According to Daily's version of his life, he entered the army at the age of 17 and was assigned to the cavalry. He became an expert marksman, and was thrown into combat in the opening days of the Korean war. His military record showed that, although wounded himself, he had saved a colleague under fire. For this he was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry, and later a Distinguished Service Cross He was also promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Later in the war, Daily was taken prisoner by the North Koreans.Not a word of it is true, apart from the fact that he was in the army in Korea.

But Daily spent the war working as a clerk and a mechanic, only spending a few weeks with the Seventh Cavalry, and this a full eight months after the massacre at No Gun Ri was said to have taken place. He was helped in his deception by the fact that army records for the period were destroyed in a major fire in the early Seventies Veterans were asked to help create new records And Daily did that with an exceptional flair. A psychiatrist who was asked about the case believed that Daily confessed to the atrocity at No Gun Ri to gain attention and public pity: in the victim culture of the late Nineties, he knew how to milk compassion.The saga has summoned up memories of the CNN "exclusive" over the use of nerve gas in Vietnam. An internal investigation uncovered deep flaws in the sourcing of the story, and producers were sacked. Again the incident involved an incident of allegedly shameful American behaviour, covered up for years by official authority.Edward Daily duped the Associated Press and several other big media organisations as well.

When confronted with evidence of his creativity, he said: "I feel like I'm in a dream world." That is one way of describing it. Others might be more inclined to regard what happened in this case as entirely in tune with the times. Not at all dreamlike, but vividly underlining contemporary attitudes to truth. The case of Edward Daily is all about the quality of truth.This is an age of conspiracy theory run riot Nowhere is this more true than in America. The internet is clogged with oceans of nonsense; a 21st-century version of medieval witch gossip in which standards of proof become less and less exacting, where anything can be true if we will it so The Net is still the smaller part of the problem.

The popular culture in America is more than ever defined by the mythologies of Hollywood. Except that in place of the fantasies of old there is the new art of "faction", where directors such as Oliver Stone purport to tell us a true story, but instead present their truth.Real events are taken and warped to fit the director's vision. This is more than dramatic licence, it is a rewriting of history in favour of the partisan. It pleases the intellectually lazy, and appeals to the dormant indignation that lurks in all our hearts: give us a clear-cut evil to shout and howl at so that we can leave the cinema feeling impassioned and satisfied. The most infamous example of this is Stone's appalling JFK, a film that has probably done more to shape contemporary American attitudes to the death of John F Kennedy than any number of earnest documentaries or newspaper articles. I watched Stone on television some time ago talking about his story being a version of the truth, or words to that effect.The latest film to warp the truth is an American epic about the breaking of the Enigma code.