Tuning In The Global Village : TV a Star Player on the World’s Political Stage : Ignoring national boundaries and ideology, it influences the course of events it covers.

BERLIN —  In the 1960s, East German schoolteachers liked to ask their students a loaded question: Did the clock that appeared briefly on the family television screen each night counting down the final seconds before the evening news have dots or dashes in place of numbers?

Anyone answering “dashes” was watching West German television--an act strictly forbidden by Communist authorities.

While the teachers’ ploy may have briefly returned a few families to the drab state-controlled offerings of East Germany, the lure of the West’s uncensored news and lively entertainment programming eventually proved so irresistible that the authorities gave up trying to control it.

It was the first crack in the Berlin Wall.

A generation later, the age of satellites and miniature TV cameras has extended television’s political reach well beyond neighboring countries to places continents away.

Consider:

* After watching live coverage of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin actively opposing the attempted military takeover in Moscow, President Bush and West European leaders quickly understood he had a good chance of survival. They immediately toughened their condemnation of events, a move that helped demoralize leaders of the August, 1991, coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The coup quickly collapsed.

* During Kuwait’s first free, national elections earlier this month--themselves an indirect fallout from the most televised war in history--candidates modeled their campaigns on those in U.S. elections shown every night via satellite TV.

* During the Gulf War, Turkish President Turgut Ozal learned that Bush valued his views when he saw his American counterpart halt a news conference to take his telephone call. Ozal was halfway around the world in his Ankara office, watching Bush live on CNN.

* This year, attempting to extend its influence into the Muslim republics of former Soviet Central Asia, Turkey launched a new satellite television service for the region’s 50 million Turkic speakers. And it has contracted with France’s Aerospatiale to launch its own satellite, Turksat, next year.

For better or worse--and there are plenty who harbor serious concerns about the changes--television has forever broken the limits of national boundaries. In the process, it has become a powerful and vital new force in international diplomacy and politics.

Aggressive, frequently insensitive and usually objective, it ignores national frontiers, brushes aside ideology, tramples cultural sensitivity and constantly frustrates attempts to contain it.

Its impact, already considerable, is growing. Fast.

Two years ago, CNN enjoyed a virtual monopoly on global television news. Today, inspired by the triumph of Ted Turner’s idea, new commercial all-news satellite television channels with a broad international reach have either already begun transmitting or are about to do so in France, Germany, Britain, Canada and Australia.

Many expect that Japan will soon revive plans scrapped last year to beam an all-news channel throughout Southeast Asia.

At the same time, governments in Europe and Asia have started shifting their own external broadcasting arms away from short-wave radio onto satellite television. And a presidential advisory commission recently urged the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) to follow suit.

“Cross-border television is used increasingly as a tool of foreign policy,” noted Britain’s respected Economist magazine earlier this year.

Summed up Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s closest aides: “Television image is everything.”

He should know.

Of all the Communist world’s leaders, none better understood--or used--the power of the tube more effectively than Gorbachev.

Abroad, televised images of his winsome smile, jovial nature and glamorous wife disarmed the West as effectively as any nuclear missile. At home, his TV appeals directly to the Soviet public skirted an obstructionist bureaucracy skeptical of reform and gave him the grass-roots support for a wave of change.

In time, the changes Gorbachev set in motion would boomerang against him. When they did, it was the power of television that helped sweep him away, along with his ideology, his nation and most of its empire.

For many world leaders, it was the sight of a shaken, rambling Gorbachev appearing before the cameras in the wake of the 1991 coup attempt that convinced them the baton of power in Moscow had passed to Yeltsin.

Television’s global reach has changed the rules of politics elsewhere too, either directly or by the enormous influence it has exerted on domestic television fare in countries long used to tight control over broadcasting content.

Thailand’s royal family last May effectively used the box to halt large-scale unrest. First, in a satellite TV interview from Paris, where she was on a state visit, the popular Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn urged Thais to end the bloodshed. Then, several days later, King Bhumibol Adulyadej arranged a televised audience with two feuding generals.

Scenes of the two leaders shuffling up to the king on their knees as the monarch reprimanded them were beamed across Thailand and around the world, bolstering royal authority and humiliating the two generals, who agreed to compromise.

Over the last three decades, television has entered the parliaments of nearly all the industrialized world’s democracies, opening the decision-making process to public scrutiny as never before. In Britain, it took nine votes over 20 years before Parliament members admitted cameras into the mother of parliaments in 1988. Today, only New Zealand keeps the gates closed.

The exposure has unmasked the irreverence of the democratic process, but occasionally it has also altered its course.

Japanese lawmakers discovered that after a parliamentary committee vote in Tokyo last year.

The vote, approving the controversial overseas deployment of noncombat troops for disaster relief and U.N. peacekeeping activities, precipitated a shoving match in which TV cameras clearly showed members of the Buddhist-backed Komei (Clean Government) Party fighting alongside ruling Liberal Democrats--a scene that so enraged the Komei rank and file that the party was forced to drop its support for the bill.

Only with a new set of compromises was Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa finally able to get the Komei back on board to enact the bill last June.

Months later, television footage showing opposition Socialists and Communists trying to delay the bill’s passage by staging a so-called “cow walk”--a kind of physical filibuster of studied lethargy in moving toward the rostrum--also exacted its toll on the opposition.

The tactic may have been a legitimate parliamentary procedure, but it came across on television as downright silly and is believed to have been an important factor in the opposition’s election defeat a month later.

Today, three decades after John F. Kennedy became the world’s first “television leader,” the power of the tube in influencing elections has extended to much of the globe.

Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello, for example, is widely regarded as a creation of the country’s powerful media magnate Roberto Marinho, owner of TV Globo, producer of 70% of all Brazilian television.

Marinho reportedly agreed to back Collor--at the time an obscure state governor with a spotty record of success and the support of only a tiny, new party--in the 1989 presidential election. In return, Collor would press the right-of-center political platform that mirrored Marinho’s views.

With Marinho’s backing and the power of TV Globo, Collor defeated a host of well-funded, better-known candidates from larger parties.

After scandal led to Collor’s recent impeachment, political observers tracked his downfall not to the release of a damning report linking him to an influence-peddling ring but to Marinho’s decision several days later to abandon him.

Among the first men consulted by new Acting President Itamar Franco: Roberto Marinho.

Satellites have also had a profound effect on the politics of European television, breaking long-held government monopolies of the medium in many countries and extending viewer choice from two or three channels to between 20 and 30.

Said Britain’s Economist, “The multiplicity of channels means that the government thought police, in whatever form, whether it is the benign good and the great in Britain, or the jackboot-in-the-night elsewhere, will find it hard to control more and more channels.”

That multiplicity has also worked to cut the Continent’s cultural and political distances.

Indeed, efforts to resist American television influence three years ago led to a search among many of the Continent’s leading TV producers and filmmakers to find the ingredients of a “European identity.”

“There is little doubt about it, television has helped build the European idea,” commented Bjoern von Sydow, a Stockholm University political scientist and onetime adviser to former Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson. “It’s helped bring Sweden into Europe.”

The political power of satellite television has not been lost on governments, now scrambling to transfer funds from shortwave radio programming to the television screen.

The BBC next month celebrates the first anniversary of its World Service Television; Germany’s Deutsche Welle began its satellite broadcasting to Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe last April, and France, along with French-speaking partners in Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec, launched a 24-hour television service to Africa last June.

Viewers seem to be watching.

Deutsche Welle Director Dieter Weirich noted that the recent start of a German language course beamed into Romania generated 15,000 requests for additional information within a three-week period.

Exactly what the explosion of television’s power means for the political process, both now and for the future, is a hotly disputed issue.

So far, however, the overwhelming body of evidence shows that, time and again, the intrusion of television has strengthened forces of democracy.

East Germans watching their countrymen on West German TV newscasts driving happily to freedom across the Austria-Hungarian frontier in the late summer of 1989 generated enough domestic pressure to break down the Berlin Wall three months later.

Those pictures of Germans dancing on the wall ignited the flame of revolution in Prague, where citizens rose up eight days later, and, before the end of the year, in Bucharest, where Romanians overthrew their dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.

“More than anything else, what television does is change the time scale of a political crisis,” said Ralf Dahrendorf, warden of Oxford University’s St. Antony’s College. “You can’t go into a crisis with a seven-day plan, because television will whip opinion and shorten the entire time line.”

When it hasn’t catalyzed victory for democracy, television has made life tougher on freedom’s oppressors, as China’s hierarchy discovered when it assessed the diplomatic damage caused by television pictures of the Tian An Men Square massacre.

Political scientist Von Sydow claims that global television also acts as a preventive medicine of sorts, heightening public awareness and making it harder for nations to galvanize public opinion needed to launch armed conflicts.

“(Global) television helps people see issues more clearly and understand them for what they are,” he said. “They won’t be drawn in.”

Not everyone agrees.

Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt argues in his memoirs that television can warp an unfolding crisis, whipping public opinion to emotional and moralistic overreactions and making it extremely hard for governments to remain cool.

He cited as an example the Middle East hostage crises of the 1980s, in which satellite hookups permitted live, intensely emotional interviews with American hostages. The interviews placed added pressures on the Ronald Reagan Administration to cave in to the captors’ demands.

Immediately before and during the Gulf War, CNN was also heavily criticized by some who claimed the network had been reduced to the role of messenger for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

For others, however, it underscored a new era of what has been dubbed “teleplomacy” in which leaders watch and talk to each other--even as they prepare to square off.

“This massive flow of information is intrinsically neither good nor bad,” Dahrendorf said. “But it does fuel our basic emotions and makes the political decision-making process volatile and unpredictable.”

Amid this debate, two facts remain unchallenged: Television has changed forever the way politics is conducted, and it will continue to do so.

By the end of the century, there will be more stations transmitting more information than ever before, and more people will be able to receive it.

Many believe the trend should be welcomed.

Concluded Von Sydow, “If everything else were constant, we’d be far worse off today without television.”