COLUMN RIGHT : The Public Needs to Know War’s Horrors : Poor information may have been a cause of the conflict.

Over the years I’ve done my share of media bashing, but I’m reluctant to join in the latest round, directed at the reporting of the war from Baghdad.

Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) has called Cable News Network reporter Peter Arnett a “collaborator,” and Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media has compared Arnett with William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” who broadcast from Germany in World War II and was later executed for treason. The Media Research Center, based in Alexandria, Va., has sent a letter to CNN Vice President Ted Turner, calling Arnett “more of a propagandist for Saddam Hussein than a reporter for CNN.”

It’s true that what Arnett and others tell us from Baghdad is subject to censorship. But surely CNN viewers have been adequately warned of this by now. As someone said, Arnett’s reports carry more warnings than a pack of cigarettes. At the same time, reports from the U.S. press pool in Saudi Arabia are carefully stage-managed by Pentagon officials. Can we be confident that controlled reports from Saudi Arabia give us a more accurate picture than censored reports from Baghdad?

True, the media critics might reply, but news management in Dhahran works to our advantage, whereas censorship in Baghdad works to Hussein’s. This is questionable. Rarely does ignorance confer advantage on anyone. A democracy is not likely to work well if the people are kept ill-informed--allegedly for their own good. In fact, poor information may have been an important cause of the war. George Bush has publicly expressed concern that Hussein was long kept in the dark by his own aides, perhaps afraid to tell him how perilous his position was.

Ideally, the role of the press is to furnish neutral, accurate information. If unmanned cameras could be set up in Baghdad, not controlled by human hand but simply transmitting an unedited picture of the effects of U.S. bombing raids, would it be desirable to show such pictures on TV?

Military personnel and media critics may well argue against it on the grounds that showing the horror of war in graphic detail might tend to undermine our willingness to press for all-out victory. Some such sentiment does seem to animate a number of of our media critics today. On CNN’s “Crossfire,” Irvine admitted that “true propaganda” was more effective than untrue, and that he was affected by such wartime horrors as the sight of burning children.

But if media critics are objecting to war coverage on these grounds, then their criticism has been misstated. Their true objection is not so much to the inaccuracy as to the accuracy of the information transmitted. Their ostensible opposition to “censored” news masks a real opposition to news. Their desire to conceal damage we are doing to life and property abroad is represented as the healthy fear of collaborators operating in enemy territory.

The truth is that wars are a drastic way of resolving disputes--so drastic that once under way they develop a momentum of their own and obscure the basis of the original dispute. Why were rival armies lined up in trenches in World War I, blazing away at one another for months and years on end, resulting in millions of deaths? In retrospect, the pacifists of the day had a point, to put it mildly. The evil of that war, and the folly of its generals, would surely have been curtailed if vivid pictures had been transmitted back to the home front. War’s hellishness ought to be brought home to us, if only to encourage prudence in our leaders.

One had hoped that the new technology, satellite transmission and instant communication would already have had this salutary effect. Perhaps, with such communication in place all over the world, we will one day enjoy the “new world order” that Bush so blithely invokes, when in truth he is thinking of nothing more recent than the U.N. system.

War is already unlikely now between countries fully wired with cable. The “electronic media,” generically understood, are likely to inhibit future commanders in chief. By the same token, current (and future) democracies are most unlikely to come to blows. Meanwhile, totalitarian regimes will continue to harbor rulers who are dangerous because they do not have to reckon with adverse publicity and the organized resistance of an informed public.

I do have one complaint about many journalists, however. I wish they would be more consistent. War is one federal program they are inclined to be skeptical about. They should be equally skeptical of others, but for some reason the profession retains an abiding enthusiasm for government solutions to a vast array of problems.

Perhaps the concept of collateral damage should give them pause. Some of our domestic programs may have done more harm to our inner cities than our bombing raids have done to Baghdad.