Propaganda" is a bit like "terrorism" - it's a word we only use to describe what our enemy does. One person's propaganda is another person's "information".

Even the word terrorism itself opens up a propaganda battlefield. It's one thing to accept that what happened in the US on September 11th were horrible acts of terrorism - that's a fact. It's quite another to accept that anything the US decides to do now is part of a "war on terrorism" - that's an interpretive opinion disguising itself as a fact. You could call it propaganda.

That hasn't stopped most news organisations, including RT╔ and the Irish Indepedent, from frequently using this shorthand description: "the war on terror/terrorism". The Irish Times uses the line "Response to Terror" at the top of pages about the crisis. This is certainly a step in the direction of objectivity, but you could argue that it seems to accept, rather than question, the claim that the US is simply acting in response to September 11th, rather than for other reasons. (For example, credible pundits have suggested the US wants better access to natural gas and oil in central Asia.)

Words like terrorism invite a response in kind: many observers, including President Assad of Syria, when he met Tony Blair last week, have accused the US of "terrorism" because it knowingly endangers and kills thousands of civilians when it attacks cities, villages and roads in Afghanistan. Terrorism is the word most often fired by both sides in the propaganda war.

One reason that interpretations and propaganda have thrived in this conflict is that there aren't enough clear facts. There are very few English-speaking reporters in Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan; reporters are largely kept away from the US ships and airbases from which military attacks are being launched. As a result, what often happens is this: a Taliban or Pentagon official makes an announcement about what he claims is happening in Afghanistan; someone in a newsroom in New York or London or Dublin telephones a reporter, who is stuck in Pakistan or in northern Afghanistan, to relay the announcement; then the reporter goes on-air or into print as if he or she were picking up the news "on the scene".

It is, as Eddie Holt has written in The Irish Times, "propaganda for journalism itself" - pretending that news organisations are able to do their jobs properly, rather than simply mouthing the stories that information-managers on both sides want them to tell.

Western reporters usually put a "health warning" on Taliban statements about civilian casualties or planes shot down - "the claim could not be independently verified". They rarely do that when discussing US statements, so that, for example, the repeated bombing of Red Cross, Red Crescent and UN sites is always described as "mistaken"; in fact the reporters have no access to the pilots and to the targeting information that could verify if these bombs were really dropped by mistake - or if they were perhaps part of an effort to create panic and instability in Afghanistan and hasten the fall of the Taliban government.

The locations where Western reporters are stuck also means the coverage gets skewed toward picturesque events in those places.

As a result, images of a relatively small number of frenetic pro-Taliban demonstrators in Pakistan kissing pictures of Osama bin Laden seem to be our only measure of Muslim public opinion.

And our image of the "war" inside Afghanistan is dominated by the Northern Alliance, who have been happy to pose with their weapons beside US and European reporters, but seemingly less happy to risk their lives by using the weapons against the Taliban. (Understandably, reporters who are roughing it near the front line under Northern Alliance protection aren't likely to criticise the group, who have an appalling record for slaughtering civilians and raping "enemy" women on a large scale.)

It's sometimes too easy for reporters to blame government restrictions for the limits of their coverage and commentary. In the US, in particular, the mood of crisis and "national unity" has led to self-censorship in the media.

Clear Channel, which owns hundreds of music radio stations across America, issued a list of songs that it said shouldn't be played for the time being: it included John Lennon's Imagine and anything by Rage Against the Machine.

The national network ABC, which is owned by Disney, came close to sacking a chat-show host after he wondered aloud whether the September 11th hijackers were really "cowards", compared to a soldier who launches a Cruise missile from hundreds of miles away from the target.

CBS news "anchorman" Dan Rather said he was "an American first" and said he would "line up" wherever the President told him to.

More seriously, the US media have been slow to push for information about the 1,200 people, mostly Arab immigrants, who been held in custody after September 11th. Many are still in jail, without charge or hearing.

The FBI is considering using "truth" drugs, or even extraditing suspects to countries where torture is used, in order to get them to "talk". But the veil of secrecy surrounding their imprisonment is largely being respected by reporters, motivated by concern for "national security".

It took more than six weeks after September 11th before a major US reporter, Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News, seriously looked at how toxic Ground Zero continues to be. His story, which shows that there are high levels of the leukaemia-causing substance benzene in the "plume" and many other poisons in the local environment, should have raised serious questions about the decision to quickly get lower Manhattan "back to business".

Instead, the story has been widely ignored, even though there will probably be far more death and illness caused to rescue workers and others in the neighbourhood as a result of pollutants than will be caused by anthrax, the subject of non-stop media speculation.

Maybe the Ground Zero story has been first unexamined, then unrepeated, to avoid panic. There are other tales that have gone unquestioned because they fit in with the tragic mood in the US after September 11th. On October 26th, reporter Nina Bernstein in the New York Times finally debunked the myth of the "World Trade Centre orphans".

From the first day, we heard stories of New York childcare centres where kids were uncollected, both parents presumed dead.

Some published stories have suggested that as many as "thousands" of children were left parentless by the atrocities of September 11th, and offers have come into the city from people who want to adopt such an orphan.

"The problem is, officials say, there are none," Bernstein writes. "Not a single child who needs foster care or adoption by strangers. Not a single documented case of a child who lost both parents. Just a handful of verified cases in which children 'lost their only parent' - and all have close relatives who have taken over their care."

Without anyone meaning any harm by it, the "orphan" stories were both an example of sloppy journalism and a piece of propaganda for tragedy, a way of exaggerating the awfulness of events that were already awful enough.