Word: listings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Compiling a list of the most influential people in America, besides being a provocative parlor game, provides a chance to mull over the ideas and visions, tastes and beliefs that affect our lives. Being influential is the reward of successful salesmanship, the validation of personal passion, the visible sign of individual merit. It is power without coercion, celebrity with substance...
Because influence is not the same as power (see page 80), most of official Washington is not on this list. Nor is this a list of heroes. Colin Powell, a legitimate hero, has been influential in the past and has the potential to be so again, but for now he's taking time off. Meanwhile, Louis Farrakhan, who to most people is no hero, is busily influencing people. It is also not a list celebrating celebrity. Dennis Rodman is famous, but we'll have to wait for a lot more killer-tomato dye jobs to show up in the N.B.A...
...Hollywood. Virtually the entire data-intensive world--which is to say, virtually the entire world--has concluded that the Web is the future of communications, and is now retooling to stay in lockstep with Netscape (and vice versa: Netscape perpetually updates its browser to accommodate new Web applications). "The list of businesses being transformed," says Clark, includes "broadcasting, publishing, software, finance, shopping, entertainment services, consumer electronics...It's a massive, massive change. We just happened to see it first and set the commercial agenda...
...free world must not be all that it used to be. All that, and Bill Clinton still doesn't qualify as one of the 25 most influential people in America? What ever happened to the prerogatives of office? Whom do you have to know to get on this list...
...other distinction between power and influence: a list of the most influential people in America reflects at least some of the nation's racial and ethnic diversity and includes both men and women. But for now, any inventory of the people who really pull the levers of power is topped by white men in suits. The President and the Federal Reserve Board chairman, the leaders of Congress, the chiefs of industry and communication--these are the men who can, in the end, still dictate where money is spent, how troops and workers get deployed, which programs and movies are distributed...