Phoneless Reporters Can't Make the Call

By this time, the BBC was reporting the dramatic change in plans, and some of the American TV correspondents were livid that they had no way of communicating with the outside world. After the five-minute ceremony and five minutes of questions from the press, the embargo was widely ignored because the news was already out.

"In our business, seconds count," Rather said. He said he didn't mind missing the ceremony but would have been disappointed "if I had been locked in that room and found out someone else had broken the story."

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said from Baghdad that he was not that surprised. "We'd been getting word that June 30 was just a date, more of a deadline," he said. U.S. officials "had been very reluctant about the details. There was definitely a sense that it wasn't necessarily a June 30 event." The turn of events produced "an incredibly exciting day from a coverage standpoint," Cooper said.

Jennings said he had heard rumors while reporting in Lebanon and Jordan over the weekend that something might be up, but "we thought it had to do with Saddam Hussein and the transfer of legal authority from the U.S. to the Iraqis."

The degree to which the handover was orchestrated in secret became clear after the ceremony, Jennings said, when "not only was Bremer getting on a helicopter to disappear forever, but so was Dan Senor, the spokesman."

John Stack, Fox's vice president for newsgathering, said he was not perturbed at the way the ceremony was staged. "All these very smart and shrewd people were taken by surprise," he said of his colleagues in the media. The fact that U.S. officials "were able to get something accomplished that was a planned event . . . without any violence, it's a good thing."

Oddly, the day's other big photo op -- Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair talking about the transfer of sovereignty at the NATO summit in Istanbul -- was also reduced to radio-like coverage. The cable networks carried a live audio feed of the two leaders' remarks, but the pool cameras were unable to transmit live pictures.

Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program.