Excerpts from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting – FAIR.org:
ABC (Under)counting Iraqi Dead
3/21/07
“On the Sunday morning show This Week (3/18/07), George Stephanopoulos reported: “More than 3,200 U.S. military dead. At least 24,000 wounded. About 60,000 Iraqis killed.” The next day on Good Morning America, his ABC colleague Diane Sawyer mentioned almost the same figures: “3,218 U.S. military fatalities and 24,042 U.S. wounded, not to mention the some 60,000 Iraqis who have been killed.”
“No source was given for the 60,000 figure by either anchor.” …
“The standard way to estimate death tolls in war-torn areas is to use epidemiological surveys based on a random sampling of the population. The United Nations made one such survey in 2004, estimating 24,000 war-related deaths in roughly the first year of the conflict. Using that as a minimum annual figure — since it’s recognized that violence has greatly intensified since the first year of the occupation — produces roughly 100,000 as a conservative estimate of Iraqi deaths.
“A comprehensive demographic survey by Johns Hopkins University published in the medical journal Lancet (10/21/06) arrived at a much higher death toll for the Iraq War: between 400,000 and 900,000 “excess” deaths by violence in Iraq — civilians and combatants — since the beginning of the U.S. invasion, with 600,000 being the mostly likely statistical estimate.”
[That was as of mid-2006. Now it’s likely to be at least 750,000. See Iraqi Apocalypse.
So the most accurate estimate of the number of slaughtered human beings in Iraq is over TWELVE TIMES HIGHER than the figure given by ABC “News”! Ah, there’s nothing like honest and unbiased reporting.]
“In February, the Associated Press released a poll that found that while the U.S. public knows the death toll for U.S. servicemembers in Iraq, the median estimate for Iraqi deaths was 9,890.
“The findings are a damning indictment of the corporate media’s reporting on Iraq.”
“ACTION: Encourage ABC to use more accurate estimates of Iraqi deaths when reporting on the issue. Ask them to explain how they arrived at their 60,000 figure.
“CONTACT:
ABC’s This Week
thisweek@abc.com
ABC’s Good Morning America
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See also:
Your taxes at work: the daily slaughter of Iraqi families – men, women and children
American high-tech cruelty: new weapons of war for use against civilian people in Iraq — and America
War-criminal U.S. military may have already used neutron bombs in Iraq
9-11, Oil, and the Real “Axis of Evil”
Iraqi Oil Belongs to the Iraqi People
Tweedle-dumb attacks Tweedle-D over war
Time magazine’s cover-up of American state terrorism in Iraq
American War Crimes Caught on Video
Video of American Marines shooting unarmed civilian people
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