Whose side are they on? U.S. officials have accused Arab news network Al Jazeera of biased coverage. Are any media really objective in times of war?

As the U,S.-led war in Iraq erupted this spring, CNN chronicled the awesome power of the U.S. military, chatted about battle strategy with retired generals, and referred to American troops as fighting a war of "liberation."

But on Arab television, a much different story was unfolding. The war was not an act of liberation, but of "occupation." Across the Middle East, Arab viewers saw a pair of wounded, shell-shocked Iraqi children with blood-spattered faces; a woman squatting in front of her bombed-out home, now a pile of smoking rubble; a weeping man clutching what appeared to be a handful of dark pottery shards--actually fragments of his son's skull.

Al Jazeera, the seven-year-old Arabic-language news network, delivered daily scenes like these by satellite to 35 million viewers in 20 Arab countries, greatly influencing public opinion in the Mideast. American officials have accused the channel of biased, anti-American reporting. But how can viewers determine whether that's true? And what about American media outlets--are they more accurate or fair than Al Jazeera?

OBJECTIVE LENS?

The idea of objectivity in modern journalism that news should be reported without opinion or bias--dates back to 19th-century America. Before then, newspapers were most often partisan organs of political parties or opinionated publishers (some still are today).

A key component of objectivity is giving opposing sides equal treatment in news reports. At least in theory.

Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. deputy secretary of defense, certainly gives Al Jazeera low marks for objectivity. He accused the 24-hour network and other Arab news channels of "biased reporting that has the effect of inciting violence against our troops."

Officials at Al Jazeera denied the accusation. They said that broadcasting scenes of wounded civilians and interviewing Arabs about American policy gives voice to people U.S. news organizations are unlikely to interview.

Who is right? They are probably both right, says Robert Thompson, professor of media and culture at Syracuse University. "Watch CNN and Al Jazeera," he says, "and you'll quickly realize that everyone who tells a story tells it from a different point of view."

When U.S. bombers targeted the Taliban in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, for example, CNN, Fox News, NBC, and other American networks portrayed the military action largely as a strike against terrorists or supporters of terrorism and as retribution for the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Al Jazeera showed victims bloodied by U.S. bombs, and carried reaction from a Muslim man in Egypt who condemned the U.S. bombing, saying, "America is the maker of terrorism, and it is now tasting its own medicine."

WHAT REAL PEOPLE THINK

"Al Jazeera's reporters are steeped in the language and the culture of the Arab countries they cover," says Mohammed El-Nawawy, co-author of a book about the Arab network. "They humanize and reveal what real people think."

The same could be said for CNN. News is defined largely by the audience it serves, Thompson says. During wartime, or after a terrorist attack, it's natural for Americans to become more patriotic. News organizations, even ones that try to adhere to journalistic standards of objectivity, can get swept along in the national sentiment of the time. And the advertisers whose ads provide media outlets with the revenue they need to make a profit--get swept along, too. How would they have reacted if an American news channel focused more on the victims of American attacks than on the progress of the U.S. military?

During the war in Iraq, American media have interviewed civilian victims of U.S. bombs, but also gave a great deal of attention to Army Private Jessica Lynch of West Virginia, who became a POW and was later rescued by American troops. Thompson wonders whether the frenzy surrounding Lynch is really much different from Al Jazeera's focus on Arab victims.

Even the catchy titles that news outlets use to promote their coverage reveal attitudes about what they are broadcasting. Al Jazeera, for instance, called its Iraq war reports, "War On Iraq" (instead of, say, "War With Iraq"), while MSNBC's war headline was "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

DEFINING FAIRNESS

The truth is that journalists have always struggled with fairness, even with the best of intentions.

"The question is not whether journalists are being fair, but how you define fairness in the first place," says Robert Lichter, president of file Center for Media and Public Affairs. "It is the most basic question: Should they be a partisan or an objective observer?"

Critics of Al Jazeera, founded in Qatar in 1996, believe it sometimes crosses the line into partisanship. During the war, for example, it often referred to Iraqi officials as "saying" something and American officials as "claiming" something else--which implies that the claims might be false.

But, once again, parallels can be found in American media. Anchors on Fox News seemed less than objective when they spoke of American troops "shellacking" the enemy or described Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as "twisted."

Accusations of bias, it's important to note, are not limited to American versus Arab media. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld criticized American journalists during the war, when they focused on Iraqi military resistance to American troops. And Al Jazeera has gotten into trouble with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Arab governments over its Mideast coverage in the past.

One thing American media have that Arab media don't is a long history of an independent and free press, Thompson notes. "But in wartime nationalistic tendencies make bias easier to seep in, and sometimes even more acceptable to the audience."

With reporting by Alessandra Stanley and Neil. MacFarquhar of The New York Times.