[Bardan the Slayer]

I have always viewed the media as a mixed bag. yes, the want to sell papers. Yes, they will sensationalise, and yes - they will naturally have a tendency to view the lives of the soldiers of it's home country as somehow more valuable.

However, the nature of war is that it is dirty. Having the media there constrains the actions of our side, and to a point that is a good thing. 60 years ago, british and american planes turned Dresden into a firestorm, killing thousands and thousands of innocent civilians in a totally horrendous way. Londoners old enough to remember talk about "the Blitz" - the bombing of London by the Luftwaffe. Dresden resulted in far more casualties. What we did to Dresden far outweighed what they did to London.

No doubt we could do the same today to Bagdhad. Hell, the US army on it's own probably has enough weaponry to reduce every city in Iraq to piles of smoking rubble, but I believe one of the reasons they don't do this is the media. Nobody would dare risk the backlash of such an event in the sure knowledge that because of the all-pervasive press, practically everyone in any western nation would know all about it within hours.

60 years ago, you could toast an entire city, and few would hear about it. Those that did would be fed purely the government line.

The media is undoubtedly interested in sensationalism. Showing dead Iraqi soldiers on the front page and listing the honourable sacrifices of the americans on the inside will sell more papers than articles on knitting. Mankind is an innately violent race, and violence sells. Yes, it's sick and disturbing, but that's the way it is. The media is a necessary evil in some respects. It keeps a leash on forces that might otherwise run rampant.

I view the media as being like the US government on this issue. The US government in my oppinion couldn't give a damn about the liberation of the Iraqi people. The squalor they live in is of no importance to the US government. However, through the US government's actions, those Iraqis will have a better fiture ahead of them. The motives are at best selfish, at worst motivated by greed, but the results will be that a country of millions of opressed people will attain a level of freedom that hasn't been approached in decades.

Good things sometimes grow in questionable ground. The media is the same. Impure motives, sensationalised stories, but they are a big part of the reason that we are conducting this war in a manner designed to inflict a *minimum* of civilian casualties.