De Commerciele Massamedia 37

'IRAQ CIVILIAN SUFFERING - THE MEDIA SILENCE
Introduction - The Surge

In all the endless coverage of the American ”surge” committing 20,000 extra troops to the war in Iraq, there has been barely a word about the likely consequences for the civilian population. A report in the Lancet medical journal last year estimated that, as of July 2006, 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the US-UK invasion - one in seven families had lost a household member.
In the Independent earlier this month, Les Roberts, co-author of the Lancet report, suggested that Britain and America may have triggered “an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide” in Iraq. (Roberts, ‘Iraq's death toll is far worse than our leaders admit,’ The Independent, February 14, 2007; http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2268067.ece)
In an exchange with a Media Lens reader, Roberts explained his reasoning:
“The Fordam University assessment put the [Rwandan] death toll at ~6-700000, that is the only quantitative assessment that I have seen... and I was there so I do not use the comparison lightly.” (Roberts, Media Lens message board, February 18, 2007)
The media’s response to Roberts’s claim? Complete silence. No other national UK press outlet has since mentioned his comparison with Rwanda. And yet, as we have noted elsewhere, when Roberts made similar observations on mass killings in Congo in the 1990s, he was widely quoted by press and politicians.
Is it too much to expect that this vast death toll might give journalists pause for thought when discussing likely outcomes of the current intensified combat in densely populated areas? Apparently so. Over the last three months, we have found a single article containing the words ‘Iraq’, ‘surge’ and ‘civilian casualties’. This was limited to one sentence in the Daily Mail:
“Analysts believe that hand-to-hand combat is inevitable and large numbers of civilian casualties are expected.” (‘U.S. gears up for Battle of Baghdad,’ Daily Mail, February 5, 2007)
Over the last month, some 2,340 articles in the national UK press have mentioned the word ‘Iraq’. Of these, seven have also mentioned the words ‘civilian casualties’. Over the same period the words ‘Iraq’ and ‘Matty Hull’ have appeared in 128 articles. As most people will know, Matty Hull was a British soldier killed in a ‘friendly fire‘ incident.
This is hardly a scientific analysis, but it gives an idea of the relative silence surrounding the issue.'

Lees verder: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/070226_iraqi_civilian_suffering.php