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There comes a point in every war when the government will blame the media - as the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has done - because things are going wrong. What Straw said. Some truth in this 24-hours news. Nothing so stale as yesterday's news day on war.
But the truth is that governments and their armies go to war to win and do not care how they do it. For them, the media is a menace. Only in wars of national survival, such as the Second World War, can they count on the media to support them to the hilt.
But in other wars - the Falklands, the Gulf War, Kosovo and now Afghanistan - no government can automatically assume that the media will be "on side". And without the media on side, public support for the war could well ebb away. In democracies with a powerful press and a tradition of dissent the media cannot be coerced into supporting the war. It has to be seduced or intimidated into self-censorship.
So in all the countries supporting the attack on Afghanistan we have already seen appeals to the media's patriotism, the national interest, security and the need to support "our boys". This has been combined with accusations that the media has favoured the enemy, endangered the safety of the nation's leaders, stabbed the troops in the back, fallen for enemy propaganda and sabotaged the war effort.
In Britain, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, summoned media bosses to Downing Street and asked them to agree not to rebroadcast messages from Osama bin Laden, particularly recorded videos because they might contained coded messages to his followers.
The American defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, warned the American media chiefs that they could expect little co-operation from the Pentagon because this was a new type of war in which secrecy was paramount.
Of course, the real reason Blair and Rumsfeld wanted to control the flow of news from Afghanistan was concern that images of civilian bomb victims would shake public support for the western alliance. An attack led by two powerful industrial nations against a third world agricultural one, already reduced to ruin and in the grip of a famine, was never going to be an edifying sight or an easy one to sell.
It depended on convincing the public that this was purely a war on terrorism, that the West has no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan and no quarrel with Islam. Only the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's forces would be attacked. The latest high-tech weaponry with its pinpoint accuracy would keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Bloody TV footage or grim still photographs of civilian bomb victims would threaten this most outrageous piece of propaganda so an essential part of the western alliance's strategy has been not only to bomb in the dark but, as far as possible, keep the public in the dark as well.
With no war correspondents on the ground where the bombs and missiles are striking, hundreds of correspondents have gathered across the borders in nearby countries where they have been reduced to reporting rumours. TV anchor men back home have had to telephone the latest news to their correspondents in the field so that they can then interview them on air. By force of circumstance, the main source of news has become official statements.
Thus the reporting of war has come full circle. Before William Howard Russell of The Times became the first civilian war correspondent in the Crimean War (1854-56), generals reported their own wars--Wellington on Waterloo, for instance.
Now, nearly 150 years later, if we want to know what is happening in Afghanistan, we turn on CNN and there is an American four-star general, medals glinting in the spotlight, telling us what he has decided we should know about the war.
Never mind, thought the western media. When the land invasion gets under way, the Pentagon will no doubt accredit at least a few war correspondents, probably under a "pool" system, like in the Gulf War. Think again. A war correspondent for the American armed forces own newspaper, "Stars and Stripes" told me this week that he had just been informed of a Pentagon ruling that even he would not be allowed to accompany any invasion force and nor would any other correspondent.
It is likely that the American media realises that Rumsfeld is right about this being a different war in which the old rules of reporting do not apply. This would explain why it is concentrating on the home front news - the battle against anthrax terrorism. The newspaper and TV programmes are empty of news from Afghanistan. But here, too, freedom of expression is in danger. The news organisations appear to be censoring themselves.
Their argument is that round-the-clock coverage of the anthrax attacks is frightening Americans and risks creating panic. In a CNN discussion this week, several panelists argued that there was too much news of anthrax and that the media should lay off for a while.
Given all these difficulties what stories in this war have not had the attention they deserved? First and foremost,the effect of the bombing on the civilian population of Afghanistan - although by last week newspapers in Britain were beginning to carry reports and photographs of victims. "Families blown apart, infants dying. The terrible images of this 'just war'," said the Independent.
The extent of the opposition to the war. Anti-war marches in both the United States and Britain have been poorly covered or ignored.
The oil conspiracy theory. Early in the bombing of Afghanistan, rumours that the United States was anxious to install a pro-American government there because it wanted to build an oil pipeline across the country were dismissed as another conspiracy theory.
But now respected academics like the British Professor of Politics, George Monbiot, have uncovered evidence that this is probably true. Monbiot says that just a few days before the attack on New York, the US Energy Information Administration reported: "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian Sea."
Before this war is over there will no doubt be other stories that are not covered, that are distorted, exaggerated, slanted and "spun". Does it matter? In 1999 a group of American congressmen travelled to Yugoslavia because they felt that they could trust neither their own government nor the media to tell them what was really happening there. "The enormous confusion which has taken place due to media manipulation on all sides has only contributed to the blood lust which - if it is the only basis for decision-making - could lead to a much wider and longer war." So yes, it does matter.
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