Manipulation and the Media : Propaganda: The issue is not that Baghdad and Washington are using reporters and broadcasters, but to what degree.

“I just don’t get it,” the doctor said, as he examined the reporter’s injured arm. “I mean, how can you guys in the media just put this fella Hussein on the air with his propaganda?”

The paradox of the news media’s access to an American enemy troubled the physician even further as he worked on his patient.

“And he lets you just wander around his country, and at the same time he is holding other Americans hostage!” he said.

As the Iraqi crisis remains largely a rattling of nerves and sabers--a state of prewar, waged on television as much as desert sand--Americans might be forgiven for wondering to what degree the media are being manipulated and to what extent the coverage is more propaganda than reliable reporting.

Iraqi authorities have informed American television networks that they will provide footage or photo opportunities regularly, perhaps daily, including what they call “guest news,” the eerie broadcasts of meetings between worried hostages and smiling Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

At the same time, journalists are aware that the Bush Administration is playing its own subtle communications game, moving from bellicose to more conciliatory, continuing to impose stiff restrictions on press access and being as deliberately obtuse as Hussein about the conditions for which it would ultimately settle.

While critics have publicly wondered whether Hussein is somehow duping the media--one network even had former President Ronald Reagan’s media adviser “critique” replays of Hussein videos--an equal concern, some journalists say, is balancing between being American citizens and being aggressive reporters, a challenge that the American news media have not faced during a protracted military engagement since the Vietnam War.

On the first point, even President Bush concedes that “I have no complaints” about television giving Hussein such generous access. “I think the (broadcasts) with what he calls ‘guests’ and we call ‘hostages’ was really so brutal and so totally unacceptable that it . . . has worked against him.”

On the second, the plain fact is that the media are used. In increasing numbers, American journalists, including reporters from The Times, are getting visas to enter and leave Iraq because their coverage serves Saddam Hussein’s purpose, just as holding non-journalists hostage also serves his purpose.

To a large degree, it is axiomatic for reporters that they are manipulated and an article of faith that the public is intelligent enough to sort out the truth for itself.

“How can anybody presume to know the effect of Saddam Hussein’s broadcasts?” said Paul Friedman, executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight.” “There were millions watching. There were millions of effects.”

The question for the news media is not really the fact of manipulation but the degree. Some controversy has attached itself to networks airing Hussein’s government-produced broadcasts without editing, particularly Cable News Network, which has carried several of Hussein’s telecasts live.

“We would not take handout footage from General Motors or General Electric live without looking at it,” Friedman said. “It is my belief that you can’t run anything produced by Iraq live.”

CNN’s defense is interesting because it reveals the international TV network’s special role in the world.

“Hussein and his cronies watch us and so does the Bush Administration,” said CNN Executive Vice President for News Ed Turner (no relation to network owner Ted Turner). “They talk to each other through this news operation,” and to the degree that the news is relevant, “we will air every detail we have.”

CNN even asked the Pentagon, White House and State Department beforehand whether they had any reaction to airing Hussein’s footage, Washington bureau chief William W. Headline said. “To my knowledge, we have had no feedback, positive or negative.”

And now critiquing the effectiveness of Hussein’s broadcasts has become popular sport in the media, another example of how quickly news gives way to interpretation. “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” “Nightline” and “PrimeTime Live” all have devoted parts of their broadcasts to this task.

The heavy consensus, as Reagan presidential assistant and media adviser Michael K. Deaver put it on “PrimeTime Live,” is that Hussein “doesn’t sell” in the United States.

But while showing the hostages may not raise Hussein’s leverage or win him support, these broadcasts may function on several levels. And some analysts argue that they could influence military tactics if they raise the political cost to the United States of bombing areas where hostages are kept.

“He put a human face to the word hostage ,” said Don Brown, executive vice president of NBC News.

By granting an interview to CBS and French television, Hussein also may have succeeded in getting Western media to take his political arguments more seriously. Two days after Hussein’s hourlong interview aired on CBS, the Washington Post ran a Page 1 story evaluating the historical roots of Hussein’s contention that Kuwait is really part of Iraq.

“Some seem to have merit, and others don’t,” said Post Foreign Editor David Ignatius.

“The early coverage of Saddam (Hussein) tended to make him sound like an irrational person, a Kadafi-like figure, which gave readers and policy-makers a false sense of what we are dealing with,” Ignatius said. “We need to do more than we did initially.”

In that regard, at least some of Hussein’s attempts to use the media help.

“I think it is important for Americans to know their enemy, to try to understand the mentality, and I have no problem with Hussein holding news conferences and giving interviews and, in a sense, using the press to promote his viewpoint,” said Alvin Shuster, foreign editor of The Times.

The question of media manipulation also is not one-sided. The Bush Administration is fully engaged in propaganda as well.

“In the early stages . . . the message that (the Bush Administration) got across was that something was going to happen at any minute, an expectation that this could be a shooting war at any time,” said NBC’s Brown.

Whether that was actually the case or not is difficult to know, journalists say, and Administration officials offer differing explanations about why their tone has changed since. But most reporters agree that the Administration’s early bellicosity served American interests.

If Hussein was dissuaded from attacking Saudi Arabia in the early stages, before American ground troops were in place, one factor was “the knowledge that he could be stopped by American air strikes,” said Howell Raines, Washington bureau chief for the New York Times. The other factor, which also was communicated via the media, “was a willingness (by the Bush Administration) to use that air power.”

Another area where the Administration may have been particularly effective in press management, Raines said, is in “making it difficult for the press to get independent information in the Middle East, and they have had a willing partner in Saudi Arabia,” a country to which Western reporters have been granted only temporary visas.

Raines argues that “that effort of fencing (in) and censoring our military correspondents will fall apart if and when actual military hostilities break out.”

One reason, he said, is that he believes the public will have a low tolerance “for being kept from finding out what is happening to their sons and daughters.”

But how much information Americans will get “really depends on when this happens,” said Shuster of The Times. “If hostilities began soon, the coverage would be extensive,” but if it were to happen later, “after the story winds down, with reporters pretty much out of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, it will be much more difficult because we will have to rely on the American authorities to get us to the scene of battle.”

In some ways, as troubling for journalists as their being used by both sides is trying to maintain the balance between journalism and patriotism.

NBC, for instance, is televising “post cards” from GIs in the gulf to folks back home--clearly sentimental messages that officials at rival networks say come close to crossing the line of neutrality.

In the Panama invasion, the press coverage became more positive overnight as it became clear that the invasion was not particularly controversial at home.

“The challenge for us (is) to cover a popular use of American military power where the Administration in a sense has the wind at its back,” said Ignatius of the Post.

This case may be more difficult, ironically, because many, perhaps most, in the news media wholeheartedly support the Administration.

“Part of the undertaking here is not to let one’s feeling that the international community is right and Saddam (Hussein) is wrong on the facts . . . blind you to what may be happening on the ground,” said Raines of the New York Times.

There is one point on which journalists believe they have done a good job of seeing through rhetoric: pointing out that the strategic interests on both sides are heavily economic.