Of course, the final consideration to tip the balance in favor of abandoning neutrality was cold hard cash. American media, like most other institutions in US, is ruled by profit motive. When majority of the people support war, most media companies, that needs to pacify its shareholders, jumps to cash in on this opportunity by serving before its customers exactly what they are ready to buy. Being patriotic makes business sense.

MSNBC got its house straight when they fired talk show host Phil Donahue, whose anti-war and left-leaning views were contrary to the current patriotic fever. Unfortunately, their bet on Peter Arnett backfired, when unexpectedly Arnett made statements that were judged to be against the interest of Pentagon. Further, he appeared in Iraqi TV and spoke ill of war planners. That was enough for NBC and National Geographic to fire him.

American TV ratings follow closely the level of patriotism of the channel. Fox News leads CNN and MSNBC, slow to adapt to the zealous fundamentalism of war, lags behind. BBC had an image of neutrality. This war eroded that image and its core values. Though not as flagrant war-hawk as the American Media, viewers notice considerable bias.

Interestingly Al Jazeera has emerged as a new challenger. Even though, it has definite bias towards Arab sentiments, it has refused to become CNN of Arab World. It claims its reports are neutral. Therefore, it has taken its beating from all quarters.

Today Iraqi officials expelled one of its reporters from Baghdad and barred another from reporting. Earlier this week NYSE revoked credentials that allowed two Al Jazeera reporters to broadcast from its trading floor, saying its credentials were for networks that provided "responsible" coverage. Subsequently Al Jazeera asked NASDAQ for permission to broadcast live reports from its building and was promptly denied. 

Its website was hacked by pro war hackers. Al Jazeera doubled its bandwidth but the attackers soon inundated the extra bandwidth. Then came the DNS hack which redirected legitimate queries to a page depicting a U.S. flag and the phrase ''Let Freedom Ring'. The U.S.-based hosting company DataPipe, a service of Hoboken Web Services in Hoboken, New Jersey, said it would no longer continue to host Al-Jazeera sites.

The IT staff at Al-Jazeera suspects foul play. They believe that larger forces are at work who want to shut down their voice.

Interestingly however, it was the most sought-after site on the Internet. Google said "Al-Jazeera" was the term that showed the greatest increase in the week ending March 31. Research firm comScore Media Metrix said Al-Jazeera had become the second-most-searched-for term on the Internet.

As of now, its Arabic site is up. However, its English site has not been restored. I navigated to its Arabic site to see what it might contain that is forcing big players to act such shamelessly against a small fish. I don't know Arabic and I could not read the website contents. But I saw the pictures and realized why everyone is up against them.

The site had pictures of the civilian casualty - the banned content in the US Media. There are image after image of children and people - bombed, killed, injured. There are images of suffering - painful and heart breaking. There are images of devastation. They have images enough to move the hearts of people.