>A recent New Yorker article documented how one of the most striking moments of our adventure in Iraq, the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, was almost completely manufactured.

Just like dozens of other articles, some with videos, showed within a couple of months after the fact. This is most probably a recycled one. Anyone who looked for alternate news sources knew this at the time and could see the uncut video. Actually, I was suspicious from square one - the official video is cut too short, the shots were taken from below waist level (the oldest trick in the book, can't distinguish whether there is a third row of people or not; for really big crowds you want to get your camera high to have as many heads as possible, or if you want to show that the alleged 500000 people weren't there, you take shots hours before or after the event), there's a glaring omission of rows of people pulling the rope - a true reporter wouldn't miss that for the world.

But that's the power of the propaganda machine. It simply doesn't matter how many people see it, though, because the propaganda will repaint it a hundred times over. It has the reset button, probably a technical novelty brought by the Bushmen: when caught lying, rewind, play again, play again, play again. In the end, the 0.5% of the people who saw the true version won't even bother to speak up. And TV is a wonderful one-way medium, no matter how heavily they spread it, nobody can hear you yell. Well, OK, 0.5% of the people may.

You can't lie to all the people all the time, but I guess they are quite happy with 99.5% and 99.5%.