Based on what I'm hearing, I gather that people who are following the war in Iraq fall into one of two groups: the critical or the accepting. Critical readers question everything and take little at face value, while accepting readers, on the other hand, pretty much put their faith in whatever's in the paper or coming through on television.

There's nothing wrong with being an accepting reader—and if you're one of them I fully understand your position. Time is short, you have to earn a living, so you've decided which sources of information to trust and you've made a pragmatic choice.

If you're a critical reader, however, then you know that it's extraordinarily difficult to ascertain what's happening and why. This is quantum reality in spades: truth exists only as a probability field, and you're constantly checking and re-verifying your own assumptions, always asking "who benefits if I believe this?"

Adding to the difficulty here is the changing nature of journalism: Writers and reporters today have substantial freedom to editorialize at will. Many of them make no pretense whatsoever of objectivity, which makes the task of assessing reality immensely more complicated.

As of this writing, Al-Jazeera is still offline, but the British press is feeling more reliable than its U.S. counterpart. We should not have allowed the media conglomerates to amalgamate themselves as they have, because now that only a half-dozen companies control virtually all broadcast news in America, they're tending to be less critical of the government in order to protect their access to information.

Consider CNN, for example. Their round-the-clock coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom is wildly popular and we could hardly expect them to do anything that might irritate the military that's giving them a front-row seat on the action. For their part, the reporters in the field are taking extreme risks and are utterly reliant upon the soldiers they're observing for their own survival. It's only natural that they are going to bond tightly with their units and identify with the group mission for purely psychological reasons. This was probably anticipated.

"Well, maybe you're right, Raven, but aren't the British reporters in the same boat as the Americans?" That's a good question. To an extent I'm sure they are, but they come across as more objective by running stories like this: Bush has already lost the war. This is a reprint of an editorial that ran in the Jordan Times, which says in part:

"President George Bush has already lost the war...He lost it with the first civilian casualty, which reminded the world that innocent people die in every war...He lost it again [on Wednesday], when it became even more apparent...that 'surgical wars' don't exist, and that the US is now bombing apartment buildings and market places in a desperate attempt to take Baghdad.

Arab and U.S. networks "broadly provide a distorted, incomplete picture of events while accurately reflecting emotional and political sentiments on both sides," Khouri wrote. "If you're getting your news and views from either Arab or American television, it is now very clear: You're getting only half the story."

Here's Robert Fisk, a poor artist stumbling over his own feet and falling face-first into the channel-water of failure. His report is on the marketplace explosion that killed around 30 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, and is titled, "It was an outrage, an obscenity":

The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.

A more neutral view is offered from David Fox, in a story titled, "Thousands flee Basra in search of food and water":

Basra's 1.5 million inhabitants have endured days without water. Red Cross engineers have managed [to] restore a water treatment centre...But most homes still have no access to potable water. People have resorted to collecting water from rivers around the city, which are polluted with sewage, prompting warnings from the UN of a potential cholera epidemic. Children are at risk from diarrhoea, which is already a big killer of Iraqi children under five.

The wife of the second crewman to die in the incident, Corporal Stephen Allbutt, 35, paid tribute to her husband as a loving father who had been devoted to his family.

Speaking at the family home in Stoke-on-Trent, Debbi Allbutt, 37, said: "Just before he left for the Gulf, he planted some daffodil bulbs in our garden as a surprise, so they'd come up while he was away. We loved each other deeply and words cannot express how much I'll miss him."

10:35:27 AM