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Elsewhere in the gulf, the press is operating under other tough restrictions. Israel has long required that all material relating to military security be subject to censorship. Revealing such details as the exact location of Scud missile hits is forbidden. (The information could theoretically be used by the Iraqis to improve their targeting.) After a Scud attack in Tel Aviv, NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher broadcast prematurely that there were casualties; Israeli authorities retaliated by cutting NBC's satellite link. NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw had to apologize on air for the inadvertent violation before the line was restored. "We apologized for telling the truth," said NBC News president Michael Gartner later. "And that really grates on you."
The few dispatches from Iraq itself have posed unique problems. CNN's Peter % Arnett, the last American correspondent left in Baghdad, has been filing reports via satellite with the approval of Iraqi censors. Fears that his dispatches are being used for propaganda purposes surged last week, when Arnett reported that allied bombs had hit a plant that manufactured infant formula. U.S. officials insist that it produced biological weapons.
CNN executives defend the airing of Arnett's reports so long as they are clearly identified as Iraqi approved. "The alternative," says executive vice president Ed Turner, "is to pack up and leave, and then there is no one there at all." CNN, along with NBC and CBS, also aired footage of American POWs making pro-Iraqi statements, apparently under duress. ABC refused to broadcast the statements, noting that its policy is to avoid using anything said by hostages that "furthers the aims of those holding them."
The dearth of uncensored, firsthand information about the war is forcing the press -- especially television -- to focus on the few parts of the story reporters can witness. The TV networks have continued (though with less frequency) to break in with live shots of reporters under Scud missile attack in Israel and Saudi Arabia. Some correspondents learned the hard way the pitfalls of that approach. For many viewers, the week's most memorable moment came not when General Powell unveiled his diagrams of damaged Iraqi targets but when CNN's Charles Jaco scrambled for his gas mask on the air in Saudi Arabia, in the erroneous belief that he had whiffed poison gas during an alert in Dhahran.
For all the miscues, the immediacy of television coverage has continued to overshadow the efforts of daily print journalism. But newspapers are catching up, running important pieces of reporting and analysis, like a story in the New York Times revealing that pro-Saddam sentiment is growing in Egypt. Times executive editor Max Frankel maintains that the major unexplored story of the war lies inside Iraq: "That's the heart of the war, not some Scud missile landing on a correspondent's hotel roof."