A thought-provoking issue's been raised by the bombing of a Baghdad market the other day.

Al-Jazeera showed full coverage of the carnage - including a young boy (about 11-12 yrs old, I think) with half his head missing.

Meanwhile, the BBC only showed just up to the sheet covering him being lifted, then froze the picture and said, 'Viewers were shown a blood-spattered skull.'

Al-Jazeera has also shown pictures of dead (allegedly executed) British and American soldiers. The US and UK governments have denounced this as being 'obscene'.

I've never seen Al-Jazeera, but the western media seems to agree that it is neutral, at least in comparison to the blatantly anti-western media that otherwise serves the Middle East. What our media hasn't been telling us is: Does Al Jazeera also show pictures of dead Iraqi soldiers? We haven't been told they have, we haven't been told they haven't.

And besides all of that, is there anything wrong with showing a child with half his head blown away?

We're fighting a war, yet our 'impartial' media is incredibly reluctant to show us the truth about what our bombs are doing. 'Look, here's a burnt out car, a broken window, oh and there were a few dead civilians over there, but those images were too distressing to see.'

TOO FUCKING DISTRESSING???

It's like in Apocalypse Now, where Colonel Kurtz says that USAF pilots weren't allowed to write the word 'fuck' on the side of their bombs, because it was obscene. Then they went out and dropped those bombs on Vietnamese villages.

We're too sheltered in this country. We need to be exposed to the realities of war - show us the shattered skulls, the spilt brain tissue.

For a free press, they seem pretty cagey about showing us the truth.