Right now in Iraq if you throw a rock in the air you’ll stand a pretty good chance of it hitting either a solider or a journalist. Or at least you might be forgiven for thinking that if news coverage of the US lead War in that country is to be believed.

The war, now into its second week, dominates almost every minute of TV news and seemingly every column of newspaper and magazine print. With thousands of journalists in Iraq covering this war, as well as many more back in their respective countries doing the same, this conflict has become completely inescapable. We have become media cannon fodder for the clamoring networks desperately trying to be the first to break the latest stories and get us as close to the war as it’s possible to be while sitting in front of a TV thousands of miles away.

Within hours of this conflict starting the media began to bombard us with facts and figures, diagrams and charts, live footage and library material, as well as special reports and ‘expert analysis’ of the war as it progressed, minute by minute. We’re fed with more information than we could ever hope to absorb let alone comprehend. But almost overnight we can use seemingly technical military terms as if with knowledge while we idly chat about the war going on so far away, so close.

Already there have been victims on both sides. None more expensive though surely, than the wars earliest casualty, truth.

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said “In wartime, truth is so important that it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.” And in more recent times, just after the terrorist acts of September the 11th… [Click here to continue reading this article at ‘Meanwhile’]