BY WALTER GOODMAN
Goodman is a television critic for The New York Times.

ARNETT

Peter Arnett spend the days and weeks after leaving Baghdad early in March, when all Western reporters were invited out, answering the criticism that his presence there throughout the war had brought down on him and his employers, the Cable News Network. By turns defiant and defensive, the correspondent upheld his role even as he acknowledged that the sort of journalism he had practiced, or been permitted to practice, had been severely circumscribed.

What exactly was the role that Arnett and the other correpsondents in Baghdad played and why did it create its own desert storm? Much of the abuse was strictly political. The Scuds came mainly from the right, from Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, whose mission it is to expose what he deems to be the prevailing leftism of press and television, and Senator Alan K. Simpson, the Wyoming Republican, who evidently did not like having pictures of civilian victims of the American bombings on the tube, lest they get in the way of public support for the administration. As even Simpson seemed belatedly to have recognized, their attacks were personal and nasty. (Arnett told an audience at the National Press Club that when he was reporting from Jerusalem before the war, Simpson and other senators had upbraided him and other correspondents for being too critical of Saddam Hussein.)

A surprisingly high-pitched comment came from Jim Wooten, a columnist for The Atlanta Journal (not the ABC correspondent), who drew a distinction between CNN, which broadcasts to the world, and networks that serve mainly the United States, where viewers have access to a range of information. He wrote: "CNN, however noble its intentions, while in Iraq is part of the controlled press and could be a legitimate target for electronic jamming by the allies." Then there was sniping from competitors against the man who had the beat to himself for a considerable period. when other network reporters were allowed into the city, however, their dispatches were not all that different from Arnett's

Arnett's champions, such as his friend David Halberstam, rebutted with credential-mongering. They reminded us of Vietnam, where Arnett won a Pulitzer Prize, and spoke of his integrity and his courage. The nature of his current coverage was hardly mentioned. Opponents of the war (yes, there really were some back in January) also came to the defense, in hopes perhaps that reports like Arnett's might produce a Vietnam effect. In any case, the concentration on the individual drew attention away from the predicament: Should American journalists be in enemy territory, sending home dispatches under the eye of the enemy censor? Is there any way to do that without abetting the enemy? Is there value to an American audience in hearing even inherently loaded reports?

The first and last questions seem to me easy. By reamining in Baghdad, Peter Arnett was doing what any jouralist would do, and by trying to get into the city, the other network news departments were doing likewise, and good luck to them. As Arnett told Larry King after he left Iraq, "I was in Baghdad for the people who look at CNN" -- not for the United States government. An on-the-ground presence in Baghdad was particularly valuable given the nature of the air campaign (how do you report it if you can't see where the bombs land?) and the Pentagon's control of information. Applying the tactics that had kept reporters at bay in Grenada and Panama, the military effectively shaped coverage from the beginning to the end of the gulf war. That encouraged the natural wartime disposition to celebrate Our Brave Men and Women and censure, or even sensor, anyone who didn't pitch in heartily enough.

The notion of American correspondents reciting reports approved by the enemy is uncomfortable, but noncoverage is not an attractive alternative. The best the journalist can do in enemy territory is to make plain to viewers and readers the conditions under which he or she is permitted to operate and try to slip in more information than the minders have in mind. Which gets us back to Baghdad.

Accompanying every dispatch from Iraq on all networks were notices that censorship prevailed. It also prevailed to some extent in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Washington. Yet what bothered even friendly critics of Arnett and his colleagues was their failure to make clear enough that they were being used expressly to report on civilian casualties. Some did try. As the CBS screen was taken up with a child in a hospital bed, for example, Betsy Aaron said, "In a hospital, the most innocent of victims is shown to the cameras." In the nature of things, the picture overwhelmed the wink, but the wink was there. Talking with Frank Sesno of CNN as he was leaving Baghdad on March 6, Arnett conceded that the authorities had allowed him to stay so that he could tell about civilian casualties. He said he had lobbied for more information, but to little avail. In an interview with Sam Donaldson on ABC's Prime Time Live, Arnett spelled out just how tight the control was: "From the beginning I accepted the constraints that the Iraqis laid down. They said, 'Anything you do, you put on paper. We go over it, and we alter it. We change it if we wish to, and that's what you're going to use.'"

To viewers around the world, it must have seemed that Saddam Hussein could have nothing to complain about in Arnett's performance. Whether it was a description of a bombed milk factory (could it have been a laboratory for bacteriological weapons?) or of what he called a civilian air raid shelter (could it also have been a military control center?), his reports never contradicted the Iraqi line.

Taken to a neighborhood where he was told that twenty-four civilians had been killed and the screen showed a framed photograph of a child in the debris of a house, he said he had seen only homes and a school, no mention of any munitions depot or military communications site or chemical-warfare plant that the Pentagon said were in the vicinity. But, of course, it was understood that military targets must not be mentioned. As Wooten wrote: "Take a reporter to a scene where civilians are suffering, tell him to say anything he wants about it, so long as he does not convey information of military value and you have ground rules that make fair and accurate reporting impossible." Describing hits near Iraqi holy places, Arnett went so far as to use the verb "targeted," as though pilots had been aiming at them.

In a self-gratulatory apologia that appeared in The Washington Post when he had left Baghdad, Arnett wrote that his daily question-and-answer exchanges with the CNN anchor after he had delivered his Iraqi-approved script "saved my credibility and made my presence in Baghdad a valuable one." For example, he was able to report on what he could see along the way to the destinations that had been selected for him. In his National Press Club talk, he gave the impression that his minders grew panicky over these Q-and-As. His hints about the presence of military vehicles and his observations of daily life were welcome, but even here, it seemed to this viewer, he either did not see much of interest or was reluctant to try the patience of his hosts. The questions, which alerted viewers to how closely Arnett was controlled, were more informative than the answers.

For a time, ABC's Bill Blakemore was going around Baghdad interviewing residents. They were all amiable, serving coffee and so forth, and he said he felt they were speaking frankly despite the presence of an Iraqi official who, he assured viewers, was not in uniform and who stayed in the background. The men on the street and on camera said nothing unkind about their regime or its invasion of Kuwait.

Now, listen to Arnett as he is being kicked out of the country: "We don't get any really honest appraisals on camera because when we give an -- have an interview in the street, there is a ministry of information official standing with us. You know, the conversation is being monitored." Only at the end, with his monitor "being very, very tolerant," was he able to say that once president Hussein had suggested a conditional withdrawal, "the public, to a person, was commenting that they didn't really need to be in Kuwait, that they wanted an end to the war."

Some of the correspondents in Baghdad apparently got to be on friendly terms with their minders, so much so that toward the end Arnett told his CNN interviewer that he would prefer to hold off talking about public feelings in Iraq until he reached Amman, "where I don't necessarily have to embarrass any local official, Frank." A reporter reluctant to embarrass a local official? The delicate concern wore off as soon as Arnett was out of the country. If Baghdad was monitoring his talk to the National Press Club, those minders might have been highly embarrassed, since he referred to their criticisms of the Hussein regime and singled out one who, he said, allowed him to deliver an uncensored report on his final night in Iraq.

Set aside the cheap innuendos of disloyalty. And set aside, too, Jim Wooten's proposition that CNN reports from Iraq should be blocked lest they force a shift in military strategy for political reasons, which is an invitation to a censorship party -- an invitation that is all the more disturbing coming from a newspaperman. A journalist who decides that his job is to help win a war, rather than just to describe it, is better off enlisting.

It was important for Arnett, Blakemore, and the others to be in Baghdad. It was important that people see something more of the consequences of the bombing than the photographs through targeting cross hairs beloved of Pentagon warriors. Nothing is harder or more essential to remember in the heat of war than that the other side is made up of human beings, too.

What was missing from most of the Baghdad reports was a degree of distance from the approved material, a touch of the skepticism that Washington reporters lay on when talking about American politicians. Wherefore the untypical deference? Where the correspondents afraid they would be kicked out if they hedged their reports a bit? Where they carried away by the professional temptation to squeeze emotion from scenes of pain? Were they feeling normal sympathy for people under attack? As he was leaving Baghdad, Arnett replied to critics that he felt "very proud to be an eyewitness so the rest of the world would know how its policy was being implemented." That's nice. And he added, "I think the record will show the policy was implemented pretty effectively." His stint in Iraq over, was Arnett doing some repositioning?

All right, the coverage from Baghdad was only part of television's effort; Washington and Riyadh supplied most of the news. And judging Arnett and Blakemore and the other television reporters in Baghdad from afar is an easier assignment than the one they carried out, under tough conditions and with admirable perseverance. Yet aspects of their performance remain troubling, not from a patriotic point of view but from a professional one. The question nags, whether thet adapted too readily to their host's scenario, whether they might not have found more ways to talk to viewers over, behing, beneath, and around those friendly minders.

In his Washington Post piece, Arnett told of "long and sometimes heated" arguments with the Iraqis and added, "I call: I can't fault any correspondent for staying on, but if Arnett had in fact been ejected for doing the journalist's job instead of the regime's, well, that would have been illuminating, too.

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