The Michael and Cathryn Borden Memorial Book of the Day.*

DISINFORMATION: 22 MEDIA MYTHS THAT UNDERMINE THE WAR ON TERROR
By Richard Miniter
(Regnery, $27.95, 275 pages )

Are suitcase nukes for real? Is Osama bin Laden on dialysis? Did the CIA fund bin Laden in the 1980s? These are the sorts of hard-to-reach questions that reporters covering the war on terror haven't answered definitively. So it's no surprise that they get shrouded in myth and error.

In that context comes ex-Wall Street Journal Europe editorial writer Richard Miniter's "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror," a short generalist's guide to these three questions and 19 others. Words like "disinformation" and "media myths" suggest a conservative "mainstream media" basher, but Mr. Miniter's book is far from that: It urges original-source reporting where possible, scrutiny of motives, "tough editing" and above all reportorial honesty.

So how does Mr. Miniter's book measure up to those standards? Much of it is exemplary. Some of it aims too low: People who believe that the Mossad warned Jews to stay away from the World Trade Center on September 11 -- one of the 22 myths -- are beyond reason. In some cases, Mr. Miniter's politics get the best of him, like his chapter on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which he insists U.S. forces actually found. Even President Bush admits this is wrong: Sunday night, he told the nation that "we did not find those weapons." (From a review by Brendan Conway in The Washington Times.)

* Who? Look here.