Blogger dav wrote to RTE (Ireland's Public Service Broadcaster) to correct their misleading reporting of Iraqi casualties:
Today's Six One news reports that the death toll in Iraq as a result of invasion is estimated at between 34 and 38 thousand. Presumably these figures were obtained from the organisation IraqBodyCount. However they are arrived at by recording only the deaths reported by English language news sources. Therefore it can in no way be considered to reflect a conclusive account of Iraqi deaths caused or resulting from the continuing war.
In future, if you are reporting the Iraqi death toll please refer to the survey published in British medical journal The Lancet. The report estimates approximately 100,000 excess deaths in the first 18 months of the invasion alone, it also excludes data from Fallujah where deaths were unusually high.
RTE replied that they didn't believe any of this random sampling nonsense:
We do not consider the Lancet report a realistic way of calculating the figures as it is based on a sample and extrapolates from this.
What we have here is another case of a journalist who just doesn't understand statistics. dav points out that RTE reported Les Robert's estimates of deaths in the Congo and did not dismiss them as unrealistic and asks a good question:
Can I ask why the figures for mortality are unreliable when it comes to Iraq, but perfectly acceptable when in reference to other war torn regions?
Yet another instance in which I am not dissuaded from my opinion that journalists are among the least well educated of all professionals.
Oh dear. If you're going to cover innumeracy at RTE you'll have your hands full. As to dav's question about accepting survey figures for Africa: Irish humanitarian NGO's like Goal and Concern are good at getting their message across. They wouldn't let RTE get away with downplaying figures for mortality in Africa, since that would hurt their fundraising.
Reminiscent of the failure of the US Congress a few years back to adopt the Census Bureau's use of sampling theory to calculate better estimates (despite the US Census Bureau being one of the most sophisticated organizations in the world for such calculations) from preferring to the house to house "how many people live here" techniques used for the past 200 years, preferring to stick with a precise number which was guaranteed to be significantly low than a less precise estimate which was guaranteed to be more accurate.
Of course, the fact that undercounted individuals tend to be urban poor and would therefore serve to increase representation of these more liberal areas in Congress, which continues to be dominated by rightwing and/or rural representatives, may have been key.
Again, this typifies the corporate-state media apparatus, which aims to normalize wetern atrocities by downplaying them or ignoring them completely, and by marginalizing dissenting views. Its all covered in quite exquisite detail in Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking book, "Manufacturing Consent". International Law Attorney Richard Falk at Princeton also summed it up when he stated, "People [in the west] are conditioned to see the world through a one-way moral/legal screen, with western values depicted as threatened, therefore justifying a campaign of unrestricted violence". Thus, when our lands or people are attacked, the world is coming to an end, but when we attack others, its just business-as-usual. John Pilger aptly put it in his book, 'The New Rulers of the World' when he said, "Terrorism, mass murder and barbarism are standard practices on our side, only the technology is different". But our mainstream media never try to give us this impression. They have the interests of the elites to serve.
Thus, the attempt of RTE to criticize the methodology of the Lancet study is a red herring, a ruse. It wouldn't matter how rigorous the methods of the study are, because its conclusions are in contrast to what the public must be led to believe. We are drip fed the myth of western basic benevolence from the cradle to the grave: that our governments espouse universal support for democracy, human rights, and freedom. This myth is cast in stone. Any evidence that undermines it must be excluded or at least marginalized. There's piles of evidence - should we bother to look beyond the end of our noses - that all of this is utter bunk, and which reveal the truth behind Pilger's words. But don't expect to read about it in the mainstream media.
"We are drip fed the myth of western basic benevolence from the cradle to the grave: that our governments espouse universal support for democracy, human rights, and freedom. This myth is cast in stone. Any evidence that undermines it must be excluded or at least marginalized. There's piles of evidence - should we bother to look beyond the end of our noses - that all of this is utter bunk, and which reveal the truth behind Pilger's words. But don't expect to read about it in the mainstream media."
Indeed. How do you get people to even consider the possibility of the unthinkable?
Will Rogers said it many decades ago, "It's hard to get a man to understand something, when his paycheck depends on him not understanding".
does any of the stats people have comments on these estimates reported here: Layperson's guide to counting Iraq deaths"
cheers
momo
Right link for above comment is this one.
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26