The fog of war has settled over Iraq, or at least over the American media. We are being offered a cloudy view of the ongoing war, and what we don't know can hurt us.

The narrow perspective and limited context Americans get from their corporate media outlets are approximately as informative about the situation in Iraq as the new season of "Survivor" will be about the situation in Vanuatu. For as long as the fighting raged in Najaf, that dramatic and bloody confrontation dominated the news. Too much so for some people, and to balance the scales The Wall Street Journal began publishing a regular roundup of positive developments in Iraq, compiled by Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff.

And indeed, there was an important story that wasn't getting told while the focus was on Sadr and the shrine. But that story wasn't (or wasn't only) the good news we had not been hearing. As soon as the truce came to Najaf, The New York Times began reporting that a significant chunk of the country was no longer under the control of the U.S.-backed government or the forces we have in place to support it.

This seems like pretty important stuff, the news that the cities of Falluja and Ramadi, along with much of the surrounding province, "are now controlled by fundamentalist militias," as the Times reported. It didn't happen overnight. But the deteriorating situation in these Sunni cities got almost no coverage as it occurred.

It's no better on TV, where the newsreaders treat us like simpletons, capable of handling just one narrative thread at a time. Strange, since over in the entertainment division each episode of "The Simpsons" or "The Sopranos" demands that we follow many characters and subplots. Somehow we manage to keep up. With an election and the Olympics and the trial of Scott Peterson competing for coverage, a comprehensive view of the war has been yet harder to find.

And so what we think we know about Iraq and what we are told about it keeps changing. (Never mind Afghanistan; reality television coverage of that country seems to have been canceled.) The media's version is in its own way as obscure and mutable as that of the Bush administration itself. Bush at least can be understood to have a campaign to win with wartime spin. What's the media's excuse?

Part of the problem is that the focus of coverage began to waver after the United States handed some control of the country to Iraqis in late June. But this is still our war, and August was the deadliest month for American soldiers in Iraq since May. And now we wake up to headlines that may signal more hard months ahead.

This is a fact: The media know things about Iraq they don't tell you. In early July, the journalist Seymour Hersh gave a speech in which he detailed horrifying specifics of the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, actions he said were captured on videotapes now in the possession of the Pentagon. He spoke of "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there." But neither he nor other journalists have told that whole story.

It's not like the press doesn't know about these allegations. Hersh's speech was in itself an obscure event, but it got huge play online. My weblog got about 50,000 hits in the three days after I discovered a video of the speech and transcribed portions of it, and the news was picked up by other weblogs that get hundreds of thousands of hits apiece each day. This is no secret, not even an open secret; it's just not been fodder for the commodity news vendors.

One big media outlet that did pick up the story of the Hersh speech was the Arab news channel, Al-Jazeera, which got the facts wrong in a way that made it even less flattering to America. Yet the Al-Jazeera version remains unchallenged by the responsible U.S. newspapers and networks.

We're getting ready to choose a president, a decision that many of us will base in some large part on events in Iraq and elsewhere in the larger war against Islamic terror organizations. It would help if we knew what the hell was going on.