The First Casualty Of War

international | anti-war | other press Monday November 09, 2009 14:26 by pat c

An important study which illustrates the paucity of US media reports of civilian deaths in Iraq. hence it is hardly shocking that US citizens are unaware tof the true extent of civilian casualties. Full story at related link.

In February of 2007 Associated Press conducted a survey of 1,002 adults across the United States about their perceptions of the war in Iraq. Whilst the respondents accurately estimated the death toll of U.S. soldiers (the median estimate was 2,974 while the actual toll at the time was 3,100), they grossly underestimated the number of Iraqi civilian casualties (the median answer was 9,890 at a time when several estimates put the toll at least 10 times that number and some as high as 50 times that number).

To assess the potential reasons for this discrepancy, Schuyler W. Henderson and colleagues at Columbia University examined 11 U.S. newspapers and 5 non-U.S. newspapers to collate the number of Coalition and Iraqi fatalities reported in the media between March 2003 and March 2008. They specifically looked at tallies (numbers of death over a period of time) and the descriptions of specific casualty events.

The results of their study showed U.S. newspapers reported more events and tallies related to Coalition deaths than Iraqi civilian deaths, although there were substantially different proportions amongst the different U.S. newspapers. In four of the five non-US newspapers, the pattern was reversed.

Notes:
Reporting Iraqi civilian fatalities in a time of war
Schuyler W Henderson, William E Olander and Les Roberts
Conflict and Health (in press)
http://www.conflictandhealth.com/