Review of Rewriting the Troubles: War and Propaganda, Ireland and Algeria by Patrick Anderson (Greenisland Press, £18). THIS is, quite simply, an extraordinary book. It should be on the reading list of student journalists across the globe because it illustrates how the controversial “propaganda model” proposed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman worked, and works, in reality. Their contention that media acts on behalf of power is proven beyond doubt by Patrick Anderson’s meticulous examination of newspaper coverage devoted to two similar anti-colonial struggles, those in Ireland and in Algeria. Rather than dealing with the political clientelism of Britain’s populist press, he chooses to concentrate his fire on two titles, renowned for their supposed independence and liberal ethos, The Guardian and The Observer. Before I go further, I need to record that I wrote for The Guardian for the best part of thirty years. But, crucially, my time there came long after the paper’s g