Truth, we keep being told in these violent times, is the first casualty of war.
It has been hard to concentrate on anything else but the conflict in Iraq over the last couple of weeks. We have been bombarded with information, and the broadcast media - radio, TV and the internet - have made it more immediate than at any other time in the history of man.
The US-led Coalition of the Willing - the UK and Australia are the main allies, although we are told there are dozens more - has decided to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. It claims it is acting to fulfil a mandate of the United Nations, which insisted Saddam should give up his weapons of mass destruction. Other nations say the Coalition has ignored the wishes of the majority of the member nations of the UN and done its own thing. History will be the judge.
Thanks to a decision to 'embed' TV and radio reporters with troops, viewers around the world see the war as it happens. Here in New Zealand - as remote a place in the South Pacific as you could get - we see the news from Iraq as it happens, at the very same moment as viewers in the UK, the US, Europe or Japan. And probably several weeks before they see it in Iraq itself.
But have we - the viewers - benefited from the blanket coverage? Have all those 'breaking news' stories helped you to understand what on earth is actually going on?
BBC News chief Mark Damazer says the public have not been well served at all. He says that the excited, breathless reporting of information from military sources on both sides has meant the public has been left less well informed than it should be.
He cites the fall of Umm Qasr, which was reported at least nine times before it actually happened.
He encourages reporters to be impartial, saying statements should always be attributed to someone (for example, "Allied commanders say Umm Qasr has fallen" etc), rather than just being presented as fact. Of course, that's what all reporters try to be, but in the heat of battle, when Scud missiles are whistling just feet over your head, it's not always the first thing you remember.
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Peter Arnett (he won the prize for his reporting of the Vietnam war when he was still in his twenties) has just been sacked by NBC because he was interviewed by Iraqi TV.
