Still, the accusation continues to echo that American news consumers have received a strangely sanitized, sheltered version of the war in the Persian Gulf, particularly given the new communication technologies that allow journalists to report -- with pictures -- nearly instantaneously from the battlefield, and especially for a war that has resulted in perhaps tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties and nearly 900 coalition casualties. The suspicion is that the press has become increasingly fearful in a conservative political climate because it's afraid to appear unpatriotic -- or liberal -- by dwelling too heavily or realistically on negative images of the war.

"I certainly think we've seen an extremely sanitized version of the war," says Peter Howe, author of "Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer." "There are very few images of Iraq casualties, let alone American casualties; and it's a real problem because as a nation we are consistently unprepared for the reality of war. Unless we understand the full implication of our actions, as a democracy we can't make a reasonable assessment of when it's the right time to go to war. If war is divorced from daily life, as a video game [is], we can't make judgments, and we find ourselves mired in something we did not expect."

Howe notes that unlike during the first Gulf War when battlefield images were tightly controlled -- even censored -- by the U.S. military, photographers in Iraq, whether embedded or unilateral, have had complete freedom to shoot whatever they wanted. Yet he suggests that the mainstream media's images remain oddly uniform and, until very recently, clean and simplistic. "There's censorship being applied, but by the media itself," says Howe. "Everybody is running scared."

It's clear the administration is paying very close attention to the war coverage, and making its complaints known. Last Oct. 13, the president complained that "there's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth" regarding Iraq. He pointed to the "media filter" and the lack of reporting on positive developments in the country, such as the opening of schools and hospitals and the introduction of new currency. More recently, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld last week took time out of his daily briefing to nitpick a Los Angeles Times headline. (He disapproved of "Mosques Targeted in Fallujah" and suggested the paper should have gone with "Terrorists Attack Coalition Forces From Mosques.") Last week the administration once again complained to the foreign minister of Qatar about the news coverage on Al-Jazeera, the Arab world's only semiautonomous cable outlet, protesting that it focuses too much on Iraqi civilian casualties.

Press critics say that the badgering has paid off at home. They point to the fact that just days after major combat began last year, ABC News president David Westin vowed the network would never air pictures of dead American POWs because "they're not newsworthy." His statement was made right after Lt. Gen. John Abizaid called POW footage "disgusting" and "absolutely unacceptable."

More recently, CBS News acquiesced to pressure from the Pentagon and held off airing its story -- and photographs -- of the abused Iraqi prisoners for nearly two weeks. It was only when the New Yorker made clear it was planning to publish a similar story that CBS ran its segment.

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