Snow, the presenter of Channel 4 News, reckons that Iraq is “one of the least well-covered conflicts of the modern television age”, and wonders why “we are so profoundly disconnected from the real Iraq”. Newsgathering here is very dangerous: that could be one big reason.

A more germane question for the media to ask than “Why do we get so little information about what is genuinely going on in Iraq?”, might be, “How come we think we are getting a full picture of what is going on in Iraq on our TV news bulletins when, in fact, we are not?”

This shifts the game slightly away from the occupying forces, whom Snow seems to suggest are at least partially responsible for sanitising the full horror of the bloodshed (or, at any rate, that the occupying forces surely can’t be heartbroken that pre-watershed broadcasting guidelines make it difficult for television to show the grizzliest images). Also, since any trip from the safety of Iraq’s Green Zone to the Red Zone requires an army escort (unless you are courting snipers or kidnappers), the occupying forces exercise some control over the flow of information.

But surely these factors are not alone responsible for giving to British or American TV viewers an undernourished impression of Iraq’s affairs? If TV news anchors simply said, “Our reporter in Baghdad has, very sensibly, not left his hotel for two months for fear of being killed. So while we can show you snippets of footage filmed by Iraqi freelance cameramen, we can hardly call it a rounded portrait of life in Iraq today”, then we’d know where we stood.

If television news reporters said they didn’t know, we’d at least know that we, too, don’t know. We’d be ignorant; but not deluded. Instead, television does as professional a job as it can to fashion such freelance footage into a facsimile of news. Isn’t it that which, however well intentioned, dupes viewers into feeling they have a grasp of what’s going on in Iraq, when they haven’t?

There may be nothing particularly shameful about this. It is just being professional. That’s how modern war works. As a reporter, Snow, understandably, itches to know what is really cooking in Iraq, but is hampered by the same constraints as all the other media in the country: an inability to travel widely and to talk freely to the locals. “That’s the huge frustration. I know no more about it standing here in the middle of Baghdad than I do in London.” Indeed.

But it is as someone who is seemingly against the invasion that Snow seems to want to convey all that dispiriting news from Iraq to England. “My frustration is that if told in full, and unsanitised, the reality of life and death in Iraq could radically affect perceptions in the outside world . . . Among the most important people denied a full account of what’s really going on here are those from the countries who are engaged inthe occupation of Iraq . . . If they had such a full account,” Snow wonders, would they “support what was being done in their name?”

Can you really ask that, if you have just acknowledged that you yourself don’t have a full account? Who’s to say the “full account”, were it possible to compile one, might not in fact persuade people in the US and Britain that their troops needed to stay and sort out the chaos?

And then — bingo! — along comes Dispatches: Iraq — The Women’s Story (Channel 4). It seemed to be offering just the sort of rare peek at life in Iraq that Snow believes will help us better grasp what is going on there. It showed that life is grim, scarred by bereavement, strained by shortages of food, petrol and medicine. There is poverty, unemployment and heartache. There are also babies being born, people getting on with life and girls playing sport.

Maybe this was as valid a snapshot of modern Iraq as those images of corpses that Snow feels we should see more of. But since we have little with which to compare it, what should we make of this amateur video, secretly filmed by someone evidently disheartened by the US-led invasion? How different would our impression of Iraq today be had this film been shot by, say, an amateur who was relieved to be living in an Iraq free of Saddam Hussein? Who do we trust?

In the modern media age, even sacred facts aren’t always what they seem.

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