Of course, there were enterprising reporters during the Gulf War who evaded military censorship by striking out on their own. CNN kept Peter Arnett in Baghdad — a decision that engendered considerable criticism but enabled the network to provide a valuable perspective. Atlantic Monthly editor Michael Kelly, then a freelancer for the New Republic, simply drove across the desert with another reporter, producing a memorable piece in which he recounted how Iraqi soldiers tried to surrender to him. Neither Arnett nor Kelly ever put American troops at risk, and their willingness to operate outside of military censorship restrictions produced some of the more compelling reportage from the Persian Gulf. Kelly suspects that similar opportunities will arise in the war on terrorism. He notes that, even now, reporters are arriving in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and other front-line states, hoping to hook up with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

"If you want to cover the war, and you want to do field stuff, you’re best off going your own way and hoping you get lucky, " Kelly says. "What makes reporters uncomfortable is that it’s such a gamble " — that is, there might be no story — "but there’s no other way to do it. "

If the early days of this war are any indication, the White House is going to use the outpouring of patriotism following the terrorist attacks to try to bend the media to its will. Last week, Salon reported that the White House tried to pressure NBC into canceling a planned interview with Bill Clinton (that story was denied by NBC). The State Department reportedly leaned on the government’s own propaganda organ, Voice of America, not to broadcast an interview with a Taliban official. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer criticized foot-in-mouth comedian Bill Maher — and warned, portentously, that "all Americans ... need to watch what they say, watch what they do. "

Victor Navasky, publisher and editorial director of the Nation, worries that the range of acceptable opinion expressed in the mainstream media will be so narrow that most of the public will not be aware of what options are available in waging war — or, as Navasky might put it, waging law — against terrorism. "There is this thing called the United Nations, " Navasky says. "To me, the first thing we should have done was go to the Security Council and get a resolution authorizing a response to what was done. " The problem, he adds, is that the mainstream media unfairly characterize the UN as "a joke " and "an Arab-dominated organization. " The chill of censoriousness goes even deeper than that: last week, columnists at newspapers in Texas and Oregon were fired, reportedly because they had criticized the president.

There is also a real danger that the media will be victimized by government attempts at disseminating disinformation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that he could foresee no scenario under which he would lie to the media. Ari Fleischer, confronted by the legendary correspondent Helen Thomas, testily made a similar pledge. Yet last week the White House was forced to confirm that Air Force One had not been the object of a specific threat on September 11, despite the administration’s repeated assertions otherwise — including a detailed blow-by-blow account that Bush adviser Karl Rove gave to the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann. And it could get worse — much worse.

Author/journalist/academic Michael Ignatieff, at a recent forum at Harvard sponsored by the Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, warned journalists against letting themselves be used by government officials seeking to put out disinformation. Ignatieff, director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, said, "Sources will feed us things that they know to be untrue. You could end up being disgraced trying to do an honest job " (see "This Just In: Media, " filed under "The Terror Attacks " at BostonPhoenix.com, September 20).

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, openly wonders whether the USA Today report that special forces are hunting Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan may be an example of precisely that kind of disinformation. "It’s still unclear to me how much of that information was new, how much of it was true, and how much might have been disinformation " put forth "as a way of flushing him out, " he says. Adds Jane Kirtley, the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who wrote about military censorship in the current Media Studies Journal: "I can tolerate them not telling us everything they know, but I can’t tolerate them deliberately lying to us and expecting us to pass it along. " The solution, she says, is "to be relentlessly skeptical about what we’re being told. "

Unfortunately, the media — and big media, especially — have incentives not to probe too deeply. Veteran media critic Danny Schechter, executive editor of MediaChannel.org, notes that some of the country’s largest media conglomerates are currently lobbying the FCC to remove the few ownership restraints that still exist — and that the chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, is the son of Colin Powell. "What media company is going to take on this administration, not only in the face of public opinion, which they’ve very skillfully mobilized behind them, but also when their own economic interests are at stake? " asks Schechter.

To be sure, just as the war on terrorism is an entirely new kind of conflict, so, too, are the media entirely different from what they were even 10 years ago. In the Gulf War, a Michael Kelly could take off into the desert, but he couldn’t transmit reports back home instantaneously. These days, anyone armed with a cell phone or a satellite link can report in real time.

Because of such technological advances, Tom Rosenstiel says, military authorities have come to believe that the censorship rules of World War II and Korea are "no longer possible, " because the cost of someone’s breaking those rules is far higher than it would have been in the past. Instead, Rosenstiel says, "they’re going to try to censor us by controlling access. "

Rosenstiel’s hope is that at least a few reporters — experienced veterans from respected news organizations — will be allowed the sort of access they need to tell the whole story. Like Jacqueline Sharkey, Rosenstiel says it’s not necessary that they be allowed to report everything they know as soon as they know it. Rather, their job would be to produce an independent, objective record that could be revealed when it is safe to do so.

Right now, when the country is understandably frightened, it’s all too easy to say that the government and the military should be able to wage war the way they see fit, free from a meddlesome media. But the media are the public’s representatives, and their role in ferreting out the truth is absolutely crucial in a time of crisis. The media are the guardians of a public trust, guaranteed by the First Amendment.

It’s a trust that the media themselves have belittled and betrayed far too often in their quest for celebrity, scandal, and profits. But look around. Like it or not, they’re all we’ve got.