All About Balance. Glenn pointed to this soldier's tale, and he's right: it's interesting. Like so many real first-hand accounts from Iraq we get the 'He was shot at, endured mortar fire, rewired a dictator's palace, found compassion for a war-torn country' angle, but also the ' "They (Iraqis) want us there. The support we got from locals was unreal," said Neice. "Sure, there are small pockets of resistance, but it's rare." ', angle. Reading the man's account, and others in a similar vein, and adding 2 and 2, it is unlikely that his account is all that exaggerated; which begs a question about the coverage of the Big Media, in particular the BBC.

The BBC thinks balance is about not deciding that the insurgents are really a minority, about not affirming the positive nature of the Coalition's involvement, about reporting the vocal explosions of propaganda ahead of the quiet voice of the ordinary Iraqi (on the grounds that Bremer and Bush do their own propaganda in this respect)- in a sense denying that there is an 'ordinary' Iraqi out there beyond the ones conjured in coalition press conferences. They tacitly argue, 'who is the average Iraqi- perhaps he is our former Baathist translator, perhaps he is the Iraqi nationalist, or the Shia fundamentalist, and how are we to know?'. Behind these attitudes lie old prejudices, such as 'the US used to support Saddam's regime; why should we ignore it now?', or 'sovereignty is absolute, so we will give equal respect to Saddam's old loyalists as to the new INC'. Every time the BBC is forced away from these positions they think they are becoming propagandists for the Coalition, and they resent it deeply. The Gilligan debacle only served to drive their resentments deeper down.

That's why the soldier's tale is not told. That's why the majority of Iraqis are ignored in favour of a 'balance' between the opposing power groups in Iraq. The BBC finds its responsibility not to be to act as a siphon relaying impressions of events, but a power-broker in the great political games in Iraq and especially beyond. Of course there are ways in which they try and appease people who disapprove of their power-brokering stance- for instance the opinion poll they carried out in Iraq recently which won then many plaudits- but the mania for interpreting and guiding events interactively always reasserts itself.