It's official. It's impossible for Americans to get real news. Our "news" sources have actually become, almost sui generis, government propaganda.

The Peter Arnett story is the latest, and perhaps the most dramatic, evidence of the sad development which has left us so ignorant of the world and vulnerable to its threats. Writing in New York Newsday, University of Austin professor of journalism Robert Jensen argues,

Peter Arnett has an overblown sense of his own importance and lousy political judgment. That's been true ever since he became a television "personality," and he's hardly the only one with those traits.

But Arnett's pomposity and hubris are not what got him fired by NBC and National Geographic this week after giving a short interview to Iraqi state television. When the controversy first emerged, NBC issued a statement of support, which evaporated as soon as the political heat was turned up and questions about Arnett's patriotism got tossed around. In short: Arnett was canned because he took seriously the notion that, even in war, journalists should be neutral.

. . . .

If . . . criticism of Arnett [for being obliging or disingenuous in his relations with the Iraqi regime] is appropriate, we should also ask whether American journalists are overly deferential to U.S. officials. Consider George W. Bush's March 6 news conference, when journalists played along in a scripted television event and asked such softball questions as "How is your faith guiding you?" Journalists that night were about as critical as Arnett was with the Iraqis.

Such performances leave the rest of the world with the impression that American journalists - especially those on television - are sycophants, and Arnett's firing only reinforces that impression. That's why before the end of the day he had a new job with the British tabloid The Mirror, which described him as "the reporter sacked by American TV for telling the truth about the war."

Arnett certainly hasn't cornered the market on truth, and many U.S. reporters and photographers are doing fine work under dangerous conditions.

But many other American journalists have abandoned any pretense of neutrality and become de facto war boosters. All over the world, viewers are seeing images of the effects of the war on the Iraqi population that are largely absent from U.S. television. We shouldn't mistake the limited critique of strategy and tactics - should the United States have unleashed a harsher attack from the beginning, and should the invasion have waited until more troops were in place? - for a serious challenge to the Bush administration's spin on the war.