In Battle of Networks, CNN Scores Knockout : Television: Its live, vivid, first-person reporting has even competitors singing its praises.

Wednesday’s battle among U.S. television networks in Baghdad produced the gap in the gulf.

It was Cable News Network--with a trio of reporters hunkered down in a room on the sixth floor of the Al Rashid Hotel--that for the most part provided the lone U.S. broadcast voice from Baghdad in the early hours of Wednesday’s air bombardment of the Iraqi capital.

CNN got its marathon scoop--delivering vivid, first-person telephone accounts of the U.S.-led air attack--after ABC, NBC and CBS earlier in the evening had lost phone communications with their own reporters at the Al Rashid headquarters of remaining Western media in Baghdad.

The 24-hour cable network’s journalistic victory was so decisive that at one point in the evening NBC anchor Tom Brokaw found himself on the phone interviewing the CNN journalists in Baghdad--anchor Bernard Shaw and correspondents John Holliman and Peter Arnett--to get their assessment of the destruction there.

Brokaw’s questioning of them came immediately after Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had said in a press briefing that he was getting his information about the accuracy of the air attack from CNN in Baghdad.

“How did CNN manage to stay on the air through all of this?” Brokaw asked Shaw, who, after a long pause, declined to answer. Brokaw said he understood his reluctance, then lauded the CNN men for their “enterprise and bravery,” before adding what may be the first network news promo of a competitor: “CNN used to be called the little network that could. It’s no longer the little network.”

Earlier, Shaw himself had done a favor for a competitor, assuring CBS on the air that its own Baghdad contingent was safe in the hotel basement.

ABC, NBC and CBS were hardly shut out Wednesday, suspending their regular programming to carry war coverage and analysis throughout the evening.

“The AP is saying that war has started in the Middle East,” Dan Rather somberly announced to CBS viewers about 4 p.m.

Although the other networks had been reporting antiaircraft activity in Baghdad for about 15 minutes, Rather’s almost-leaden statement was an emotional missile that seemed to convey a defining point in history, more so even than White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater’s terse acknowledgement a few minutes later that “the liberation of Kuwait has begun.”

By that time, CBS had already lost phone contact with its correspondent in Baghdad, Allen Pizzey. But CNN, NBC and ABC correspondents immediately began reporting on the phone what they were seeing and hearing.

The Baghdad reports were descriptive, virtually radio on TV. ABC’s Gary Shepard reported seeing red tracers from antiaircraft guns fill the sky. CNN’s Holliman placed a microphone in a window, beaming the sounds of war to the United States much the way Edward R. Murrow had used the CBS radio microphone as an electronic megaphone during the London blitz at the onset of World War II.

NBC’s Tom Aspell was the first to resonate the urgency of what was happening: “And there’s a very big explosion right out there in the west of the city . . . now more explosions . . . red and white tracers all over the place. . . . Wow! What a sight!” Aspell again: “We’re just not up on our war of the ‘90s. We don’t know what these explosions are.”

Yet it was Holliman, Arnett and Shaw--who had been scheduled to fly out of Baghdad today after spending the week there in a futile effort to interview Iraqi President Saddam Hussein--who provided the yeoman reporting in the first hour of the air attack.

Hearing their calm, conversational, sometimes almost nervously lighthearted coverage was almost like eavesdropping on war. “The explosions are coming closer to this part of town,” said Arnett, the seasoned war correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam reporting while with the Associated Press.

“The lights are now out in the entire city of Baghdad,” said Holliman, who then asked Arnett to turn out the light in their room. A pause, then Holliman was back to the mike. “Peter says it’s nothing to worry about. I bow to his experience.”

Suddenly Holliman: “Whoop! Now there’s something on fire.”

Arnett: “Those bombs are right on target.”

Soon they were joined by Shaw, who added his own impression, comparing what he had seen outside to “the fireworks finale at the base of the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July.”

All the while, the three men were intermittently interrupted by knocking on their door, with Shaw announcing--on the air--that they were hiding under furniture to escape detection from Iraqi security officials. In effect, then, he was revealing their hiding places to the Iraqis, for as Wednesday night affirmed, just about everyone watches CNN.