I find Pentagon's recipe for propaganda by Carol Brightman enlightening.

There is no doubt that print and electronic media with international outreach has helped disseminate Bush's war propaganda.

The way CNN , Washington Post and Wall Street Journal dismissed the Feb 15 worldwide mass anti-war protests is evidence of how public opinion can be shaped with spin-doctoring.

Inundated with daily messages of war-mongering, I turned to US media watchdog Fair (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) to discern information from misinformation.

In Media advisory (Feb 4): Iraq's hidden weapons: from allegation to fact , Fair noted the media's intensive coverage of the UN inspections has repeatedly glided from reporting the allegation that Iraq is hiding banned weapons materials to repeating it as a statement of fact. It said:

"Through constant repetition of phrases like "the search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the media convey to the public the impression that the alleged banned weapons o­n which the Bush administration rests its case for war are known to exist and that the question is simply whether inspectors are skillful enough to find them.

"In fact, whether or not Iraq possesses banned weapons is very much an open question, o­ne which no publicly available evidence can answer o­ne way or the other.

"As they routinely do in other cases, journalists should make a habit of using the modifier 'alleged' when referring to Iraq's alleged hidden weapons."

The media Fair found faulting the line: Washington Post , NBC , Time , Associated Press , Los Angeles Times , New York Times , CBS and CNN .

In Media advisory (Feb 10): A failure of skepticism in Powell coverage: disproof of previous claims underlines need for scrutiny , Fair repeated:

"In reporting o­n Secretary of State Colin Powell's Feb 5 presentation to the United Nations Security Council, many journalists treated allegations made by Powell as though they were facts.

"Reporters at several major outlets neglected to observe the journalistic rule of prefacing unverified assertions with words like 'claimed' or 'alleged'."

The media Fair found faulting o­n this occasion: New York Daily News , NBC Nightly News , CNN , St Petersburg , New York Times , Los Angeles Times , Associated Press , Independent( UK ) , and The Mirror ( UK ) .

Fair urged that "responsible journalists should avoid playing a part in such a conversion by making a clear distinction between what has been alleged by the US government and what has been independently verified."

Admittedly, there are still many good journalists who are holding o­n to their virtues.

Carl Bernstein, who shared fame with Bob Woodward in breaking the Watergate story three decades ago in Washington Post , criticised Bush for being very selective in whom he names among evil-doers.

But Bernstein reserved his most stinging criticism for none other than his fellow journalists - accusing them of abandoning the search for the best obtainable version of the truth for news that sells.

He cited the American media's coverage of worldwide peace demonstrations last weekend as an example of news without proper context.

"Our stake in maintaining the myth and the attendant self-image that we are doing a great job is every bit as great a fiction as that of the American Congress serving the people...The gravest threat to the truth today may well be within our own profession.

"Whether we agree with those demonstrations or whether we believe they were out of line or wrong headed, these were huge events that are helping to shape what is happening in the United Nations and whether we go to war... Yet o­n television those demonstrations . . . were treated dismissively, condescendingly and patronisingly as if they were not important news."

Bernstein said journalists must be willing to go after the hard stories, digging to find all of the facts and presenting them in broad context. "But reporters can't do it alone," he said. "We need courage, we need willingness o­n the part of publishers to commit to finding the best obtainable version of the truth, however difficult that might be."

In this context, what fellow blogger Oon Yeoh wrote in Transitions o­n Monday is a wake-up call to media owners and journalists in Malaysia. He said:

"The o­nly way for Malaysia to progress in the information age is for its citizens to be exposed to a diversity of views. Unfortunately, we cannot get this in the mainstream press (quoting reporting o­n the Iraq standoff as an example of reality in Malaysian media)...

"(What) a truly responsible news organisation should do (is to) offer readers different viewpoints, so that they can make up their own minds o­n the various issues of the day.

Oon has attracted wide-ranging response for his anti-anti-war stance, from people like a senior mainstream media editor and readers who are either "with us or not with us". But they get published in malaysiakini.