Richard Keeble: We see more and more of the conflict, but we know as little as ever

Most of the US/UK's important military action is covert, away from prying TV cameras and the public's gaze

Propaganda is a vital ingredient of military strategy during the conflict with Iraq. The enemy is manufactured, its leaders demonised, and its strength grossly exaggerated. Yet the media are not part of a massive conspiracy. Rather, the war myth is the result of profound geostrategic, ideological, social, political and economic factors.

Most of the important military activity by the US and the UK is covert, away from prying TV cameras and the public gaze. But our screens are filled with images of the war. Constantly repeated – and tightly controlled – battlefield images of coalition forces in action feature as never before on TV, while seemingly endless speculation by military commentators only serve to crowd out the views of oppoenents to the aggression by the US and the UK. Horrific images of the dead and wounded shown by the Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera are not being allowed to disturb the sanitised representation of the conflict for British viewers.

Today the most obvious contrasts with the 1991 coverage arise from the access to the frontlines for the 600 US and 128 UK journalists "embedded" with the troops, and the round-the-clock television coverage.

Not surprisingly, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, was quick to praise the "embeds": "The imagery they broadcast is at least partially responsible for the public's change of mood with the majority of people now saying they back the coalition." And those distant shots, from an eerily static camera, of huge mushroom clouds erupting over Baghdad following yet another night-time aerial bombardment only seem to acclimatise the viewer to the everyday ordinariness of the horror.

In contrast, during the first Gulf conflict, reporting pools were used to keep journalists huddled in packs in Saudi Arabia away from the frontlines, although the war in the Gulf had to be seen. The US desperately needed to fight a "big" war to help "kick the Vietnam syndrome", to legitimise its enormous military budget and to reinforce the power of the military/industrial/intelligence elite.

In the end there was nothing more than a series of massacres bureid beneath the myth of heroic warfare. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported in his autobiography that 250,000

Iraqi soldiers were killed in the conflict – compared to just 150 in the US-led forces (most of them through "friendly fire").

Reporters such as Robert Fisk of the Independent and Peter Sharp of ITN, who dared to operate away from the pools, were intimidated by the military and some of their journalist colleagues. Most of the crucial military action in 1991 came from the air, and since journalists had no access to fighter jets, the conflict was kept largely secret.

This time a repeat of the same kind of media controls was never feasible since the Middle East has been swarming with thousands of journalists for months. In any case, military censorship regimes always serve essentially symbolic purposes – expressing the arbitrary power of the army over the conduct and representation of war.

For their part, mainstream journalists, influenced by professional norms and conventional news values, can usually be relied upon to apply self-censorship. All the mainstream print and broadcast media, just before the bombing of Baghdad on 20 March, were happy to highlight Pentagon leaks that suggested 3,000 missiles and precision-guided bombs would be dropped on Iraq in an early "shock and awe" campaign.

Now, as the UK/US tanks build up outside Baghdad, countless unnamed Iraqi troops and conscripts are being killed away from the TV cameras. When civilian homes are destroyed, such tragedies are "inevitable", the fault of "Saddam" or simply "mistakes" – blips in an otherwise smoothmilitary operation rather than moral outrages.

Take, for instance, the coverage of the bombing of the Baghdad market on 26 March. How many were killed? "At least 14," say the media. But they remain anonymous – dehumanised "targets". We can expect no profiles of the Iraqi dead or their grieving families.

Richard Keeble is professor of journalism at Lincoln University, and the author of 'Secret State, Silent Press' (John Libbey), a study of press coverage of the 1991 Gulf War