"If you want your core values to mean anything, you have to live them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And you cannot simply abandon them in times of crisis," PR Week columnist (and weblogger) Paul Holmes writes in his Holmes Report.

"Are Americans more vulnerable to advertisements, and perhaps less skeptical about them, than, say, Europeans?" TomPaine.com's Sharon Basco asked Jean Kilbourne, author of Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. "The only reason that Americans might be more vulnerable than people from other countries is that we believe we're not vulnerable," Kilbourne said. "There's such a widespread belief in America that we're not influenced by anything really, that you know, we're not culturally conditioned.

"Why do we aid and abet the lies and propaganda of this filthy war?" asked the Independent's Robert Fisk. "How come, for example, it's now BBC 'style' to describe the Anglo-American invaders as the 'coalition'. This is a lie. ... The Iraqis try to imitate the US Central Command (CentCom) propaganda operations, though with less subtlety. ... Then there's the famous "war in Iraq" slogan which the British and American media like to promote. But this is an invasion, not a mere war. ...