TRAVIS

I'll have to begin this discussion as all good discussions should begin, with a reference to Richard Morin's Unconventional Wisdom column in Sunday's Washington Post. Morin reports on a recent poll showing that the nation's armchair hawks tend to prefer to get their news from FOX (no surprise) and NBC, while the doves tune into CBS and ABC respectively. CNN seems to rest comfortably in the middle of the spectrum.

Should I be drawing conclusions from this? Perhaps our two blackballed journalists, Geraldo Rivera and Peter Arnett, were instructed to deliberately push the boundaries to produce edgy reporting from the frontlines? Maybe not. After all Arnett was essentially on loan to NBC after their own correspondents were booted, and Rivera is well known for his sheer stupidity.

Actually, I'll propose even another cockamamie idea. Over the weekend, we experienced the first lull in this war. Those forty-eight hours of refueling tanks and restocking ammo seem to have sent the press into a frenzy. It's as if someone called a timeout and the announcers had to fill time until something blew up anew. Everyone knows the most difficult task in broadcasting is filling time because that's when you make mistakes. I say this as if I actually know something about broadcasting.

So I'll leave you with this question. You're one of the 5 remaining journalists sitting in the Al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad. So far you've avoided being expelled from the country, incinerated by a bunker-buster, or arrested as a spy.

Saddam calls up and asks you to give him a foot-rub on live Iraqi TV. Do you use baby oil or talcum powder?

ANDREW

I think you're giving these two too much credit. The typical blather of the 24-hour talking heads gets more and more difficult to sustain in the absence of constant happenings, but Arnett and Rivera are in a different class. They were actually out in the field, presumably to gather objective information.

I think Rivera's offense can be written off fairly easily. He's a hotshot, a cowboy, the type of guy who spent his downtime during the Washington, DC sniper attacks signing Hooters waitresses. He was live, the adrenaline was flowing, and it gave him an ego boost to prove to the folks back home that he was in the thick of it. He happened to do that by drawing a map in the sand (fantastic television) illustrating exactly where the thick of it was, and telling the folks back home exactly when things were going to start getting really serious, all live.

It wasn't ideology -- hell, it was FOX -- it was just dumb. That there might be a working satellite dish left somewhere in Baghdad never crossed his mind. And now he's out. Honestly, one down out of five or six hundred reporters in the field writing about American actions isn't going to hurt anyone but Geraldo.

Arnett's a little different. Unlike the American side, which has hundreds of reporters with the troops, in headquarters, at the Pentagon, at the State Department, at the White House -- literally, everywhere -- Arnett was one of a very small handful the Iraqis felt was sufficiently in their pocket to stay in Baghdad. They felt the same way about him 12 years ago, and apparently for good reason.

If Arnett did what he did because he was afraid for his life, or even afraid of jeopardizing an information flow he's been consciously and carefully cultivating for more than a decade, I might take a different view. But I think what makes his case so interesting is that he's actually a believer in the basic journalistic creed of moral relativism. If you strip most of the thinking and nuance away, novice reporters set off into the world wedded to the doctrine of "equal time" -- tell both sides of the story, with no judgment calls on your part. Arnett thought he was telling the other side of the story, valiantly counterbalancing the reporting coming out of the Pentagon. What he ignored was that there's no reason to assume anything the Iraqis say is true, and a whole lot of reasons to assume what you hear from American sources is credible.

This isn't surprising given the guy's background. I have a great book at home of reporting from the Vietnam war (Reporting Vietnam, Library of America). There's a photo in it of a much younger Peter--with much more hair--slogging through the mud and rain outside some nameless Vietnamese village. He won a well-deserved Pulitzer for his work over there, which makes him part of a certain generation. For journalists back then, 'Nam was an education in official lies. The U.S. military made stuff up, the correspondents knew it, and I think they -- like many Americans who came of age in that era -- developed a lasting belief that anything the American military said had to be taken with a truck full of salt. Things are different now. The coverage of American screw-ups by American journalists in a position to witness them (check the Washington Post's eyewitness account of civilians getting shelled today) is a pretty good indication that we're in a different era entirely.

TRAVIS

I love the image of Geraldo Rivera as a cowboy. He's the guy Tom Cruise would have had to beat in Top Gun, if it had been a movie about journalists. Ye Haw! Aaron Brown is dead!

With regards to Arnett, I think we've got to dig deeper into his motivations. And where he got the information he was reporting. Arnett's career was sidelined by more than his distrust of what he read in The Stars and Stripes.

From his balcony in Baghdad, I'm assuming Arnett had only a limited field of vision of what is going on in the war as a whole. He surely received random reports back from his contacts at National Geographic, MSNBC and NBC. He may have had limited Internet access between power and communications blackouts. He probably also received television broadcasts courtesy of the U.S. propaganda machine and he surely had access to Iraqi Television.

With such a disparate collection of incoming information, I don't see how any individual could comment on the status of the entire war without his personal bias getting in the way. (Just as my personal bias is probably getting in the way as I imagine what life is like for a correspondent in Baghdad)

But maybe I'm not giving Arnett his due. Let's consider his column in the Daily Mirror today where he says his only crime was to opine that the U.S. battle plan had fallen by the wayside.

I don't buy it. Arnett was doing far more than reporting "the other side" of the story when he was giving this level of analysis. Reporting on what you see, hear and experience is one thing, interjecting too much of his personal opinion on a subject he's not qualified to cover as a mere war correspondent is another.

I wouldn't accuse Arnett of being in bed with the Iraqis, in fact, I wouldn't even care if he is. His reputation is not tainted by the fact that he made statements that were against the all-mighty Allied forces, but because he made those statements when he is in no position to provide such high-level analysis.

As you said, Arnett's experiences in Vietnam don't necessarily apply to a war being fought with embedded reporters and live video. While I'm sure plenty of untruth is bouncing around the Iraqi deserts, this overwhelming distrust may have ended up being Arnett's greatest weakness. I wonder how many of the military people interacting with the press were even born before the start of the Vietnam war?

So what do you think is left of his career? I suppose Arnett will become the perennial anti-war war correspondent. Taking a job at the Daily Mirror the day after getting sacked pretty much seals that deal.

As for Rivera, a journalist who makes more news than he reports, I suppose E! Entertainment television should send him back to Iraq with a helmet cam so he can film his own reality TV show.

ANDREW

At 68, Arnett is one of the few folks still left in the field who not only remembers the Vietnam war but covered the early years of it. There are plenty of folks working for major newspapers and magazines (hell -- even MTV) who weren't even alive when Saigon fell. They carry none of the baggage Arnett brings from Vietnam. And they may be more likely than Arnett to trust the motives and words of men in the field, many of whom are barely out of high school.

What we're maybe forgetting is that Peter Arnett's career was pretty much over before this started up. Accusations of bias in the first Gulf War followed by a discredited story about the US government using nerve gas on its own troops in Vietnam had him past the sidelines and into the bleachers by the time this one started. At an age when most people are enjoying their retirement, he headed to the most dangerous city in the world with a camera crew and his little black book of Iraqi contacts. Despite that, the best he could do was accreditation with National Geographic Explorer -- hardly a hard-hitting news organization. For a veteran war correspondent with a Pulitzer on the shelf it must have been a pretty disappointing assignment.

Once things started up, NBC put his number on speed-dial to narrate the fireworks over Baghdad. For the network it was a low-risk, low-cost move. As other reporters got booted by the Iraqis for painting a fairly clear picture of what was going on in the city, Arnett managed to hang on. Whether or not the info he was getting from outside was complete, he was definitely being fed a much richer diet of Iraqi propaganda than anyone except Al-Jazeera.

Maybe you're right. Perhaps Peter got sick of being a "mere war correspondent" -- an oxymoronic statement, in my opinion, as there may be no more dramatic, demanding or difficult job in journalism -- and decided he'd rather be a pundit. Perhaps he was pissed that retired generals and other talkative folks back inside the Beltway were getting to do all the opinionating, and the only TV reporter on the scene had to stick to just the facts.

But where I have to disagree is the idea that it wouldn't matter if he was "in bed with the Iraqis." Of course, that disagreeing with Donald Rumsfeld, et al. isn't a serious credibility issue -- if it was, the New York Times would be out the window. But the credibility of journalists rests on the idea that they're in bed with no one and free to criticize anyone. Thus far, the American government has shown itself to be tolerant of criticism, even if the Pentagon press corps raises Rumsfeld's blood pressure daily. The Iraqis have not.

Still, the media's now-dull self-flagellation over the idea of embedding is a good indication that the American press is aware and afraid of ending up in bed with the Pentagon. Arnett, apparently, had a serious judgment lapse and jumped at the chance to appear on the same network that was running reality programming of dead and captured American soldiers. In a few sound bites, he trashed the credibility he had spent so long earning back. While many in the media may be of the opinion that the war isn't going the way it was supposed to, most stick to quoting others. If Arnett had stuck to quoting Iraqis with no commentary, he would have weathered this war.

But in the space of a few seconds, he talked himself right out of the profession. Like other once-objective people who turned their professions into pulpits -- former weapons inspector Scott Ritter springs to mind -- Arnett will be a favorite of the anti-war movement forever after, preaching to the choir.

Andrew Curry works for U.S. News and World Report
Travis Daub, who writes the Politicasting column for Knotmag, is an editor at LostBrain.com and Design and Production Director of Foreign Policy Magazine.
You guess which one pays the bills.