Prince of the Global Village

VISIONARIES ARE POSsessed creatures, men and women in the thrall of belief so powerful that they ignore all else -- even reason -- to ensure that reality catches up with their dreams. The vision may be the glory-driven daring of a Saddam Hussein, who foolishly tried to extend his rule by conquest and plunder, or the seize-the-day bravery of a Boris Yeltsin, who struggled to free a society from seven decades of iron ideology. But always behind the action is an idea, a passionate sense of what is eternal in human nature and % also of what is coming but as yet unseen, just over the horizon.

A generation ago, social theorist Marshall McLuhan proclaimed the advent of a "global village," a sort of borderless world in which communications media would transcend the boundaries of nations. "Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness," he wrote. " 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in . . . a simultaneous happening." McLuhan underestimated the enduring appeal of the status quo and the stubborn persistence of the petty side of human nature. The fusion of television and satellites did not produce instantaneous brotherhood, just a slowly dawning awareness of the implications of a world transfixed by a single TV image.

It took another visionary, and the band of dreamers and opportunists he gathered around him, to demonstrate that McLuhan was wrong only temporarily. In 1991, one of the most eventful years of this century, the world witnessed the dramatic and transforming impact on those events of live television by satellite. The very definition of news was rewritten -- from something that has happened to something that is happening at the very moment you are hearing of it. A war involving the fiercest air bombardment in history unfolded in real time -- before the cameras. The motherland of communism overthrew its leaders and their doctrine -- before the cameras. To a considerable degree, especially in Moscow, momentous things happened precisely because they were being seen as they happened.

These shots heard, and seen, around the world appeared under the aegis of the first global TV news company, Cable News Network. Contrary to the dictum of former U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill that "all politics is local," CNN demonstrated that politics can be planetary, that ordinary people can take a deep interest in events remote from them in every way -- and can respond to reportage in global rather than purely nationalistic terms.

Back in CNN's infancy, when he was dismissed as crackbrained and soon to be bankrupt, Ted Turner sensed the wonders to come. "I am the right man in the right place at the right time," he said. "Not me alone, but all the people who think the world can be brought together by telecommunications." The years since, and most especially the one just past, have demonstrated how emphatically he was right. For influencing the dynamic of events and turning viewers in 150 countries into instant witnesses of history, Robert Edward Turner III is TIME's Man of the Year for 1991.