I can't believe I'm writing this. Have I really joined the black helicopters set? Or am I just noticing things for the first time?

It seems inescapable to me that I am watching my brothers and sisters in the media slowly turn. Media bias, as Chomsky knows, is rarely a conscious effort or a grand conspiracy. More often, it is the automatic infusion of assumptions and beliefs by low-level copy editors and wire desk writers. But the result is just as nefarious as if it had been a vast conspiracy.

Like the burgeoning Oil-for-Food program scandal at the U.N., which has produced copious paperwork, damning quotes, and yet has not been given a drop of ink in major U.S. outlets like the "Philadelphia Inquirer."

Or this. On a recent Saturday, Islamist terrorists tried to blow up the Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal near Basra. They launched three suicide boats toward the docks, in the type of attack that had succeeded against the U.S.S. Cole and, more recently, a French oil tanker. But this time, the U.S. Navy was on the job. The port patrol intercepted the suicide squads. Two Coast Guardsmen and five Navy sailors aboard a rigid hull inflatable were preparing to board a dhow that had approached the terminal, and the bad guys, a la Flight 93, blew themselves up when caught. A couple of brave sailors died, as did a U.S. Coast Guard member. Yet the day was saved. Damage to the oil rigs at the port was minimal. Exporting of billions of barrels of crucial oil -- crucial to the rebuilding of Iraq -- resumed within hours.

So what headline did the Associated Press (and thus dozens if not hundreds of American newspapers) put on this story? "U.S. Thwarts Major Terror Strike?" "Quick-Thinking Sailors Defeat Bombers on High Seas?"

Nope, try this:

"Two U.S. servicemembers killed when boats explode near Iraqi oil facilities"

Just another bad day in Iraq, I guess.

I'm getting that helpless feeling again, like on Sept. 11, when events spin out of control so fast my brain can't process how bad it's become before things get even worse. It makes you want to retch. It makes me want to hand each of those prisoner-abusing a**holes a loaded Magnum and shut him or her in an empty room. They'd know what to do. Trying to keep some semblance of journalistic detachment amid all this is nearly impossible.

I took my career in my hands last night and dangled it over the abyss, as reckless as Steve Irwin on too much cough syrup. On our front-page we were about to run a New York Times story (we subscribe to their wire service) on the fallout from the Abu Ghraib mess. It contained prominently the phrase, "... the horrific descriptions and photographs that have emerged in recent days of acts of humiliation, sexual and otherwise, at Abu Ghraib prison ..."

I read this several times, then suggested to my fellow copy editors that perhaps the word "horrific" was hyperbole, and that simply describing "acts of humiliation, sexual and otherwise," was sufficient. Also (though I didn't say this much out loud), perhaps we can safely trust the readers, who had seen the pictures and read the descriptions, to have their own emotional reactions, and know what they were and give a name to them, without being told what to feel by the NYT.

My reaction to the pictures and descriptions, for instance, was revulsion, a need to re-check my moral principles against the difficult decision to have this war right now, and rage at the handful of idiots who look like they're going to wreck an entire century for some jackass stunt. (My reaction on seeing the full Army report of them, today, is even stronger: see above).

But "horrific?" No, this wasn't the stuff of horror movies. In itself, it was the stuff of hell night a Phi Kappa Sigma when I lived across the quad from their house at Dickinson. Culturally, it was a brutal insult. Politically, it was a disaster. But "horrific?" No: bodies burned and mutilated and torn apart and hung up on bridges are horrific. Men with machine guns executing little girls and then videotaping the scene while the babies bleed to death in their car seats. That's horrific.

But I didn't say that, either. I asked if we could agree to drop that one word. At first I got blank stares. Part of it, perhaps, was incredulity that I, or any of us, would presume to rewrite the prose of a NYT story. Copy-editing them usually is limited by custom to fixing their many misplaced commas. Who was I, a small-town ink-stained wretch, to presume to know journalism better than the Gray Lady?

And to make matters worse for myself, I recommended a change in a direction that could only be interpreted in many minds here as "supporting that asshole Bush." Remember this is a place where I hear almost daily, from a variety of sources, that no sane person could fail to vote for John Kerry. These are the same copy editors who wanted to remove a mild insult to the French from an account of a patriotic rally. The mayor had said it in public, but it was deemed too "editorial" for a news story. My attempt, the last time I was given a wire page to fill, to include a picture of Nazi-style desecration of a Jewish cemetery in France likewise was objected to as not newsworthy.

At first, consent was granted to remove "horrific" -- as long as it was replaced with something equally strong. I pointed out that "acts of humiliation, sexual and otherwise" seemed to describe the crimes pretty well, and that adding more adjectives was redundant. No further objection was made, but I had to pick up the paper this morning to be sure the change I suggested had been made and approved at the top. It was.

It is possible both to burn with personal shame and rage at the fools Abu Ghraib, who threw away so much for so little, and at the same time to remind other people to keep the reaction to their criminal folly in perspective. The incident itself is one thing; the way it has been received around the world is another. If my son burned your house down, I would be furious at him. If you then tried to kill him (and me) because of what he did, I would defend us vigorously. That doesn't mean I condone his crime, I merely reject your reaction to it. Here's a good example of perspective, by a voice from the Middle East that is no American lackey:

Absolutes are appealing, but in imposing them, moralists must consider two points: That only a system which responds to censure through amelioration can eventually set lawful standards of behavior; and that some of Washington's more zealous Middle Eastern critics often avoided applying a universal ethical yardstick when considering what took place under Saddam -- even as the US today accepts their moral privilege to condemn its actions in Abu Ghraib.

There is no justification (let alone a politically expedient rationale) for a host of recent American undertakings in Iraq - whether the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners or the bombardment of civilians in Falluja. However, there is also no excuse for denying that what we have seen in the past week in the US has been the thrashing about of a democratic system that feels disgraced by the behavior of several of its citizens, and that intends to rectify matters.

The Egyptian playwright Ali Salem told me recently that the true indignity of the Iraq war was that it was not Arabs who had overthrown Saddam Hussein. He was right. As Arabs examine the photographs from Abu Ghraib and read about American misconduct there, they might reflect less on what this says about the US, which usually ponders its worst excesses, than what it says about their own systems, where such images could only have been glimpsed over the carcass of an overthrown regime.