Other countries seemed to be doing a better job than the U.S. as well. Le Monde had no problem criticising the American administration, although criticising anything the least bit conservative about America is pretty much standard in France. The French had far more philosophical and humanitarian criticisms of the war, while British papers went for hard-line reporting. Meanwhile, most American newspapers, at least the major ones, tried to give the Bush Administration a soft landing.

In 2003, when bombs began falling on Baghdad, I was an editorial assistant on The New Yorker. We were watching CNN in the photo-editor's office, and I had sense of déją vu. I'd seen similar things on TV during the first Gulf War. The following spring I began talking to an Iraq veteran who was with the newly-formed Iraq Veterans Against War (IVAW), and to people who worked for the GI Rights Hotline, a non-profit, non-military phone line that offers advice to American GIs. One hotline staffer told me about a soldier who'd watched his superior take the head off a dead Iraqi with an e-tool, a kind of collapsible shovel. He told me of Iraqi children being refused medical aid by officers in charge, even when regular soldiers were trying to help them. Soon I had an agreement to write a piece for the left-wing The Village Voice, the influential New York weekly.

Then a contact with IVAW mentioned that our soldiers were using a lot of tracer fire. Tracer fire consists of incendiary rounds – phosphorous rounds – that ignite when they hit the air. It's supposed to help soldiers see at night, but it's used during the day as well because, as one soldier said: “It fucking burns straight through the fuckers,” meaning the Iraqis. Like napalm, tracer burns what it hits and keeps on burning. Meanwhile, the GI Rights Hotline mentioned they were receiving more calls for psychological-distress counselling than for anything else, and estimated a high desertion rate. I heard this during the spring and summer of 2004. None of this information was in The New York Times or The Washington Post. I turned in a draft to The Village Voice, and they stopped returning my calls.

Opportunity for a lawyer

The point is that when I found out about all of this, I was a newbie journalist, straight out of graduate school for writing – and I'd studied poetry. Totally wet behind the ears, making every mistake in the book while inventing a few on the side. I can't have been the only American journalist hearing these stories. Journalists on major papers must have been hearing them, too. But I think they were scared, especially in New York, the heart of U.S. journalism. For months we'd all walked past the photographs of the 9/11 dead posted in our subway stations. They were originally put up as homemade missing-persons posters, and for a long time no one had the heart to take them down. Believing that our administration was lying to us was too frightening to handle.

I suspect these facts didn't come out in Britain for an entirely different reason. The British press has less stringent traditions of fact-checking than the American press, so if The Guardian had heard what I had heard, I believe these stories would have ended up in print. However, I found most of my contacts through churches. American journalism often follows the old battle-lines of the Civil Rights movement, which had a strong base in African-American and certain white liberal churches. Because the British press tends to see religion in America as a primitive, scary, right-wing mass, it isn't likely to contact American churches, even those that serve as epicenters for helping soldiers and protesting about the war.

My sources for the piece that The Village Voice killed came from places that, I suspect, no British journalist would think to call: two groups at Riverside Church in Manhattan, and a Quaker group in Fayetteville, North Carolina. If I were going to write another piece on the war, I'd also call African-American Baptist churches and maybe even some white Baptist churches, to see how much they were involved in war protests. African- American churches tend to be rather liberal, so local organising for protests is likely to show up there first. I figure if white Baptist churches were to get involved in protests, it's a sure sign that the war is vastly unpopular.

Sadly, I suspect that knowing which churches and religious groups to contact is beginning to fall out of American journalism. It's a common choice for me, because I'm from a smallish town in Maryland and remember a lot of local changes that started through the area churches – churches and high schools seem to be the epicenters of change in American towns with populations below 35,000. But part of the fallout of the right-wing evangelical movement is that, increasingly, American journalists see American religion as the British do: as an undifferentiated, conservative mass. For instance, the mainstream press in America has largely missed the growing environmental movement among conservative churches. And while the polls show that the war in Iraq is highly unpopular, action against it has largely not taken place in the churches. So I suspect that, despite electing a passel of Democrats to the House of Representatives and the Senate, the American public may actually be willing to put up with the war more than the numbers show.

American fact-checking likes to believe it's robust, and in truth, it usually is. We assume that our government is also stringent about its facts, and until the Bush Administration, it was. (This is, I believe, part of the reason why our newspapers initially believed George Bush's statements about WMDs.) What robust fact-checking means is that, as a journalist, I have to tape every interview and turn in transcripts to my editors along with the finished pieces. I also double-check facts from newspapers and magazines. I used to believe this was the standard for all reliable press in the Western world.

The reason it's so robust is a 1964 Supreme Court case, New York Times vs Sullivan, in which the judges ruled that as long as facts were published without malice, and the paper made a concerted effort to determine that the facts were right before publication, they were protected from libel even if the facts in question were wrong. The burden of proof of malice and sloppiness lay with the accuser, but papers had to make every effort to ensure their facts were true. This led to the idea of strong fact-checking; the idea that if everything published had been verified to the best of the publication's ability, it was safe. The reason I agree that the Voicewas probably right to kill my story was that the facts in it couldn't be verified. Everything came from soldiers my contacts wouldn't name. My one first-hand source was a soldier whose post-traumatic stress disorder was so severe that he'd flashback while talking to me on the phone.

Death threats for a beauty

Mystified, I called one of the clerics who'd been quoted in two articles in The Times. It turned out that he was unaware that a Muslim had won the Miss England Pageant. He said he'd never spoken out against her. When I pressed, he said that, yes, he didn't really believe in beauty pageants, that they were contrary to feminism. I pressed further and he said the Koran was against them too, but he'd have to go look up the relevant verses. Had anyone from The Times called him on this matter? No, he said. Here is what I suspect happened: there was another Muslim contestant for Miss England, a woman from Iraq. When she entered the pageant, a small paper in Liverpool called this cleric for a general quote about beauty pageants and Islam. He'd answered that they were contrary to the Koran. His words then bounced around different papers and were finally applied to Ms Kohistani when she won – without anyone bothering to call the source and check.

The British press had many other facts wrong about the story. The Times reported that the Kohistanis had fled the Taliban, when her family had actually fled Afghanistan and gone to Russia two years before the Taliban came to power. The BBC's website reported that Ms Kohistani's mother had made the dress in which her daughter won Miss England, when the dress was actually made by Anupma Jaidka's Maya Fashion House. (Boy, was Ms Jaidka angry – she'd provided a dress seen on national TV and wasn't getting credit!) The writer of one piece in The Times told me he'd spoken to Ms Kohistani on his cellphone at 2am, and that he hadn't taped the conversation. I can't imagine not recording an interview. Yes, the piece in The Times was about a beauty queen, not the Foreign Secretary, but human-interest pieces do as much to shape people's view of the world as pieces about elected officials. Errors tend to reinforce prevailing notions. Without good factchecking, it's hard for truth to win out over stereotype. While the British read about a poor, persecuted Muslim girl – a refugee from the Taliban whose family was so poor that her mother had to make her pageant dress – I found a middle-class Muslim girl whose parents had been university professors. She loved wearing pink and wanted to study advertising. I spoke to the head of fact-checking at a national magazine here in America. He sighed and said that the British press was notorious for bad fact-checking. His attitude was “live and learn”, meaning don't even pitch a piece based on facts in the British press without checking them yourself.

The irony is that The Sun, Murdoch's daily tabloid, appears to have got the story right. It was the only paper that sent a reporter to the Kohistanis' house with a tape recorder. I suspect that, as The Sun reported, the Kohistani family perhaps did receive hate-mail – most beauty queens do. Then, maybe, after speaking to The Sun the family, for some reason and perhaps understandably under the circumstances, decided to pretend no hate-mail had arrived. But the family didn't appear to be screening their phone calls, or to have taken any steps towards protecting themselves, so I don't think they received death threats. I contacted the reporter who wrote the piece and asked her why she had been so careful with her facts and – here I quote from memory – she laughed and said: “Because we always get sued.”

Hearing of my saga with The Times and Teen Vogue, a friend who writes for The Irish Times rolled his eyes. Granted, he's not one to mind slagging off the English, but he had one humdinger of a British press fact-checking error for me. After Hurricane Katrina, The Guardian and The Observer reported that killer Navy dolphins had escaped and were posing a threat to boats. The article named one source. My friend Googled this source and hit museumofhoaxes.com, which pointed out that the source had been responsible for a number of conspiracy-based claims in the past. My husband, who's from Edinburgh, laughed out loud when I read my BJR piece to him. He fished for the phrase from the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but didn't quite get it right. “If it's a choice between truth and a good story, then print the good story.” Or, as the movie has it: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”