Media 'Errors' And The Lancet - Iraq: "285,000 people have died" (Lancet)
JAS
October 02, 2005 By Dave Edwards
Writing on the BBC's website last month, World Affairs correspondent Paul
Reynolds observed that George Bush was struggling to turn Iraq into a stable
country before his term ends in January 2009:
"If the president pulls it off, he can leave the legacy he has been seeking
in the Middle East - Iraq as the democratic example which justified the war
and the cost."
Welcome to the BBC's version of objective, unbiased reporting! In reality,
Reynolds can have little idea of events behind the scenes in Iraq. There are
occasional reports of US machinations fixing the political process, but
almost no journalists are willing to brave the Iraqi streets to find out for
themselves. An exception is Robert Fisk of the Independent, who describes
how serious Western journalism has all but vanished from Iraq:
"One of the American staff admits he has not been outside 'for months'. An
Arab reporter does their street reporting; an American travels around Iraq -
but only as an 'embed' with US troops. No American journalists from this
bureau travel the streets of Baghdad. This is not hotel journalism, as I
once described it. This is prison journalism."
Detached from the real world, BBC journalists are happy to take George Bush
at his word when he claims to aspire to a "democratic example" in Iraq. When
a Media Lens reader challenged his claim that Bush might ultimately be able
to justify the slaughter of civilians in Iraq. Reynolds responded:
"I did not mean you to read that as me justifying the war but what Mr Bush
would say."
Reynolds was willing to admit and even correct his 'error', which is
nevertheless very much the norm for BBC performance. Thus, also last month,
the BBC's Middle East analyst Roger Hardy wrote that George Bush is
"determined to stick to a tight political timetable which would enable him
to start withdrawing US troops from Iraq next year. But will his rush to
come up with an 'exit strategy' force him to abandon the aspiration to
create a modern secular democracy out of the ashes of the Saddam
dictatorship?"
If challenged, perhaps Hardy would also respond that he meant to communicate
"what Mr Bush would say" was his aspiration; that Bush would claim he
intends to withdraw US troops from Iraq, despite the construction of a chain
of permanent US bases. On August 29, the US Air Force's top general said
that US warplanes would remain in Iraq well after US ground troops had
withdrawn from the country. General John Jumper said:
"We will continue with a rotational presence of some type in that area more
or less indefinitely. We have interests in that part of the world and an
interest in staying in touch with the militaries over there."
Much journalism consists of power-friendly 'errors'. In July, the
Independent newspaper - considered one of the most rational and honest
British newspapers - dismissed estimates published in the science journal,
The Lancet, that 100,000 civilians had been killed since the start of the
occupation of Iraq. The paper claimed that the sample used to calculate the
number of deaths had been "small", adding:
"While never completely discredited, those figures were widely doubted,
allowing the authorities in the US and Britain to dismiss them as
propaganda."
I challenged the author, senior editorial writer Mary Dejevsky, who replied:
"Personally, I think there was a problem with the extrapolation technique,
because - while the sample may have been standard for that sort of thing -
it seemed small from a lay perspective for the conclusions being drawn and
there seemed too little account taken of the different levels of unrest in
different regions."
I asked the Lancet report's lead author, Les Roberts, one of the world's
most prestigious epidemiologists, to comment on Dejevsky's criticisms.
The Puzzled Epidemiologist
In his response, Roberts wrote that Dejevsky was wrong even to talk in terms
of the report's "extrapolation technique" - the team had sampled, not
extrapolated, data. As for the idea that the sample was "small",
Robertscommented:
"This is most puzzling? 142 post-invasion deaths in 988 households is a lot
of deaths, and for the setting, a lot of interviews. In 1993, when the US
Centers for Disease Control randomly called 613 households in Milwaukee and
concluded that 403,000 people had developed Cryptosporidium in the largest
outbreak ever recorded in the developed world, no one said that 613
households was not a big enough sample."
It is indeed puzzling. In 2000 Roberts began the first of three surveys in
Congo for the International Rescue Committee in which he used methods akin
to those of his Iraq study. Roberts' first survey estimated that 1.7 million
people had died in Congo over 22 months of armed conflict. As Roberts says,
the reaction could not have been more different:
"Tony Blair and Colin Powell quoted those results time and time again
without any question as to the precision or validity."
Indeed, within a month, the UN Security Council passed a resolution that all
foreign armies must leave Congo, and later that year, the United Nations
called for $140 million in aid to the country, more than doubling its
previous annual request. Later, citing the study, the US State Department
announced a pledge of an additional $10 million for emergency programmes in
Congo.
And yet, remarkably, in October 2004, the Daily Mail reported "growing anger
in Washington and London" at "the methods used to compile" Roberts' Iraq
report - essentially the same methods that had been used in Congo.
Most disturbing in Roberts' reply was his response to Dejevsky's claims that
the uneven levels of violent unrest in Iraq compromised the accuracy of the
figures. In fact the study not only accounted for this variability, it erred
on the side of caution by excluding data from Fallujah where deaths were
unusually high. Fallujah provided the only insight into cities experiencing
extreme violence (ie, Ramadi, Tallafar, Fallujah, Najaf); all the others
were passed over in the sample by random chance. This means that the actual
total of civilian deaths is likely to be higher than 100,000. Roberts
toldDejevsky:
"Please understand how extremely conservative we were: we did a survey
estimating that ~285,000 people have died due to the first 18 months of
invasion and occupation and we reported it as at least ~100,000."
Roberts concluded:
"There are now at least 8 independent estimates of the number or rate of
deaths induced by the invasion of Iraq. The source most favored by the war
proponents (Iraqbodycount.org) is the lowest. Our estimate is the third from
highest. Four of the estimates place the death toll above 100,000."
Politicians and journalists have used the low Iraqbodycount figure to attack
the Lancet study. They have also made much of a comment made in the
Washington Post by Marc E. Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human
Rights Watch, who said of Roberts' figures: "These numbers seem to be
inflated."
What the media have +not+ reported are comments made since by Garlasco, who
now says that he had not read the Lancet paper at the time and calls his
quote in the Post "really unfortunate". Garlasco says he told the reporter:
"I haven't read it. I haven't seen it. I don't know anything about it, so I
shouldn't comment on it." But "like any good journalist, he got me to."
Most of the journalists who dismissed the Lancet report did not trouble to
establish, or seek, an informed scientific view. Instead, they chose to fall
back on government-friendly platitudes and propaganda. Given the gravity of
the issue under discussion - our government's responsibility for the illegal
mass killing of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of civilians - one can
hardly imagine a more serious journalistic failure.
Perhaps the last word should go to Roberts himself. Towards the end of his
email to Dejevsky, we hear the voice of a highly rational scientist who has
experienced, fully, just how irrational the media can be:
"It is odd that the logic of epidemiology embraced by the press every day
regarding new drugs or health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of
death is their armed forces."
David Edwards is co-editor of www.medialens.org
Paul Hyett
>Media 'Errors' And The Lancet
>
>October 02, 2005 By Dave Edwards
>
>Writing on the BBC's website last month, World Affairs correspondent Paul
>Reynolds observed that George Bush was struggling to turn Iraq into a stable
>country before his term ends in January 2009
By the looks of things, the only way he'll completely stop the fighting
would be to turn the entire country into a radioactive pancake...
--
Paul Hyett, Cheltenham
morriss...@yahoo.com
>
> "There are now at least 8 independent estimates of the number or rate of
> deaths induced by the invasion of Iraq. The source most favored by the war
> proponents (Iraqbodycount.org) is the lowest. Our estimate is the third from
> highest. Four of the estimates place the death toll above 100,000."
Perhaps Kevvin Roberts and the pentagon should be using the John
Cawston methodology: every Iraqi child killed by the Americans is
equivalent to four Iraqi children SAVED.
So there have been at least half a million children and women and old
men SAVED due to the illegal invasion and occupation.
Let us all rejoice!