iraq body count
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Media Lens: What Happened To Academia? – Part 1
We have long been fascinated by the silencing of academe. How does it work in an ostensibly free society? What are the mechanisms that bring the honest and outspoken to heel? The late historian Howard Zinn described how the well-intentioned desire to work for progressive change “gets tangled in a cluster of beliefs so stuck,… Continue reading
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Media Lens: WikiLeaks – The Smear And The Denial – Part 2
The UK and US media smears described in Part 1 should be kept in mind when considering the gravity and importance of the latest WikiLeaks. In addition to thousands of previously unreported civilian killings, the leaks revealed more than 1,300 claims of torture by Iraqi police and military between 2005 and 2009. But these are… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Children Of Darkness – Killing ‘Them’ – Part 2
The idea that Israel’s massacre of 1,400 Palestinians was intended to stop rocket attacks is hard to reconcile with the fact that Israel deliberately provoked those attacks when it broke the ceasefire with its November 4, 2008 attack killing six people in Gaza Continue reading
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Action Alert: The Washington Post Undercounts Iraq Deaths
The Washington Post’s weekly Saturday feature on “Iraq War Casualties” has consistently listed a “maximum count” of Iraqi civilian deaths that is dramatically lower than the likely civilian death tolls assessed through surveys of the Iraqi public. Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: ALL SMOKE, NO FIRE – THE NATIONAL JOURNAL SMEARS THE LANCET
January 22, 2008 MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media Last year, we described how mainstream climate sceptics had queued up to praise film-maker Martin Durkin’s now infamous documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. The Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and their counterparts in the United States, used the film to Continue reading
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Media Lens: Iraq Body Count: “A Very Misleading Exercise”
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media October 3, 2007 MEDIA ALERT: IRAQ BODY COUNT: “A VERY MISLEADING EXERCISE” Introduction The mainstream media are continuing to use figures provided by the website Iraq Body Count (IBC) to sell the public a number for total post-invasion deaths of Iraqis that is perhaps Continue reading
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Beware the Ides of March By William Bowles
25 March 2007 “Inspired” “Engineered” “Involvement” “Intelligence” “Circumstantial” “Link” — The BBC hedging its bets on alleged Iranian involvement in the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq “There is intelligence about this [Iranian involvement], but no hard proof” BBC 6pm News, 23/3/07 Well we all know what ‘intelligence’ means but this didn’t stop the same ‘news’ broadcast leading Continue reading
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Media Lens: An Exchange With BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson
9 June 2006 — Media Lens On June 6, we sent the following email to the BBC’s Baghdad Correspondent Andrew North, World Affairs Editor John Simpson and Director of News Helen Boaden: Who would guess from your reports and commentary tonight (BBC1, Ten O’Clock News) that the US-UK ‘coalition’ had anything to do with the Continue reading
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Media Lens: Maelstrom Of Vitriol – The BBC Smears Media Lens
3 May 2006 — Media Lens On April 28, BBC online published an article by David Fuller titled, ‘Virtual war follows Iraq conflict,’ (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4951320.stm) The article discussed challenges made by Media Lens and others to the website Iraq Body Count (IBC) which had released a “rebuttal” of criticisms the previous day (www.iraqbodycount.net/editorial/defended/). Continue reading
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Iraq Body Count – The acceptable face of slaughter? By William Bowles
The IBC’s John Sloboda inexcusable slur on Medialens and others such as John Pilger in the BBC interview (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4950254.stm) follows a well-established line by the so-called liberal intelligentsia who, whilst claiming to be progressive, are actually having the opposite effect; to reduce the debate to an argument over numbers rather than principle, an issue the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Iraq Body Count – A shame becoming shameful
10 April 2006 — Media Lens John Pilger And A Leading Epidemiologist Challenge IBC Noam Chomsky once observed: “If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you’re doing something wrong.” (www.journalism.sfsu.edu/www/pubs/gater/spring95/apr27/chom.htm) One indication that the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project is doing something wrong is that it is deemed, not merely inoffensive, Continue reading
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Media Lens: Iraq Body Count Refuses To Respond
We found that the first 18 pages of the IBC database, covering the period between July 2005 and January 2006, contained just six references to ’coalition’ helicopter attacks and airstrikes killing civilians. Our research revealed that the IBC database consistently features the same bias – massive numbers of deaths caused by insurgents as compared to… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Paved With Good Intentions – Iraq Body Count – Part 2
First, the dramatic absence of examples of mass killing by US-UK forces suggests that the low IBC toll of civilian deaths in comparison with other studies is partly explained by the fact that examples of US-UK killing are simply not being reported by the media or recorded by IBC. Visitors to the site – directed… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Paved With Good Intentions – Iraq Body Count – Part 1
On the rare occasions when the issue of civilian casualties is discussed in the mainstream media three words are invariably mentioned: Iraq Body Count (IBC). IBC describes itself as a project which maintains “the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burying The Lancet – Update
In our Media Alert, Burying The Lancet – Parts 1 And 2 (September 5 and 6), we focused on the media response to a November 2004 report in The Lancet which estimated nearly 100,000 excess civilians deaths in Iraq since the March 2003 US-UK invasion. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burying the Lancet – Part 2
In our analysis we found that in both the US and the British press, news reports initially presented the estimates of 100,000 deaths in Iraq and 1.7 million deaths in Congo without critical comment. The difference lies in the days, weeks and months that followed. Whereas the Congo figures and methodology were accepted without challenge,… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burying the Lancet – Part 1
As a test of the independence and honesty of the mass media, few tasks are more revealing than that of reporting our own government’s responsibility for the killing of innocents abroad. In an age of ’converged’ political parties and globalised corporate influence, few establishment groups have any interest in seeing such horrors exposed, while many… Continue reading
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Weasel words by the dogs of straw By William Bowles
We have yet to discover the true scale of the slaughter that the US wrought on Fallujah but one thing is clear, if we rely on the British government for the numbers we’ll never know the truth. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 