November 03, 2005
Underreported or Bogus?
According to a group called Project Censored, the mainstream media ignored or underreported some major stories last year. No, they're not talking about our troops building schools and restoring water and power in Iraq. The stories they're worried about include the following:
Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Death Toll
Les Roberts, an investigator with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, conducted a rigorous inquiry into pre- and post-invasion mortality in Iraq, sneaking into Iraq by lying flat on the bed of an SUV and training observers on the scene. The results were published in the Lancet , a prestigious peer-reviewed British medical journal, on Oct. 29, 2004--just four days prior to the U.S. presidential elections. Roberts and his team (including researchers from Columbia University and from Al-Mustansiriya University, in Baghdad) concluded that "the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is probably about 100,000 people, and may be much higher."
That sounds horrendous indeed. Why didn't we hear more about it? Well, Slate.com takes a stab at it:
Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.
But wait, there are more underreported stories to discover...
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Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage
Last year Project Censored foretold the potential for electoral wrongdoing in the 2004 presidential campaign: The "sale of electoral politics" made No. 6 in the list of 2003-04's most underreported stories. The mainstream media had largely ignored the evidence that electronic voting machines were susceptible to tampering, as well as political alliances between the machines' manufacturers and the Republican Party. Then came Nov. 2, 2004.
Bush prevailed by 3 million votes--despite exit polls that clearly projected Kerry winning by a margin of 5 million.
"Exit polls are highly accurate," Steve Freeman, professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Organizational Dynamics, and Temple University statistician Josh Mitteldorf wrote in In These Times. "They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for."
Dick Morris agrees that exit polls are usually accurate. But his view on this situation is much different:
Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush’s National Guard service and the planned “60 Minutes” ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.
At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum.
This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.
And not by the Republicans.
Here's one more I'd like to touch upon:
Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood
This one has to do with journalists being deliberately targeted by U.S. forces in Iraq...an unfounded accusation that caused CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan to resign.
Here's a real example of journalists being targeted in Iraq, and it's buried in the story about the 2,000th military death last week:
As a sign of those challenges, one of Iraq's most ruthless terror groups — al-Qaida in Iraq — claimed responsibility for Monday's suicide attacks against hotels housing Western journalists and contractors in Baghdad, as well as suicide bombings Tuesday in northern Iraq.
I guess Michael Moore's "Minutemen" deserve more benefit of the doubt than our own military.
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Good post, Pam. It's nice to see someone's documenting this stuff all in one place. I would guess that the NYT and other MSM outlets won't be doing a review anytime soon--but I've been wrong before.
posted by
THIRDWAVEDAVE at November 3, 2005 11:05 PM
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Good post, Pam. It's nice to see someone's documenting this stuff all in one place. I would guess that the NYT and other MSM outlets won't be doing a review anytime soon--but I've been wrong before.
