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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 11:00 am Post subject: More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered since 2003 invasion |
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| Quote: | PRESS RELEASE
More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered since 2003 invasion
In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on
the impact the recent 'surge' is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals
that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the
invasion took place in 2003. Previous estimates, most noticeably
the one published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half
this number (654,965 deaths).
These findings come from a poll released today by O.R.B., the British
polling agency that have been tracking public opinion in Iraq since
2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a
representative sample of 1,461 adults aged 18+ answered the following
question:-
Q How many members of your household, if any, have died as a
result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence
rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean
those who were actually living under your roof.
None 78%
One death 16%
Two deaths 5%
Threedeaths 1%
Four+ deaths 0.002%
Given that from the 2005 census there are a total of 4,050,597
households this data suggests a total of 1,220,580 deaths since the
invasion in 2003.
Detailed analysis (which is available on our website) indicates that
almost one in two households in Baghdad have lost a family member,
significantly higher than in any other area of the country. The
governorates of Diyala (42%) and Ninewa (35%) were next.
The poll also questioned the surviving relatives on the method in
which their loved ones were killed. It reveals that 48% died from a
gunshot wound, 20% from the impact of a car bomb, 9% from aerial
bombardment, 6% as a result of an accident and 6% from another
blast/ordnance. This is significant because more often that not it is
car bombs and aerial bombardments that make the news – with gunshots
rarely in the headlines.
As well as a murder rate that now exceeds the Rwanda genocide from
1994 (800,000 murdered), not only have more than one million been
injured but our poll calculates that of the millions of Iraqis that
have fled their neighbourhoods, 52% have moved within Iraq but 48%
have crossed its borders, with Syria taking the brunt of refugees.
And for those left in Iraq, although 81% may describe the availability
of basic groceries such as bread and fresh vegetables as "very/fairly
good", more than one in two (54%) consider them to be "expensive".
Note:
The opinion poll was conducted by O.R.B. and the survey details are as follows:
• Results are based face-to-face interviews amongst a nationally
representative sample of 1720 adults aged 18+ throughout Iraq.
• The standard margin of error on the sample size is +2.4%
• The methodology uses multi-stage random probability sampling
and covers fifteen of the eighteen governorates within Iraq. For
security reasons Karbala and Al Anbar were not included. Irbil was
excluded as the authorities refused our field team a permit.
• Interviews conducted August 12th – 19th 2007.
• Full results and data tabulations are available at
www.opinion.co.uk/newsroom.aspx
• O.R.B. are full members of the British Polling Council and
abide by its rules
Contacts:
Johnny Heald Munqeth Daghir
Managing Director, ORB Managing Director, Baghdad
+44 207 611 5270 +962 799672229
07973 600308 |
i wonder if this will get much media coverage ...
| Quote: | ORB seems to be a very reputable Reseacrh Organisation. It has recently been awarded the international quality standard ISO 20252 by SGS -the worlds leading verification, testing and certification company, and includes the Conservative Party, the British Council as well as the BBC among it clients.
Indeed the BBC has recently used ORB - “British Army / Iraq” Newsnight Survey September 2007- and endorses ORB – see below - so I hope they will run this news.
BBC Corporate Social Responsibility endorsement:
"My experience of working with ORB has been its rapid response to proposed work, agility and flexibility to frame things in a satisfactory way and regular feedback throughout the survey process allowing us to assess the mood more quickly and creatively than with other polling organisations. ORB have proved their capacity to deliver reliable information consistent with our needs and to give analysis and insights that have helped us refashion our work accordingly and, in some cases, their work has helped to drive policy making on the wider front... which is credit to their authority."
Lord Michael Hastings - Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, BBC |
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78
you can view the actual data here;
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Documents/TABLES.pdf
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Documents/FinalDeadNumbersWEIGHTED.xls |
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Mandy
Joined: 07 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 5:56 pm Post subject: |
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Very few articles ..
CLICK HERE Google news link
I suppose the Independent/Guardian will pick it up overnight |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Sat Sep 15, 2007 12:49 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | 
British polling agency: More than one million Iraqi deaths since US invasion
By Patrick Martin
15 September 2007
As part of its campaign to justify a long-term US occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration has increasingly resorted to warning of chaos and even genocide in the wake of a withdrawal of American troops. But a new report suggests that something akin to genocide is already taking place, under American auspices.
The British polling agency ORB reported Thursday that the death toll in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion has passed the one million mark.
According to ORB, US-occupied Iraq, with an estimated 1.2 million violent deaths, has “a murder rate that now exceeds the Rwanda genocide from 1994 (800,000 murdered),” with another one million wounded and millions more driven from their homes into internal or external exile.
ORB (Opinion Research Business), which has conducted polls in Iraq since 2005, released the findings of a survey of 1,461 adults across the country. Among other questions, it asked: “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e., as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.”
Of those responding, 78 percent said their households had experienced no violent deaths, 16 percent had experienced one death, 5 percent two deaths, 1 percent three deaths or more. Given the number of households in the country, 4,050,597 according to 2005 census figures, this works out to nearly 1.2 million deaths.
By far the worst death rate was in Baghdad, where nearly half of all those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household. The reported death rate in Diyala province (Baquba) was 42 percent, and in Ninewa province (Mosul), 35 percent.
The survey found that 48 percent of the violent deaths were due to gunshot wounds, 20 percent to car bombs, 9 percent to aerial bombardment, 6 percent to other ordnance or explosions, and 6 percent to accidents.
The figure for aerial bombardments is particularly noteworthy since such deaths—numbering well over 100,000 according to the ORB study—go virtually unreported in the American media. This is doubtless because such killings are entirely the work of the US and British occupation forces, the only ones equipped with helicopters and warplanes.
The ORB survey found a far higher death rate than the figures released by Western media outlets, the US-established Iraqi government in Baghdad, or the United Nations. But it dovetails with the public health survey conducted last year by a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins University and published in the British medical journal Lancet, which estimated the death toll (as of early 2006, nearly 18 months ago), at about 665,000.
The Lancet figures were denounced by the US and Iraqi governments and dismissed by the American media, and the ORB figures are likely to face the same fate. The study’s findings were reported only in passing in Friday’s daily newspapers, most prominently by the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe, not at all by the New York Times or Washington Post.
None of the network evening news broadcasts on Friday even mentioned the ORB report.
Opinion Research Business is not a left-wing or antiwar group, but an established polling organization, founded in 1994 by Gordon Heald, who headed Gallup Britain from 1980 to 1994. Its customers include the huge mining concern Anglo American, the Bank of Scotland, and the Conservative Party. Its non-executive director is Geoffrey Martin OBE, currently special adviser to the secretary general on strategic relationships of the British Commonwealth.
The ORB survey was based on face-to-face interviews conducted between August 12 and August 19 among a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults (of whom 1,461 responded), with a standard margin of error of 2.4 percent. Random sampling was used to select those interviewed in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
For security reasons, no interviews were conducted in Al Anbar or Karbala provinces, or in the province of Irbil, where Kurdish authorities refused to allow field interviews. Since Anbar and Karbala are among the bloodiest battlefields of the war, and Irbil among the quietest, the exclusion of the three provinces would more likely to lead to an underestimation of the death toll than an exaggeration.
The ORB study was made public on the same day that President Bush went on national television to deliver a report on conditions in Iraq that was nothing short of delusional. With a million Iraqis dead, a million wounded, and four to five million displaced, Bush hailed the return of “normal life” to the devastated country. “Sectarian killings are down, and ordinary life is beginning to return,” he said.
The next day Bush and Vice President Cheney appeared before hand-picked audiences to press their campaign for an unlimited US occupation of Iraq. Bush spoke at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia and Cheney at the Gerald Ford Museum in Michigan and the headquarters of the Central Command in Florida.
Cheney claimed that the result of a rapid US troop withdrawal would be “chaos” and “carnage,” declaring, “In all the calls we’ve heard for an American withdrawal from Iraq, these negative consequences haven’t really been denied, they’ve simply been ignored.”
Cheney raised the specter of Iranian intervention in a post-US Iraq, which “would unloose an all-out war, with the violence unlikely to be contained within Iraq. The ensuing carnage would further destabilize the Middle East and magnify the threat to our friends throughout the region.”
Bush, speaking before an audience of 250 Marines and their families in Quantico, claimed, “We got security in the right direction and we are bringing our troops home.”
Also Friday, the State Department quietly released a report noting that religious freedom has sharply deteriorated in Iraq over the past year because of the upsurge in sectarian killings, with minority religions (Sunnis in Shiite areas, Shiites in Sunni areas, secular Iraqis, Christians and smaller groups in all areas) subjected to systematic persecution.
The report cited “frequent sectarian violence including attacks on places of worship,” as well as “harassment, intimidation, kidnapping, and killings,” adding that “non-Muslims (are) especially vulnerable to pressure and violence, because of their minority status and, often, because of the lack of a protective tribal structure.”
The Democratic Party is fully complicit in the creation of conditions of near-genocide in Iraq, since the congressional Democratic leadership has refused to cut off funding for a war which has cost the lives of more than one million Iraqis, as well as over 3,700 American soldiers.
In response to Bush’s Thursday night speech, there were renewed professions of impotence by leading Senate Democrats. Barack Obama, who began his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination touting his antiwar credentials, said the Democratic-controlled Congress could not force Bush to accept a deadline for ending the war.
“One way of ending the war would be setting a timetable,” he said in a speech in Iowa. “We’re about 15 votes short. Right now it doesn’t look like we’re going to get that many votes.”
Obama was referring to the 67 votes required in the Senate to override a presidential veto. He was silent on the fact that there are other constitutional methods of ending the war, such as refusing to appropriate the funds to finance it, which the Democratic congressional leadership has rejected.
Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, told Congressional Quarterly, “The truth is we don’t have the votes to end the war.” He said Senate Democrats would seek to “move the things that we can move on domestic issues” in order to “have tangible accomplishments,” rather than persist in debates on Iraq.
Other senators endorsed this view, including Charles Schumer of New York, who said, referring to the upcoming 2008 campaign, “This election is shaping up to be about change. Not only change in Iraq, but change at home.” Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado said, “The Democratic message has to focus on things that are good for the middle class. The war should not be the only issue.”
In the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not scheduled any vote on Iraq war policy this month, although the defense authorization bill still remains to be adopted for the fiscal year beginning October 1. All indications are that the congressional Democrats will rubber-stamp both the authorization and the emergency funding bill for the war, expected to approach $200 billion, which has not yet been sent to Congress by the Bush administration.
The silence from the Democratic and Republican parties and the media on the latest evidence of mass killing and social devastation in Iraq as a result of the US colonial war and occupation underscores the complicity of the entire American ruling elite and all of its official institutions in a war crime of catastrophic proportions.
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/sep2007/orb-s15.shtml |
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Brown Sauce
Joined: 07 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sat Sep 15, 2007 7:23 pm Post subject: |
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I wonder what iraqibodycount dot org will say about these figures, after they dissed the lancet last time.
probably now't until it gets some coverage ... |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 2:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Brown Sauce wrote: | | probably now't until it gets some coverage ... |
doesn't look like its going to get any coverage ... newsnight spent about 30 seconds talking about it, but gave northern rock 28 minutes, theres been very little elsewhere about it
| Quote: | A deafening silence on report of one million Iraqis killed under US occupation
By Patrick Martin
17 September 2007
When those responsible for the American war in Iraq face a public reckoning for their colossal crimes, the weekend of September 15-16, 2007 will be an important piece of evidence against them. On Friday, September 14 there were brief press reports of a scientific survey by the British polling organization ORB, which resulted in an estimate of 1.2 million violent deaths in Iraq since the US invasion.
This staggering figure demonstrates two political facts: 1) the American war in Iraq has produced a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions, with a death total already higher than that in Rwanda in 1994; 2) those arguing against a US withdrawal on the grounds that this would lead to civil war, even genocide, are deliberately concealing the fact that such a bloodbath is already taking place, with the US military in control.
The reaction to the ORB report in the US political and media establishment was virtual silence. After scattered newspaper reports Friday, there was no coverage on the Friday evening television newscasts or on the cable television news stations. There was no comment from the Bush White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department, and not a single Republican or Democratic presidential candidate or congressional leader made an issue of it. On the Sunday morning talk shows on all four broadcast networks the subject was not raised.
This was not because those involved were unaware of the study, which received wide circulation on the Internet and was prominently reported in the British daily press. Nor was there any serious challenge to the validity of the study’s findings.
Opinion Research Business (ORB), founded by the former head of British operations for the Gallup polling organization, is a well-established commercial polling firm. It gave a detailed technical description of the methods used to make a scientific random sample.
Six months ago, by contrast, an ORB survey in Iraq was hailed by the White House because some of its findings could be given a positive spin in administration propaganda. That survey, conducted in February and made public March 18 in the Sunday Times of London, found that only 27 percent of Iraqis believed their country was in a state of civil war and that a majority supported the Maliki government and the US military “surge,” and believed life was getting better in their country.
That survey also reported figures on violence that largely dovetail with those of the survey conducted in August and reported last Friday, including 79 percent of Baghdad residents experiencing either a violent death or kidnapping in their immediate family or workplace. But its findings of Iraqi political opinions—not the figures on deaths—were given headline treatment in the US press, with articles in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor and other national media outlets.
White House press spokesman Tony Snow cited the ORB poll at a March 23 news briefing, when he used its findings to rebut the results of a poll of Iraqis by ABC News, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the German ARD network and USA Today newspaper. Asked about the ABC poll’s finding that Iraqis were more pessimistic about the future, Snow declared, “there was also a British poll at the same time that had almost diametrically opposed results.” He added that the British poll had “twice the sample” of the ABC poll, and should therefore be considered more authoritative.
The March ORB poll was widely hailed in the far-right media, including Fox News Network. The right-wing magazine National Review declared, “Supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom will be buoyed by a new poll of Iraqis showing high levels of support for the Baghdad security plan and the elected government implementing it.”
The latest ORB poll, focusing on the enormous death toll produced by the US invasion, has received no such positive reception at the White House. There is, of course, ample reason for such hostility. The figures reported by ORB undermine Bush administration claims that its goal in Iraq is to “liberate” the Iraqi people from tyranny and terrorism, or to defend “freedom and democracy.”
The real motivation for the war was spelled out by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan in a newly published book of memoirs, in which he wrote, “Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Equally significant is the silence from congressional Democrats and the Democratic presidential candidates, all of whom claim to be opposed to the Iraq war. This antiwar posturing, however, has nothing in common with genuine compassion for the plight of the Iraqi people or principled opposition to the predatory interests of American imperialism in the oil-rich country.
The Democrats oppose the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, not because it has been a bloody and criminal operation, but because it has been mismanaged and unsuccessful in accomplishing the goal of plundering Iraq’s oil resources and strengthening the strategic position of US imperialism in the Middle East.
The Democrats do not want to highlight the massive scale of the bloodbath in Iraq, as suggested by the ORB survey, because they share political responsibility for the war, from the vote to authorize the use of force in October 2002, to the repeated congressional passage of bills to fund the war, at a total cost of more than $600 billion. In any war crimes trial over the near-genocide in Iraq, leading Democrats would take their place in the dock, second only to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war cabal.
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program Sunday, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, denounced suggestions that congressional Democrats would allow the United States to be defeated in Iraq. He criticized the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on the ground that it had weakened US national security interests, particularly in relation to Iran.
“We’re not talking about abandoning Iraq,” Kerry said. “We’re talking about changing the mission and adjusting the mission so that the bulkier combat troops are withdrawn, ultimately, within a year, but that you are continuing to provide the basic backstop support necessary to finish the training, so they stand up on their own, and you are continuing to chase Al Qaeda.”
Kerry made it clear that he advocated a more aggressive, not less aggressive, policy in the Middle East. “We need to get out of Iraq in order to be stronger to deal with Iran,” he said, “in order to deal with Hezbollah and Hamas, to regain our credibility in the region. And I believe, very deeply, they understand power.”
When “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert pressed Kerry on the refusal of the Democrats to force the White House to stop the war by cutting off funding, Kerry evaded the question, claiming—falsely—that such action would require 67 votes in the Senate to override a presidential veto. The supposed 67-vote hurdle is an obstacle deliberately conjured up by the congressional Democrats, in order to play their double game of publicly posturing as opponents of the war while allowing the Bush administration to continue waging it.
Kerry continued: “I will fund the troops to protect the national security interests of America, to accomplish a mission that increases our national security and protects the troops themselves. We are not proposing failure...”
What does the pursuit of “success” mean in the context of the reports of 1.2 million violent deaths in Iraq since the US invasion and occupation? It means the devastation of that country will continue until the American and international working class intervenes to put an end to it.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/sep2007/orb2-s17.shtml |
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Mandy
Joined: 07 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 5:57 pm Post subject: |
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| At least it was mentioned on George's Talksport show & on gg.com |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2007 5:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | MEDIA ALERT: The Media Ignore Credible Poll Revealing 1.2 Million Violent Deaths In Iraq
We Can’t Talk About Oil
The media are not, as is commonly supposed, windows on the world; they are more like paintings or sketches of windows on the world - both the ‘window’ and the ‘reality’ beyond are manufactured corporate products.
The problem is that the manufacturers selling their wares, while portraying themselves as disinterested, are anything but. They are profit-seeking media corporations that have a very clear interest in highlighting certain issues and in burying others out of sight.
Economist Alan Greenspan - former Chairman of the US Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve - writes in a single sentence of his new 531-page memoir:
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." (Leader, ‘Power, not oil, Mr Greenspan,’ Sunday Times, September 16, 2007)
A Sunday Times leader briefly waved away this curious outburst:
“Many free market economists, like their Marxist opponents, fall into the fallacy of believing that everything in politics hinges on financial self-interest. True, oil has always been an important factor in Middle Eastern strategy but even countries opposed to the war believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The real reason for the war was Saddam's defiance and the projection of US power after 9/11.” (Ibid)
Asked to explain his remark, Greenspan said:
"From a rational point of view, I cannot understand why we don't name what is evident and indeed a wholly defensible pre-emptive position." (Richard Adams, ‘Invasion of Iraq was driven by oil, says Greenspan,’ The Guardian, September 17, 2007)
Greenspan noted that he made his “pre-emptive” economic case for war to White House officials and that one lower-level official told him: "Well, unfortunately, we can't talk about oil." (Bob Woodward, ‘Greenspan: Ouster Of Hussein Crucial For Oil Security,’ Washington Post, September 17, 2007)
Greenspan’s comment was too important to be completely ignored by the media, but far too dangerous to be seriously discussed (the three sentences from the Sunday Times, above, constitute the most in-depth discussion to appear in the UK press). We can be sure that honest and open analysis of this absolutely central issue will not be forthcoming. Indeed, Greenspan has quickly “clarified” that, in arguing that “the Iraq war is largely about oil”, he of course didn’t mean that oil was the motivation for the war:
"I was not saying that that's the administration's motive. I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential." (Ibid)
1.2 Million Iraqis Have Been Murdered
Another aspect of reality that has no place in the corporate media’s painted window was highlighted last Friday with the release (September 14) of a new report by the British polling organisation, Opinion Research Business (ORB). ORB is no dissident, anti-war outfit; it is a respected polling company that has conducted studies for customers as mainstream as the BBC and the Conservative Party.
The latest poll revealed that 1.2 million Iraqi citizens “have been murdered” since the March 2003 US-UK invasion. (http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78 )
In February, Les Roberts, co-author of the 2004 and 2006 Lancet reports, argued that Britain and America might by then have triggered in Iraq "an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide", in which 800,000 people were killed. (Roberts, 'Iraq's death toll is far worse than our leaders admit,' The Independent, February 14, 2007; http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2268067.ece)
The key importance of the new poll is that it provides strong evidence for this claim, and strong support for the findings of the 2006 Lancet study, which reported 655,000 deaths. Roberts sent this email in response to the ORB poll:
"The poll is 14 months later with deaths escalating over time. That alone accounts for most of the difference [between the October 2006 Lancet paper and the ORB poll]. There are confidence interval issues, there are reasons to assume the Lancet estimate is too low but the same motives for under-reporting should apply to ORB. Overall they seem very much to align. (e.g. both conclude that: most commonly violent deaths are from gunshot wounds [in contradiction to IBC and the MOH*], most deaths are outside of Baghdad [in contradiction to the other passive monitoring sources which tallied ~3/4th of deaths in the first 4 years in Baghdad and have only recently attributed even 1/2 as being elsewhere], Diyala worse than Anbar....)."
[* MOH = Iraqi Ministry of Health] (Email to Media Lens and others, September 14, 2007)
And yet, despite its obvious significance, the ORB study has been almost entirely blanked by the US-UK media. At time of writing, four days after the findings were announced, the poll has been mentioned in just one national UK newspaper - ironically, the pro-war Observer. It has been ignored by the Guardian and the Independent.
The BBC’s Newsnight may have been alone in providing TV broadcast coverage. The programme devoted the first 28 minutes of its September 14 edition to the financial crisis at Northern Rock bank. At 28:53 anchor Gavin Esler said:
“More than a million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion in 2003, according to the British polling company ORB. The study’s likely to fuel controversy over the true, human cost of the war. It’s significantly up on the previous highest estimate of 650,000 deaths published by the Lancet last October. At the time, the Iraqi government described +that+ figure as ‘ridiculously high’. The independent Iraqi [sic] Body Count group puts the current total at closer to 75,000.” (Newsnight, September 14, 2007)
Esler’s contribution ended after 34 seconds at 29:27.
Could it be that journalists are just too ill-informed to understand the importance of the ORB study? Not according to news presenter Jon Snow, who responded to one emailer asking why Channel 4 had not covered the new study:
"... anyone who reports iraq is bound to be aware of every death toll assessment. alas no one has the slightest idea exactly how many people have died..we are all certain that a very greta many have. Obviously those of us who find the war most heinous want to pin the largest possible number on the people who did this. it is an un fulfilling excercise because by definition it is unprovable and therefore pointless. What we do try to do is to report the known deaths whenever they happen. Iraq Body count, the Lancet extrapolated survey, the Red crescent are all estimates that help to give us a sense of numbers, but we shall never know for sure. What we also do is to report the four million poeple (minimum) who have been displaced by the war. the one and a half million in Jordan and in Syria respectively are largely counted numbers and reliable.” (http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=8904#8904)
Snow wrote:
"... anyone who reports iraq is bound to be aware of every death toll assessment".
We are to believe, then, that highly trained professional journalists have a solid grasp of these issues - members of the public need not worry on that score! But what is so striking is that journalists consistently exhibit an inability to grasp even the basic meaning of the figures involved. Consider Esler’s comment above:
“The independent Iraqi [sic] Body Count group puts the current total at closer to 75,000.”
Iraq Body Count (IBC) does not at all offer a “total” figure to be compared with the Lancet and ORB studies. IBC only collects records of violent civilian deaths reported by two different (mainly Western) media sources operating in Iraq. Epidemiologists report that this type of study typically captures around 5 per cent of deaths during high levels of violence, such as exists in Iraq. By contrast, the Lancet studies provide figures for all deaths - violent and non-violent, civilian and military, reported and unreported.
The response we received from the Newsnight editor, Peter Barron, is a further case in point:
“I certainly think it was right to report the ORB findings, and to put them in context. The IBC figure is of course not offering a comprehensive estimate of the total number of deaths, but it has the virtue of being real data and therefore provides one end of the spectrum.” (Email to Media Lens, September 17, 2007)
The suggestion that the Lancet reports are not based on "real data" is remarkable. It is also wrong to suggest that IBC provides a different "end of the spectrum" to the Lancet reports. Talk of a "spectrum" presupposes that the same quantity is being measured in each case. But that is simply false.
Snow also comments:
"... alas no one has the slightest idea exactly how many people have died".
In fact we do have a good idea of how many have died - the issue of exactness is a red herring. The point about the ORB study is that it provides strong supportive evidence for the findings of the earlier, far more detailed and rigorous 2006 Lancet study. The Lancet authors have been calling for exactly this kind of follow up study to help confirm or refute their findings. It seems clear that the Lancet figure of 655,000 deaths, although now a year out of date, was accurate.
For the media to ignore the ORB study is an authentic scandal. Doubtless the failure is in part rooted in simple ignorance of its significance. If so, this amounts to a form of criminal negligence in the face of vast war crimes. But, as discussed above, structural realities continue to apply - the media system is an integrated component of a system that benefits from the subordination of people and truth to profit and power.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you decide to write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to Alan Rusbridger and Simon Kelner, editors of the Guardian and Independent, respectively. Ask them why their newspapers have not mentioned the ORB report:
Email: Alan.Rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Email: s.kelner@independent.co.uk
Write to Peter Barron, editor of Newsnight. Ask him if really believes 34 seconds does justice to the ORB study, in light of its significance in evaluating the 2004 and 2006 Lancet studies.
Email: peter.barron@bbc.co.uk
Write to Gavin Esler
Email: gavin.esler@bbc.co.uk
Write to Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC Online
Email: steve.herrmann@bbc.co.uk
Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email: editor@medialens.org
Please do NOT reply to the email address from which this media alert originated. Please instead email us at
Email: editor@medialens.org
This media alert will shortly be archived here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/09/070918_the_media_ignore.php
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