Almost unremarked, we have passed a turning point in journalism, particularly as journalism is practiced on television. Exactly when this happened is unclear—although by the 1980’s there were hints—but American broadcasts from Baghdad while American warplanes flew overhead finally made it certain. The old journalistic ideal of objectivity—the sense that reporting involves the gathering and presentation of relevant facts after appropriate critical analysis—has given way to a more porous standard. According to this new standard, reporters may—indeed should—stand midway between two opposing sides, even when one of the two sides is their own.

This is no academic matter. Neutrality is now a principle of American journalism, explicitly stated and solemnly embraced. After Dan Rather of CBS reported from Saudi Arabia last August that “our tanks are arriving,” the Washington Post gave him a call: wasn’t it jingoistic, perhaps xenophobic, to say “our tanks”? Rather apologized and promised he would never say such a thing again. He should have known better in the first place. After all, Mike Wallace, Rather’s CBS colleague, made the new standard clear well before the Gulf crisis started. At a conference on the military and the press at Columbia University on October 31, 1987, Wallace announced that it would be appropriate for him as a journalist to accompany enemy troops into battle, even if they ambushed American soliders.¹ And during the war itself, Bernard Shaw of CNN, explaining why he had refused to be debriefed by American officials after he left Baghdad, declared that reporters must be “neutral.”

As it happens, Shaw once said that the late Edward R. Murrow of CBS was his great hero. Indeed, a whole generation of television newsmen regard Murrow as their hero, invoking his name every time they give one another an award. They ought to go back now and listen to his broadcasts. In the Battle of Britain and other engagements, Murrow was outspoken about which side he was on, and he was never a neutral reporter. It would have been unthinkable for him in 1944, say, to make his way to Berlin, check into the Adlon Hotel, and pass on pronouncements by Hitler.

Still, this is the New World Order, and rules everywhere are changing. The great place to be for television journalists this winter was the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, in the basement of which, according to the Pentagon, was a command-and-control center, although the journalists holed up there were (neutrally) unable to find it.

Colleagues did complain when Peter Arnett of CNN stayed on in Baghdad after other journalists had been expelled; the complaints, however, were not so much about whether CNN (which has outlets in 104 countries) was acting as a broadcasting service for Saddam Hussein as about whether it was taking advantage of its competitors. When CBS, ABC, and NBC got their own correspondents into Baghdad, the complaints ended.

“You must avoid the appearance of cheerleading,” Ed Turner, the vice president of CNN, said during the war. “We are, after all, at CNN, a global network.” Turner, no relation to his boss Ted Turner, although obviously they think alike, went on to stress that CNN wanted to be fair to all nations. But the truth was that CNN had a mission. Speaking from Baghdad, Arnett told us what it was:

I know it’s Ted Turner’s vision to get CNN around the world, and we can prevent events like this from occurring in the future. I know that is my wish after covering wars all over and conflicts all over the world. I mean, I am sick of wars, and I am here because maybe my contribution will somehow lessen the hostilities, if not this time, maybe next time.

Old-style journalists grew sick of wars, too, although few thought their presence would prevent them. New-style neutral journalists, however, have their conceits, and the constraints that bind fellow citizens are not necessarily binding on them. At the Columbia conference, Mike Wallace was asked if a “higher duty as an American citizen” did not take precedence over the duty of a journalist. “No,” Wallace replied, “you don’t have that higher duty—no, no.” But if a neutral journalist does not owe a higher duty to citizenship, where does his higher duty lie? Old-style journalists seldom thought about that. A story was a story, and a reporter went out and reported it. Our age is self-consciously moral, though, and higher duties now weigh on us all. Arnett was clear about his higher duty, even without being asked. “I don’t work for the national interest,” he asserted in another broadcast from Baghdad. “I work for the public interest.”

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And it may be here that neutral journalism flies apart and breaks up into shards. What is this public interest, and who determines it, anyway? The national interest is determined by consensus and people are elected to serve it. The recent consensus was that the U.S. national interest lay in driving Iraq out of Kuwait and decimating its war machine. But the public interest is amorphous, and usually it turns out to be closer to the interest of its advocates than to that of the public.

Consider the performances in Baghdad. The correspondents there could not gather relevant facts, and if they had tried, they would have been expelled, or worse, from Iraq. What the correspondents did was listen to government-controlled Baghdad Radio (with a translator, presumably; none of the correspondents seemed to speak Arabic), tour Baghdad neighborhoods (with government guides and monitors), and, in the fashion of journalists everywhere, pick up what they could from other correspondents they met.

There is not much chance to do real reporting in a situation like that, and most of the time, one suspects, the correspondents knew it. Anchormen pressed them on questions they could not possibly answer. Tell me, Peter (or Bill, or Tom, or Betsy), an anchor would ask, how do Iraqis feel about this statement from President Bush? And Peter (or Bill, or Tom, or Betsy), from a cubicle in a hotel, an eight-hour time difference away, in a country whose language he did not understand, would reply as best he could.

The most accurate reply would have been, “I don’t know,” but you cannot say that very often and keep your job in television. So the reporting from Baghdad inevitably turned into an exercise by the correspondent in appearing to know something when he probably did not know much, while bearing in mind that he could not offend the host government.

Obvious questions arise: what if a correspondent in Baghdad had discovered something the host government did not want revealed? What if a correspondent had uncovered news about a party purge, or an outbreak of civil disorder, or the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein? Or—and this is not far-fetched—what if a correspondent, being bused from Baghdad to Basra, had come across an artillery battery with shells loaded with nerve gas and pointed toward U.S. Marines? The profession was uncomfortable with questions like that. Nonetheless, they could not be entirely ignored, and obliquely the correspondents in Baghdad addressed them. Were they, for example, holding back information?

“There are lots of things that you can’t report,” Betsy Aaron of CBS acknowledged. “If you do, you are asked to leave the country, and I don’t think we want to do that. I think you do a very valuable service reporting, no matter what you are allowed to report.”

No matter what you are allowed to report? Imagine Ed Murrow saying that. Neutral journalism assumes that what the reporter reports is not nearly as important as the fact that the reporter is there to report it. Journalism becomes a symbolic act, distinguished by form and not content. Operate under that standard, and censorship will not be a problem. Here is Bill Blakemore, speaking over ABC from Baghdad:

The script process is very normal for wartime, I would say. We write our scripts. We find one of the censors who’s down in the hotel lobby, and we show it to the censor who reads it, and sometimes there’s a slight change of a word here or there. Very often you may say something you didn’t realize would touch a sensitivity, but there’s not been any kind of heavy censorship in my experience here so far. It’s a fairly easy understanding we have.

Clearly, the “fairly easy understanding” between correspondents and one of the world’s most repressive governments meant that the correspondents simply censored themselves. If they were uncertain how to do this, they could always get help. Here is Blakemore again, in an exchange with his anchorman, Peter Jennings:

“Bill, are you operating on a completely uncensored basis?” Jennings whimsically asked.

No, Blakemore responded, “we got organized just now and managed to get somebody over here to listen and make sure we don’t have any military or strategic information.”

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Neutral status means that a journalist does not report objectively; he reports selectively. Arnett, visiting what had been Baghdad’s two main power plants, now destroyed by bombs and missiles, spoke of “relentless attacks on civilian installations.” He did not mention that those installations had been covered in camouflage paint. When he reported on the famous target that the Pentagon said was a biological-weapons factory and the Iraqis claimed was a “baby-milk plant”—“innocent enough from what we could see,” observed Arnett—he did not notice the camouflage there, either. (Visiting German peace activists, of all people, did notice it and talked about it when they got back to Europe.) After being taken to another bombed-out site, Arnett reported that “while we were there, a distraught woman shouted insults at the press and vented anger at the West.” Then we saw and heard the woman, who was standing next to a crater. “All of you are responsible, all of you, bombing the people for the sake of oil,” she screamed in perfect English. She also turned up on French television speaking perfect French. Several days later, a CNN anchor in Atlanta identified her as an employee of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry.

Arnett, an old hand at covering wars and seeing through propaganda, presumably knew that when the “distraught woman” was shouting. Surely he at least noticed that her jogging suit had “United Nations” printed down one leg. A neutral journalist must narrow his vision and report with one eye closed.

The Baghdad correspondents, as individuals or as a group, most likely will sweep this year’s television-journalism prizes. A claque formed almost immediately for Arnett, heaping encomiums on his head (especially after his patriotism was questioned by Senator Alan Simpson). He was a “dukes-up guy,” “brave” and “independent,” and an ornament to his profession. In the true spirit of neutral journalism, government-controlled Iraqi newsmen joined the claque, too. “The Iraqi press wrote favorably about me,” Arnett told Larry King, the CNN talk-show host, who interviewed him when the war was over. Arnett also said he had become a “third-world hero.”

Certainly Arnett and the other Baghdad correspondents displayed physical bravery in placing themselves in a war zone; and they did report, loosely speaking, to the best of their abilities. On the other hand, the correspondents as individuals were incidental. If there had not been Peter, Bill, Tom, or Betsy, there would have been John, Morton, Arthur, or Susan, and the “reporting” would have been much the same. For them, the great thing was that anyone was in Baghdad at all, and it did not matter that a great many other Americans were disturbed. When a Washington Post-ABC News poll asked if we should bomb a communications center in the Baghdad hotel where the reporters were staying, 62 percent of the respondents said we should issue a warning and then bomb even if the reporters were still there; 5 percent said we should forget the warning and just go ahead with the bombing.

In fact, the press as a whole did not come off well in the war. Television tarred more reliable print, and polls showed a huge dislike of the media. The essential reason was captured by the headline over a story in Time about disenchantment with the press: “Just Whose Side Are They On?” The “they,” of course, were journalists, and simply by raising the question Time went a long way toward providing the answer, even though the story itself predictably took a different position: “The attacks from both sides probably mean that the press is situated just about where it usually is: in the even-handed middle ground.”

Well, perhaps, but the even-handed middle ground becomes an increasingly elusive place in the television age. There were no American reporters in Kuwait when Iraq salted and pillaged that country; it was not in Iraq’s interest to have them there. It was in Iraq’s interest, however, to have reporters in Baghdad; when the war was over, Iraq kicked them out. Could the press have found a more even-handed middle ground here? Why, yes. It could have insisted that if it was going to be in Baghdad it must also be in Kuwait. Obviously, no network did insist on that.

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The principal signs of television’s search for a middle ground were “cleared by censor” titles; they were even-handedly applied to film approved by either American or Iraqi censors, showing skepticism of both sides. But the new neutral journalism also went a long way toward suggesting which side it was the more skeptical of. As long ago as last August, Michael Gartner, the president of NBC News, in a piece for the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, had alerted us to danger: “Here’s something you should know about the war that’s going on in the Gulf: much of the news that you read or hear or see is being censored.”

Actually, the American part of the war had not begun yet, but that did not deter Gartner. He went on to quote, disdainfully, from a list of things the Pentagon did not want us to know. They included:

1. Number of troops.
2. Number of aircraft.
3. Number of other equipment (e.g., artillery, tanks, radars, trucks, water “buffaloes,” etc.).
4. Names of military installations/geographic locations of U.S. military units in Saudi Arabia.
5. Information regarding future operations.
6. Information concerning security precautions at military installations in Saudi Arabia.

And so on, ending with “(9) Photography that would show level of security at military installations in Saudi Arabia” and “(10) Photography that would reveal the name of specific locations of military forces or installations.”

While it would be easy to dismiss Gartner as merely frivolous, it may be assumed that his peculiar ideas about censorship and war and the military and the press got passed on to his reporters. Surely they were reflected in an NBC special, “America: The Realities of War,” when Arthur Kent, the NBC correspondent in Saudi Arabia, took on Pete Williams, the Pentagon spokesman in Washington.

“Why are you trying to put your hands so far into our business?” Kent asked peevishly. “We’re not trying to tell you how to run the war. We’re just trying to cover it. Why do you want to control us so completely?”

Williams did not mention Gartner’s laundry list of complaints, although if he had he would have made a reasonable argument not just for controlling the press but for banning it altogether. Williams did not say either that some of the television coverage was so goofy the Pentagon might have thought its higher duty was to straighten it out. In an interview when the war was over, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf remarked that he had “basically turned the television off in the headquarters very early on because the reporting was so inaccurate I did not want my people to get confused.”

On the same program in which he attacked Williams, Kent also offered a choice specimen of the reporting General Schwarzkopf probably had in mind:

“Saddam Hussein is a cunning man and nowhere does he show that more clearly than on a battlefield when he’s under attack,” Kent told Faith Daniels, who was anchoring the special.

“And that, Arthur, really seems to be this administration’s greatest miscalculation,” Daniels replied.

“That’s right, Faith,” Kent continued. “He is ruthless, but more than ruthless. In the past eleven days, he’s surprised us. He’s shown us a capable military mind, and he still seems to know exactly what he’s doing.”

With “reporting” like that, is it any wonder that 57 percent of the respondents in one poll said the military should exercise more, not less, control over the press, and that 88 percent in another poll supported censorship? For, in addition to the other problems—moral, political, and professional—it has created, the neutrality principle has evidently turned many otherwise intelligent people into fools.

¹ A Marine colonel at the conference, George M. Connell, had a different perspective. “I feel utter contempt,” he said when responding to Wallace, who had been supported in his declaration of neutrality, even if hesitantly, by Peter Jennings of ABC. “Two days later they're both [Wallace and Jennings] walking off my hilltop; they're 200 yards away, and they get ambushed, and they're lying there wounded—and they're going to expect that I send Marines up there to get them. . . . But I'll do it, and that's what makes me so contemptuous of them. And Marines will die going to get a couple of journalists.” Colonel Connell was not being fanciful. When the correspondent Bob Simon vanished with his crew near the Kuwaiti border, CBS called the Pentagon for help.