuring, ''That was Saddam Hussein and some very colorful language in there.''
But the dictator's taped propaganda speech seems pallid compared with CNN's live coverage of his dangerous endgame. Whatever the outcome of the war, the geopolitical structure of the Middle East will be irrevocably changed. So will TV news, and CNN, with its reporting triumph, is the main reason why. As one exhausted young CNN TelePrompTer operator puts it in the wee hours of January 17: ''I guess we're not the Chicken Noodle Network anymore.''
ET MEETS CNN: WHEN REPORTERS BECOME THE STORY
In the news: On January 18, Entertainment Tonight's Leeza Gibbons discussed CNN's coup; on January 20, Larry King interviewed fellow
CNN broadcasters Bernard Shaw and John Holliman after their return to
the United States; also on January 18, Bill Sternhoff, an anchor on
the syndicated show Personalities, did a complimentary piece on Shaw
and CNN.
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