MTV's World

It's the Suit vs. the Tattoo Set. Foggy Bottom and the Hip Hop Crowd. The General and the Veejay. It's, it's...well, it's another weird but fascinating cultural moment on MTV, the Viacom-owned music network (VIA ) that supplements its core mission of delivering 150-decibel music to the world's teens with straight-talking programs on issues such as AIDS, drugs, and racism. On Feb. 14, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will lead Be Heard, a no-holds-barred talk show on MTV Networks, where he will field questions on the crisis in Afghanistan from teens from Boston to Berlin to Bombay. The program will air on MTV's 33 channels worldwide and reach almost 375 million households. MTV's video jockeys--the ones who usually deliver wall-to-wall Hindi film music, German hard rock, Mando-pop, and Mexican hip hop to local viewers--will moderate the meeting, and translators will be on hand to turn questions into English. It will be, in other words, an Event.

Powell's appearance is a media moment that only MTV could pull off. Media moguls can babble on about the global village, on how CNN or BBC can reach out and touch the world. But those news shows are bush league operations compared with MTV's global clout. Thanks to the roaring success of its subsidiary, MTV Networks International, the music channel and its sister operations, VH1 and Nickelodeon, reach 1 billion people in 18 different languages in 164 countries. Eight out of ten MTV viewers live outside the U.S. CNN International reaches an international audience less than half the size of MTV's. Its impressive global reach has earned MTV membership in that tiny elite of such globally transcendent brands as Coke and Levi's.