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The media’s coverage of the war in Iraq has reached a new dimension: not only are broadcast media conveying images of Baghdad around the clock, reporters are riding along with soldiers on the front lines, placing their lives at high risk for the sake of gathering information faster than a competing news agency.

Though the extent to which the media is covering the war, visually or otherwise, may seem excessive to some, the necessity of doing so is unquestionable. The public needs to see all sides of war in order to have a wholistic conception of it. It is the media’s job to expose the damage of war, however gruesome or disturbing it may be, because it is the truth; it is the media’s job to make sure the public knows as much as can be known, not to shelter it from details.

Sadly, the coverage of the war in Iraq, especially in the broadcast media thus far has been especially biased and devoid of credibility. It has become a joke.

The original motive behind the war with Iraq was to disarm Saddam Hussein. But since the war began, the Bush administration has kept its mouth shut about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, twisting the war’s goals to include the “liberation” of the Iraqi people, and not just disarmament. Instead of naming the war “Operation Disarm Iraq,” Bush coined the more pleasant, highly patriotic “Operation Iraqi Freedom” phrase instead. Ever since, the media has followed Bush like a poodle on a leash, serving as his mouthpiece.

Instead of saying they are covering the “war in Iraq” or the “conflict in Iraq,” many reporters have stared into the cameras, saying they are covering “Iraq’s liberation.” It’s one thing for the media to get information from the Bush administration and U.S. military personnel, but it’s called bias when the media uses Bush’s words verbatim to “objectively” cover the war.

Buying into Bush’s liberation-speak has forced the media into an unintelligent stupor. Why is no one pressing Bush to produce proof that the “evidence” of weapons development that started this war actually exists? No such weapons have been discovered since the war started.

The media must be critical and question the Bush administration just as willingly as they echo its rhetoric, not because the media is anti-Bush but because the media is the only tool the public has to access information from its leadership. If the media is complacent, it fails in its purpose: it resembles the state-run media in communist and totalitarian states, where the current regime decides what it wants the public to know.

There’s only one reason the war in Iraq is going on: the fear of terrorism inspired by Sept. 11, 2001. If those attacks had not happened, the United States would not be “liberating” the Iraqi people from Hussein. If President Bush is straying from his original goal to disarm Iraq, to not yielding until a regime change occurs, the national media need to ask the administration these questions, because ordinary people who want to know, cannot.

Patriotism can be blinding; the one resource people should be able to count on for objective, true information is the media. Unfortunately, the national American media has become more of a public relations arm for the president than a resource for the public.