BOB GARFIELD: While military victory in Iraq was swift, the managing of the peace is more problematic --in the development of the media as everywhere else. Last week a U.S. funded TV station called The Iraqi Media Network went on the air in Baghdad but without the live news programs originally planned and amid charges of American meddling in basic journalism.

Among other matters at issue, according to Reuters correspondent Saul Hudson, an attempt to censor passages from the Koran and a demand that new programs be reviewed by the wife of a prominent Kurdish leader.


SAUL HUDSON: They felt that this was just a form of political censorship. They said that no western media would be asked to have their news items scrutinized by a political leader before they went on air.


BOB GARFIELD: Well what's the programming look like on the Iraqi Media Network at the moment?


SAUL HUDSON: It looks a bit simple and perhaps a little dated. You have music -- which almost underlines the idea that perhaps some of the programming is dated, because the music is from an era of decades ago.

And then you have canned interviews with a low-ranking official, plus you have vox pop interviews with people lining outside a hospital for example or people at gas stations, and no comment from the journalist. It appears that it's just a hodgepodge of different views.

So it has a rather pedestrian feel to it at the moment.


BOB GARFIELD: Okay. So on the face of it, it would seem a little ironic that after the liberation of Iraq in, in preparation for democracy there, the United States' first act would be to put some sort of broadcast restraints on free expression through the airwaves. But is it as simple as that apparent irony?


SAUL HUDSON: There is a fine line that the Americans have to walk, and what they are saying is that this is the birth of a new era of television and it is not very easy to get up and running. They say that it isn't propaganda. The challenge that the American administration has is to convince the viewers of the station's credibility when the Iraqis are automatically assuming that the station is only there to put out an American message and not necessarily an Iraqi message.


BOB GARFIELD: Only 10 percent of Iraqis even own a television set, so the stakes are perhaps not as high as they might be in another country, another situation. But nonetheless the station isn't the only one available to Iraqis.


SAUL HUDSON: They do have other options. Kurds in the north of Iraq have a station whose transmissions get picked up in different parts of the country. The main diet of television news in Baghdad is actually an Iranian television station which can be picked up.

However, Iraqis watching it would always comment that they were seeing what they were seeing through the prism of Iranian eyes and not through Iraqi eyes. They seemed very prepared to just filter out aspects of it that they thought might have an Iranian bias.


BOB GARFIELD: Now the people you spoke to seem strikingly media-savvy considering they've been subject only to Saddam's propaganda for the last several decades.


SAUL HUDSON: I believe that the Iraqis view all television with a skeptical eye -- because they had years and years of listening to broadcasts that they didn't completely believe in -- so it was a very simple question for them: where is this television coming from, and therefore where is its bias?


BOB GARFIELD: So if a diplomatically cunning and yet reasonably balanced news station lands in--the forest and nobody bothers turning on the television, does it make a noise?


SAUL HUDSON: It seems at the moment as if the other stations are making more noise, and then you have to go back to the point you made about how many people have television sets. It seems that newspapers can have more of an influence at the moment than television because of the lack of electricity, and unfortunately for Iraqis, the thing that appears to make most noise is rumor -- word of mouth spreads from perhaps a kernel of truth and-- goes around the city and then around a country so that in fact credible information is very difficult to come by because rumor is filling the void where the television stations might eventually be.


BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well Saul Hudson, thank you very much.


SAUL HUDSON: Thank you!


BOB GARFIELD: Reuters correspondent Saul Hudson just returned from Baghdad and spoke to us heroically while recovering from root canal surgery.