So Minitrez, the lead anchorman for the US military radio and television broadcaster American Forces Network (AFN) Europe, doesn't report on scenes of carnage in Baghdad, anti-Bush demonstrations or the plight of refugees.

"We show the military side of things," said the 32-year-old Staff Sergeant from New Mexico, preparing for one of his six daily newscasts -- delivered in full uniform -- in AFN Europe's Frankfurt studio.

AFN doesn't really see its job in critical or investigative reporting, as the commercial networks might.

"Our audience are US military personnel and their families," said AFN's station commander, Sergeant First Class Tim Donahue.

And from his first-hand experience as a reporter on the front lines during the first Gulf War, he knew that "families are sitting at home glued to their TV sets for news of their loved ones down there."

Every tiny snippet of information or picture showing the "boys" are doing well was "eagerly snapped up", he said.

His biggest story back then was a 40-second soundbite about a dog tag worn by a soldier in the 1991 conflict which had belonged to his father in World War II, Donahue said.

Particularly popular this time round, also for the commercial networks that AFN supplies, are the so-called "Hi moms" or "Hi honeys", said George Smith, AFN's (civilian) chief of network broadcast operations.

"These are reports when you go to a soldier and the soldier goes 'Hi mom, how're you doing. I'm somewhere in Iraq. I really miss you and I hope I can get back home soon'," he explained.

Anyway, he said, AFN did not have the resources to do wider stories such as the plight of the refugees or civilian war damage that were being covered by commercial networks such as CNN, Fox, ABC and MSNBC.

"We'll let the big boys do the refugee stories. It doesn't make sense for us to take the few reporters we have and have them go out and do a job that someone else is doing," Smith said.

"What we try to have our reporters do is cover part of the news that no-one else is doing."

And since AFN was targeted at military personnel and their families, "we focus on stories about soldiers, what soldiers are doing, how they're feeling, their experiences," Smith said.

AFN currently had 10 reporters "embedded" with troops in Iraq and Kuwait, transmitting their reports via satellite telephone.

Most of them were soldiers first and trained subsequently by the military to be journalists.

Smith insisted the reports were not censored in any way.

"In our rules and regulations, we say very clearly that we do not censor anything. Our reporters can report on everything they see. We never say: 'What you're reporting on is not the philosophy of the US government, so we don't want you to put that on the air'," he said.

"But there's a difference between censorship and operational security."

Thus, reporters were not allowed to say, for example, where they and the troops they were "embedded" with were at any given moment or where they would be in future, because that would endanger both reporters and troops alike.

However, anchorman Minitrez conceded that if there were any reports that appeared critical of the Bush administration, they would be edited out.

"We can't lean to the left or to the right. Anything which isn't right down the middle is cut out during the editorial process," Minitrez said.

SPACE.WIRE