The Nicest Guys You Can Imagine
In their film, The Corporation, Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan describe how in the mid-1800s the corporation was declared a "fictitious person" in law and granted the same legal rights as real individuals. So what kind of 'person' is a corporation?
The filmmakers assessed the corporate 'personality' using diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organisation and standard diagnostic tools of psychiatrists and psychologists:
"The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social 'personality': It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism... Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a 'psychopath.'"( http://www.thecorporation.com )
We, of course, live in a society dominated by these corporate psychopaths. Our media is not +controlled+ by them, as is sometimes claimed; it is comprised of them.
Unsurprisingly, then, the corporate media system consistently responds in an inhuman and callous way to even the most horrific suffering. But isn't the media made up of nice, well-educated, well-spoken journalists? Yes, absolutely, but Noam Chomsky makes the point that matters:
"When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. But the individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine - benevolent, friendly, nice to their children, even nice to their slaves, caring about other people. I mean as individuals they may be anything. In their institutional role, they're monsters, because the institution's monstrous. And the same is true here." (Ibid)
And the same is certainly true of the media response to the US-UK assault on Iraq.
On October 29, the prestigious scientific journal, The Lancet, published a report by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: 'Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey'. ( http://www.thelancet.com/journal/vol364/iss9445/early_online_publication )
The authors estimate that 100,000 more Iraqi civilians died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred. They write:
"Eighty-four percent of the deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery." (Press Release, 'Iraqi Civilian Deaths Increase Dramatically After Invasion,' October 28, 2004,
http://www.jhsph.edu/Press_Room/Press_Releases/PR_2004/Burnham_Iraq.html )
Most of those killed by "coalition" forces were women and children.
The report was met with a low-key, sceptical response, or outright silence in the media. There was no horror, no outrage. No leaders were written pointing out that, in addition to the illegality, lies and public deception, our government is responsible for the deaths of 100,000 civilians.
Scepticism is reasonable enough, of course, but there have been no debates allowing the report's authors to respond to challenges. Journalists seem uninterested in establishing whether the government's dismissal of the report might be one more cynical deception. Instead they have been happy to just move on. And to just move on in response to a mass slaughter of innocents on this scale is indeed indicative of corporate psychopathy. As Chomsky says, in their institutional roles, corporate journalists really are monsters.
At time of writing (November 2), the Lancet report has not been mentioned at all by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others. The Express devoted 71 words to the report, but only in its Lancashire edition. We asked the Observer editor, Roger Alton, why his paper had failed to mention the report. He replied:
"Dear Mr Edwards,
Thanks for your note. The figures were well covered in the week, but also I find the methodology a bit doubtful..." (Email to Media Lens, November 1, 2004)
In fact, the figures were covered in two brief Guardian articles (October 29 and October 30). The second of these, entitled, 'No 10 challenges civilian death toll', focused heavily on government criticism of the report without allowing the authors to respond. The Guardian then dropped the story.
The Independent also published two articles on October 29 and 30. But these were then followed up by two articles on the subject totalling some 1,200 words in the Independent on Sunday.
The Guardian's David Aaronovitch told us:
"I have a feeling (and I could be wrong) that the report may be a dud." (Email to Media Lens, October 30, 2004)
This is the sum-total of coverage afforded by The Sunday Times:
"Tony Blair, too, may have recalled Basil Fawlty when The Lancet published an estimate that 100,000 Iraqis have died since the start of the allied invasion." (Michael Portillo, 'The Queen must not allow Germany to act like a victim,' The Sunday Times, October 31, 2004)
The Evening Standard managed two sentences:
"The emails came as a new study in The Lancet estimated 100,000 civilians had died since the conflict began. The Prime Minister's official spokesman... added that the 100,000 death toll figure could not be trusted because it was based on an extrapolation." (Paul Waugh, 'Blair "did not grasp risk to troops"', October 29, 2004)
The Times has so far restricted itself to one report on October 29. This, however, at least contradicted the growing government and media smear campaign:
"Statisticians who have analysed the data said last night that the scientists' methodology was strong and the civilian death count could well be conservative.
"They said that the work effectively disproved suggestions by US authorities that civilian bodycounts were impossible to conduct." (Sam Lister, 'Researchers claims that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in war,' The Times, October 29, 2004)
Scientific Strength - Our Data Have Been Back And Forth
The tone for the response was set on Channel 4 News (October 29, 19:00), by science reporter Tom Clarke, who spent 53 seconds of his 2 minute 15 second report challenging the methodology of the Lancet report:
"Today, Downing Street dismissed the report saying the researchers used an extrapolation technique, which they considered inappropriate, rather than a detailed body count." (Tom Clarke, Channel 4 website, October 29, 2004)
Clarke emphasised how much higher the report's estimate of civilian deaths was than previous estimates:
"The Iraq Ministry of Health has estimated 3000 civilian deaths, but they've only been counting for six months.
"Another figure - over 16 000 since the conflict began - comes from a project called Iraqbodycount. Their estimate is based on reported casualties. This latest study comes up with a very different number: nearly 100,000 extra civilian deaths since war began - possibly more."
Clarke then added:
"But without bodies, can we trust the body count? Higher than average civilian casualties in Fallujah strongly distorted this study making the nationwide average well over 100 thousand so families surveyed there were discounted from the final figure.
"The reliability of interviews must be questioned too, though four out of five families were able to produce a death certificate."
Curiously, Clarke claimed that Fallujah "strongly distorted this study". And yet, as he himself noted, "families surveyed there were discounted" - so Fallujah did +not+ in fact distort the report. But he then claimed the reliability of interviews must +also+ be questioned - ie that this was a further problem in addition to the distortion he had just discounted.
Clarke then made his most serious claim:
"But the study's main weakness, and the one highlighted by Downing Street in dismissing today's figures, is that it multiplies a small sample across the whole of Iraq. A country at war, where people are aggrieved and displaced from their homes, makes household based surveys far less accurate."
It is remarkable that a news reporter could so casually dismiss the methodology and findings of a carefully implemented study that has been rigorously peer-reviewed for one of the world's leading scientific journals.
We asked the report's authors about the large rise in numbers of estimated civilian deaths over previous estimates, and also on the ability to make a reliable body count without bodies. Dr. Gilbert Burnham responded:
"In short, we used a standard survey method that is used all over the world to estimate mortality. So bodies are not necessary to calculate mortality. In fact going to the community for household surveys on mortality is the standard method used for calculating mortality all over the world, and is probably the method used in the UK census as well, although I am not a demographer.
"Anyway, information collected in surveys always produces higher numbers than 'passive reporting' as many things never get reported. This is the easy explanation for the differences between iraqbodycount.net, and our survey.
"Further a survey can find other causes of death related to public health problems such as women dying in childbirth, children dead of infectious diseases, and elderly unable to reach a source of insulin, which body counts cannot do--since they collect information from newspaper accounts of deaths (usually violent ones). Can one estimate national figures on the basis of a sample?
"The answer is certainly yes (the basis of all census methods), provided that the sample is national, households are randomly selected, and great precautions are taken to eliminate biases. These are all what we did. Now the precision of the results is mostly dependent on sample size. The bigger the sample, the more precise the result. We calculated this carefully, and we had the statistical power to say what we did. Doing a larger sample size could make the figure more precise (smaller confidence intervals) but would have entailed risks to the surveyors which we did not want to take, as they were high enough already.
"Our data have been back and forth between many reviewers at the Lancet and here in the school (chair of Biostatistics Dept), so we have the scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty. I doubt any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent years as this one has!" (Dr. Gilbert Burnham, email to David Edwards, October 30, 2004)
Channel 4's Tom Clarke had made a further observation:
"The definition of civilian is also unclear. The majority of violent deaths were among young men who may - or may not - have been insurgents."
The report's lead author, Dr. Les Roberts, responded to this point:
"The civilian question is fair. About 25% of the population were adult males. >70% of people who died in automobile accidents were adult males. Presumably, they died more than other demographic groups because they are out and about more. 46% of people reportedly killed by coalition forces were adult males. Thus, some of them may have been combatants, some probably were not... perhaps they were just out and about more and more likely to be in targeted areas. We reported that over half of those killed by coalition forces were women and children to point out that if there was targeting, it was not very focused. Thus, we are careful to say that about 100,000 people, perhaps far more were killed. We suspect that the vast majority were civilians, but we do not say each and every one of the approximately 100,000 was a civilian." (Email to David Edwards, October 31, 2004)
Clarke concluded his Channel 4 report with a damning statement:
"Given the worsening security situation, it'll be a long time before we have an accurate picture for civilian losses in Iraq, if ever."
This suggested that flawed methodology meant the Lancet report could safely be dismissed as failing to provide "an accurate picture for civilian losses in Iraq". It meant the researchers, the Lancet peer review team, and the Lancet editors, had produced an unreliable piece of work.
To reiterate the response of the report's authors: "we have the scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty. I doubt any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent years as this one has!"
An October 29 Downing Street press release read:
"Asked if the Prime Minister was concerned about a survey published today suggesting that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the war in Iraq, the PMOS [Prime Minister's Official Spokesman] said that it was important to treat the figures with caution because there were a number of concerns and doubts about the methodology that had been used. Firstly, the survey appeared to be based on an extrapolation technique rather than a detailed body count. Our worries centred on the fact that the technique in question appeared to treat Iraq as if every area was one and the same. In terms of the level of conflict, that was definitely not the case. Secondly, the survey appeared to assume that bombing had taken place throughout Iraq. Again, that was not true. It had been focussed primarily on areas such as Fallujah. Consequently, we did not believe that extrapolation was an appropriate technique to use."
( http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp )
We again raised these queries with the report authors. Dr. Roberts replied:
"Point 1 is true and it is not a mistake on our part. We would have had a more accurate picture if we conducted a 'stratified' sample, with some in the high violence areas and some in the low violence areas. But, that would have involved visiting far more houses and exposing the interviewers to even more risk. Secondly, we do not know how many people are in the 'high violence' areas, so this would have involved large assumptions that would now be criticized.
"Most samples are taken with the assumption that all the clusters are 'exchangeable' for purposes of analysis. The difference between them is considered in the interpretation of the data.
"Point two, assumes bombing is happening equally across Iraq. There is no such explicit assumption. There is the assumption that all individuals in Iraq had an equal opportunity to die (and if we did not, it would not be a representative sample). It happens, that the one place with a lot of bombings, Falluja, and we excluded that from our 100,000 estimate....thus if anything, assuming that there has not been any intensive bombing in Iraq.
"Finally, there were 7 clusters in the Kurdish North with no violent deaths. Of those 26 randomly picked neighborhoods visited in the South, the area that was invaded, 5 had reported deaths from Coalition air-strikes. This, I suspect that such events are more widespread than the review suggests." (Email to David Edwards, November 1, 2004)
Almost none of the above has been debated anywhere in the UK press. It is clear that the Johns Hopkins researchers, the Lancet editors, and the Lancet's peer-review team, naturally took every precaution to ensure that the methodology involved could withstand the intense scrutiny a report of this kind was bound to generate. Their results point to the mass slaughter of 100,000 civilians. The media is just not interested.
Part 2 follows shortly...
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to Observer editor, Roger Alton
Email: roger.alton@observer.co.uk
Write to the Observer's foreign affairs editor, Peter Beaumont
Email: peter.beaumont@observer.co.uk
Write to Andrew Gowers, editor of the Financial Times
Email: Andrew.Gowers@FT.com
Write to Martin Newland, editor of the Daily Telegraph
Email: Martin.Newland@telegraph.co.uk
Ask them why they have failed to so much as +mention+ the Lancet's report of 100,000 excess civilian deaths as a result of the US-UK invasion of Iraq.
Email Channel 4 News about their reporting:
Tom Clarke, Science Reporter, Channel 4 News
Email: tom.clarke@itn.co.uk
Jim Gray, Channel 4 News Editor
Email: jim.gray@itn.co.uk
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MEDIA ALERT: 100,000 IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS - PART 2
By way of a splendid coincidence, Media Lens received this delayed response from the BBC on November 3:
"I am writing in response to your email to Caroline Hawley dated 13/10. Apologies for the delay in replying. The estimate for the number of people killed by Saddam Hussein is based on the figure from Human Rights Watch. They estimate that as many as 290,000 Iraqis were 'disappeared' by the Iraqi government over the past two decades, and that many of these 'disappeared' are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves in Iraq.
"The investigators are working for the Iraqi Special Tribunal which was is under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi interim government.
Yours sincerely,
Jenny Baxter"
Notice the lack of scepticism about the methodology used in arriving at the figures, and about the credibility of the Iraqi Special Tribune - there are no reservations, doubts or caveats.
On October 13, we had written to BBC correspondent Caroline Hawley asking the basis for her claim that Saddam Hussein had killed 300,000 Iraqis. In her BBC News report, Hawley had also expressed no reservations about the figure.
By contrast, a BBC website review of last week's Lancet report of 100,000 excess civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion, included several balancing comments:
"UK foreign secretary Jack Straw said his government would examine the findings 'with very great care'. But he told BBC's Today that another independent estimate of civilian deaths was around 15,000." Meanwhile a "Pentagon spokesman said 'there is no accurate way to validate the estimates of civilian casualties by this or any other organisation'." ('Iraq death toll "soared post-war"', October 29, 2004)
http://newswww.bbc.net.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3962969.stm
On November 2, we received this response from Channel 4 News science reporter, Tom Clarke:
"The weakness I refered to in my piece is a direct reflection of the limitiations highlighted by the researchers themselves in the discussion of their results. These limitations were also referred to by the lancet's editor Richard Horton in his commentary that accompanied the article. I direct you [to] the entire of page six of their paper.
"Remarkably, neither the MoD nor the FCO keep a tally of civilian casuaties in Iraq, and Downing Street dismissed -- pretty much out of hand, the only attempt to do so. By pointing these facts out in my report, I hoped the viewer might draw their own conclusions. My piece reported on the best attempt so far to quantify civilian casulties in Iraq, yet would have been seriously biased, had I not made plain its significant limitations (a study with a 95% confidence interval for the final death toll rangining from 8,000 to 194,000)."
One of the report's authors, Richard Garfield, has responded to the same challenge:
"Research is more than summarizing data, it is also interpretation. If we had just visited the 32 neighborhoods without Falluja and did not look at the data or think about them, we would have reported 98000 deaths, and said the measure was so imprecise that there was a 2.5% chance that there had been less than 8,000 deaths, a 10% chance that there had been less than about 45,000 deaths,....all of those assumptions that go with normal distributions.
"But we had two other pieces of information. First, violence accounted for only 2% of deaths before the war and was the main cause of death after the invasion. That is something new, consistent with the dramatic rise in mortality and reduces the likelihood that the true number was at the lower end of the confidence range. Secondly, there is the Falluja data, which imply that there are pockets of Anbar, or other communities like Falluja, experiencing intense conflict, that have far more deaths than the rest of the country. We set aside these data in statistical analysis because the result in this cluster was such an outlier, but it tells us that the true death toll is far more likely to be on the high-side of our point estimate than on the low side." (Professor Richard Garfield, email sent to Media Lens reader, October 31, 2004)
It is important to recognise that providing 95% confidence intervals is standard in scientific analysis of data. While Clarke was correct to mention these confidence intervals, he misrepresented the limitations of the report in stating that "the study's main weakness... is that it multiplies a small sample across the whole of Iraq".
This was not, in fact, a serious weakness. In response, we repeat here the comments made by report author Dr. Gilbert Burnham, quoted in part one of this alert:
"Can one estimate national figures on the basis of a sample?
"The answer is certainly yes (the basis of all census methods), provided that the sample is national, households are randomly selected, and great precautions are taken to eliminate biases. These are all what we did. Now the precision of the results is mostly dependent on sample size. The bigger the sample, the more precise the result. We calculated this carefully, and we had the statistical power to say what we did." (Dr. Gilbert Burnham, email to David Edwards, October 30, 2004)
Lancet editor, Richard Horton, emphasised these points in his editorial:
"This remarkable piece of work represents the efforts of a courageous team of scientists. To have included more clusters [of households interviewed for the survey] would have improved the precision of their findings, but at an enormous and unacceptable risk to the team of interviewers who gathered the primary data. Despite these unusual challenges, the central observation - namely, that civilian mortality since the war has risen due to the effects of aerial weaponry - is convincing". ( http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04cmt384web.pdf )
In addition, to reiterate, the twin facts that:
(a) violence accounted for only 2% of deaths before the war but was the main cause of death after the invasion, and
(b) the high death-rate Fallujah data was discounted in the estimated tally of 98,000 excess deaths, mean that any movement away from this figure is likely to be on the high side of the estimated range, thus +greater+ than 98,000 deaths.
The Lancet report authors candidly and correctly weighed up +all+ the possible limitations of their study. Having done so, the estimate of 98,000 deaths is, based on all the evidence and its careful interpretation, a +conservative+ estimate. The researchers also, correctly, call for verification of these results by an independent body such as the World Health Organisation. For Channel 4 news to dismiss so easily the care, courage and scientific rigour of this report is remarkable.
In a BBC Newsnight debate - the only debate we have seen on the Lancet report - Michael Clarke of the International Policy Institute challenged the Lancet's editor, Richard Horton:
"This 100,000 figure, remember, has a huge margin of error. It ranges from 8,000 - which is half what most of the rest of us think it is - to 194,000. And what they've done is split the difference and said, 'Well, we think about 98,000 with some measure of confidence,' because there is a sort of a confidence statistical factor built into that. But that really isn't, to my mind, very credible." (BBC2, Newsnight, November 2, 2004)
Horton replied:
"Well that's not true. What you just heard isn't a correct summary of the research."
Horton began explaining that the figures were higher than previous estimates because this was the first empirical research of Iraqis themselves carried out in Iraq. Newsnight anchor, Gavin Esler, then interrupted, starkly revealing his failure to understand the figures:
"But you haven't got 100,000 death certificates, you haven't got 100,000 bodies. You've got somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000 is where you've put it, and you've gone in the middle."
Horton continued his reply:
"But that again is a misunderstanding of the figures. The most likely estimate of excess deaths is 98,000. It's +not+ right to say that it's equally likely it could be between 8,000 and 194,000. The most likely figure is 98,000, and as soon as you go away from that figure, either lower or higher, it's much less likely it will be much lower or higher."
Remarkably, Clarke then instantly renounced his claim that the authors had simply "split the difference", before moving on to a second claim:
"Statistically, that's a reasonable assumption, but the numbers are too small. I mean remember, seven people - very brave people, who did a series of interviews in 33 different places - but seven people, spent a month interviewing the Iraqi families that they went to visit. And on the basis of interviews, and what Iraqi families told them, they've made these extrapolations. But the numbers are really very small. The number of confirmed deaths that they look at is 61 - not 61,000, or 610, but 61."
Of course the idea that the "numbers are too small" is +exactly+ the kind of issue that the serious scientists, peer reviewers and Lancet editors involved in producing the report would have focused on first in considering the merits of the research. According to the report's authors, it is simply not true that "the numbers are too small". Based on the chosen sample size, the 100,000 figure can be advanced "with great certainty". This is simply a matter of scientific logic.
Richard Horton concluded his comments by noting the shocking truth that "there has been no debate" on the Lancet report.
The Charnel House - A Simple Question From A Couple Of Amateurs
Ahead of the war, almost all journalists accepted that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was one vast torture chamber for the civilian population. Journalists and politicians talked often of a "charnel house", a "giant Gulag" and so on. In October 2003, Labour MP Ann Clwyd said:
"In June this year I stood on the edge of Saddam's killing fields. I saw the skeletons of men, women and children being dug up in this enormous mass grave. I do not believe, and neither do you, that we should turn a blind eye to such atrocities." (Paul Eastham, 'Blair safe as tears wash away Labour rebellion over Iraq,' Daily Mail, October 2, 2003)
In June 2003, the Telegraph's Con Coughlin wrote:
"Another day and another mass grave is unearthed in Iraq". He added: "So many of these harrowing sites have been uncovered in the two months since Saddam's overthrow that even the experts are starting to lose count of just how many atrocities were committed by the Iraqi dictator's henchmen... If this were Kosovo, the Government would be under fire for not having acted sooner to prevent the genocide."
Coughlin concluded:
"Having just returned from three weeks in post-liberation Iraq, I find it almost perverse that anyone should question the wisdom of removing Saddam from power." (Coughlin, 'So what if Saddam's deadly arsenal is never found? The war was just,' The Sunday Telegraph, June 1, 2003)
Journalists and politicians appeared to truly believe that genocide was ongoing in Iraq immediately prior to the invasion. And yet it appears not to have occurred to even one of them to check these claims against the findings of the Lancet report, which studied Iraqi deaths in periods before and after the invasion, interviewing 8,000 people around the country.
The point is that the report has produced a thorough scientific analysis of deaths for a period of time when Saddam Hussein was said to have been on a murderous rampage. It took a matter of moments for us - a couple of amateurs with virtually zero resources - to write to the report authors and ask them what they had found:
"Did your research uncover evidence of mass murder by Saddam Hussein's regime in the year prior to the invasion? There have been government and media claims of tens, even hundreds, of thousands murdered, whereas Amnesty International told me they estimated the figure to be in the hundreds. Did your research cast any light on that?" (David Edwards to Dr. Les Roberts, October 30, 2004)
The next day, we received this reply from the report's lead author, Dr. Les Roberts:
"There was one reported killing by Saddam's folks in the first days of the war (considered post-invasion) and there were a couple people who disappeared during the invasion (all adult males). We did not count disappearances as deaths. Thus, no, we have no evidence of that. That does not prove it did not happen. If it was only hundreds of deaths, our small sample probably would not have detected it." (Email to David Edwards, October 31, 2004)
Not one journalist has commented on the significance of the absence of evidence for claims that Saddam Hussein was involved in mass killing in the year prior to the invasion. Nor, in the case of reports of 300,000 alleged victims of Saddam Hussein, have there been consistent expressions of scepticism about, indeed dismissal of, 'dubious' methodology, statistical analysis and interpretation of results.
Coda - What Lester Luborsky Saw
Consider that, right up to the very eve of war last year, Tony Blair, Jack Straw and others insisted that "even now" a peaceful solution was possible. It was simple - all Saddam Hussein had to do was to comply fully with UN resolutions, cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, and give up his weapons of mass destruction. If that happened, the troops amassed in the desert would all go home - everyone would be happy. Journalists consistently reported Blair's claim that he was "going the extra mile for peace" as credible and sincere.
And yet, to our knowledge, not one journalist ever discussed what would happen in the event of a peaceful outcome. What would actually have happened if Iraq had somehow been able to comply fully by US-UK standards so that weapons inspectors were allowed to continue their work to the point where Iraq was given a clean bill of health? Would sanctions then have been lifted, leaving Saddam Hussein in power, Iraqi oil out of Western hands, and "coalition" forces wandering happily home? Would the US have been required to pick up the tab for sending a quarter of a million men around the world only to bring them straight back?
The reason no journalist ever discussed this possibility, we believe, was because they knew the US-UK governments would never permit such an eventuality. In other words, at some level, journalists +knew+ war was inevitable.
But, paradoxically, many of them also, simultaneously, +did+ believe that Blair and Straw were sincere in talking of a peaceful resolution. The intense propaganda brainwashing that persuades us of the fundamental benevolence of our leaders was in collision with the obvious realities. Media reporting reflected the propaganda but steered clear of areas of thought where the propaganda was quickly rendered absurd. And journalists were able to do all of this without knowing that they were doing it. But how on earth does this work?
In the 1960s, psychologist Lester Luborsky used a special camera to track the eye movements of subjects asked to look at a set of pictures. Subjects were asked to rate which pictures they liked and disliked. Three of the pictures were sexual in content, with one, for example, showing the outline of a woman's breast, beyond which a man could be seen reading a newspaper. The response of some subjects was remarkable. They were able to avoid letting their gaze stray even once to the sexually suggestive parts of the pictures. When later asked to describe the content of the pictures, these subjects remembered little or nothing sexually suggestive about them. Some could not even recall seeing the pictures. Psychologist Daniel Goleman explains:
"In order to avoid looking, some element of the mind must have known first what the picture contained, so that it knew what to avoid. The mind somehow grasps what is going on and rushes a protective filter into place, thus steering awareness away from what threatens." (Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths - The Psychology of Self-Deception, Bloomsbury, 1997, p.107)
Like all of us, journalists need to believe they are honest, reasonable human beings. There is a problem, however - career success depends on their not finding +too+ much to criticise in the operation of elite state-corporate power. The art of successful mainstream journalism is the art of reconciling these two irreconcilables without admitting the lie to conscious awareness.
As with the individuals in Luborsky's experiments, journalists somehow understand what is going on and rush a protective filter into place, steering awareness away from what threatens. It is an awesome and intriguing phenomenon of human psychology.
The consequences are awesome, too - incinerated children, dismembered bodies, and families smashed and broken in depthless grief.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to Labour MP Ann Clwyd
Email: clwyda@parliament.uk
Write to Daily Telegraph reporter Con Coughlin
Email: con.coughlin@telegraph.co.uk
Write to Tom Clarke, Science Reporter, Channel 4 News
Email: tom.clarke@itn.co.uk
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Email: jim.gray@itn.co.uk
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MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
http://www.medialens.org
In their film, The Corporation, Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan describe how in the mid-1800s the corporation was declared a "fictitious person" in law and granted the same legal rights as real individuals. So what kind of 'person' is a corporation?
The filmmakers assessed the corporate 'personality' using diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organisation and standard diagnostic tools of psychiatrists and psychologists:
"The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social 'personality': It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism... Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a 'psychopath.'"( http://www.thecorporation.com )
We, of course, live in a society dominated by these corporate psychopaths. Our media is not +controlled+ by them, as is sometimes claimed; it is comprised of them.
Unsurprisingly, then, the corporate media system consistently responds in an inhuman and callous way to even the most horrific suffering. But isn't the media made up of nice, well-educated, well-spoken journalists? Yes, absolutely, but Noam Chomsky makes the point that matters:
"When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. But the individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine - benevolent, friendly, nice to their children, even nice to their slaves, caring about other people. I mean as individuals they may be anything. In their institutional role, they're monsters, because the institution's monstrous. And the same is true here." (Ibid)
And the same is certainly true of the media response to the US-UK assault on Iraq.
On October 29, the prestigious scientific journal, The Lancet, published a report by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: 'Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey'. ( http://www.thelancet.com/journal/vol364/iss9445/early_online_publication )
The authors estimate that 100,000 more Iraqi civilians died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred. They write:
"Eighty-four percent of the deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery." (Press Release, 'Iraqi Civilian Deaths Increase Dramatically After Invasion,' October 28, 2004,
http://www.jhsph.edu/Press_Room/Press_Releases/PR_2004/Burnham_Iraq.html )
Most of those killed by "coalition" forces were women and children.
The report was met with a low-key, sceptical response, or outright silence in the media. There was no horror, no outrage. No leaders were written pointing out that, in addition to the illegality, lies and public deception, our government is responsible for the deaths of 100,000 civilians.
Scepticism is reasonable enough, of course, but there have been no debates allowing the report's authors to respond to challenges. Journalists seem uninterested in establishing whether the government's dismissal of the report might be one more cynical deception. Instead they have been happy to just move on. And to just move on in response to a mass slaughter of innocents on this scale is indeed indicative of corporate psychopathy. As Chomsky says, in their institutional roles, corporate journalists really are monsters.
At time of writing (November 2), the Lancet report has not been mentioned at all by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others. The Express devoted 71 words to the report, but only in its Lancashire edition. We asked the Observer editor, Roger Alton, why his paper had failed to mention the report. He replied:
"Dear Mr Edwards,
Thanks for your note. The figures were well covered in the week, but also I find the methodology a bit doubtful..." (Email to Media Lens, November 1, 2004)
In fact, the figures were covered in two brief Guardian articles (October 29 and October 30). The second of these, entitled, 'No 10 challenges civilian death toll', focused heavily on government criticism of the report without allowing the authors to respond. The Guardian then dropped the story.
The Independent also published two articles on October 29 and 30. But these were then followed up by two articles on the subject totalling some 1,200 words in the Independent on Sunday.
The Guardian's David Aaronovitch told us:
"I have a feeling (and I could be wrong) that the report may be a dud." (Email to Media Lens, October 30, 2004)
This is the sum-total of coverage afforded by The Sunday Times:
"Tony Blair, too, may have recalled Basil Fawlty when The Lancet published an estimate that 100,000 Iraqis have died since the start of the allied invasion." (Michael Portillo, 'The Queen must not allow Germany to act like a victim,' The Sunday Times, October 31, 2004)
The Evening Standard managed two sentences:
"The emails came as a new study in The Lancet estimated 100,000 civilians had died since the conflict began. The Prime Minister's official spokesman... added that the 100,000 death toll figure could not be trusted because it was based on an extrapolation." (Paul Waugh, 'Blair "did not grasp risk to troops"', October 29, 2004)
The Times has so far restricted itself to one report on October 29. This, however, at least contradicted the growing government and media smear campaign:
"Statisticians who have analysed the data said last night that the scientists' methodology was strong and the civilian death count could well be conservative.
"They said that the work effectively disproved suggestions by US authorities that civilian bodycounts were impossible to conduct." (Sam Lister, 'Researchers claims that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in war,' The Times, October 29, 2004)
Scientific Strength - Our Data Have Been Back And Forth
The tone for the response was set on Channel 4 News (October 29, 19:00), by science reporter Tom Clarke, who spent 53 seconds of his 2 minute 15 second report challenging the methodology of the Lancet report:
"Today, Downing Street dismissed the report saying the researchers used an extrapolation technique, which they considered inappropriate, rather than a detailed body count." (Tom Clarke, Channel 4 website, October 29, 2004)
Clarke emphasised how much higher the report's estimate of civilian deaths was than previous estimates:
"The Iraq Ministry of Health has estimated 3000 civilian deaths, but they've only been counting for six months.
"Another figure - over 16 000 since the conflict began - comes from a project called Iraqbodycount. Their estimate is based on reported casualties. This latest study comes up with a very different number: nearly 100,000 extra civilian deaths since war began - possibly more."
Clarke then added:
"But without bodies, can we trust the body count? Higher than average civilian casualties in Fallujah strongly distorted this study making the nationwide average well over 100 thousand so families surveyed there were discounted from the final figure.
"The reliability of interviews must be questioned too, though four out of five families were able to produce a death certificate."
Curiously, Clarke claimed that Fallujah "strongly distorted this study". And yet, as he himself noted, "families surveyed there were discounted" - so Fallujah did +not+ in fact distort the report. But he then claimed the reliability of interviews must +also+ be questioned - ie that this was a further problem in addition to the distortion he had just discounted.
Clarke then made his most serious claim:
"But the study's main weakness, and the one highlighted by Downing Street in dismissing today's figures, is that it multiplies a small sample across the whole of Iraq. A country at war, where people are aggrieved and displaced from their homes, makes household based surveys far less accurate."
It is remarkable that a news reporter could so casually dismiss the methodology and findings of a carefully implemented study that has been rigorously peer-reviewed for one of the world's leading scientific journals.
We asked the report's authors about the large rise in numbers of estimated civilian deaths over previous estimates, and also on the ability to make a reliable body count without bodies. Dr. Gilbert Burnham responded:
"In short, we used a standard survey method that is used all over the world to estimate mortality. So bodies are not necessary to calculate mortality. In fact going to the community for household surveys on mortality is the standard method used for calculating mortality all over the world, and is probably the method used in the UK census as well, although I am not a demographer.
"Anyway, information collected in surveys always produces higher numbers than 'passive reporting' as many things never get reported. This is the easy explanation for the differences between iraqbodycount.net, and our survey.
"Further a survey can find other causes of death related to public health problems such as women dying in childbirth, children dead of infectious diseases, and elderly unable to reach a source of insulin, which body counts cannot do--since they collect information from newspaper accounts of deaths (usually violent ones). Can one estimate national figures on the basis of a sample?
"The answer is certainly yes (the basis of all census methods), provided that the sample is national, households are randomly selected, and great precautions are taken to eliminate biases. These are all what we did. Now the precision of the results is mostly dependent on sample size. The bigger the sample, the more precise the result. We calculated this carefully, and we had the statistical power to say what we did. Doing a larger sample size could make the figure more precise (smaller confidence intervals) but would have entailed risks to the surveyors which we did not want to take, as they were high enough already.
"Our data have been back and forth between many reviewers at the Lancet and here in the school (chair of Biostatistics Dept), so we have the scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty. I doubt any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent years as this one has!" (Dr. Gilbert Burnham, email to David Edwards, October 30, 2004)
Channel 4's Tom Clarke had made a further observation:
"The definition of civilian is also unclear. The majority of violent deaths were among young men who may - or may not - have been insurgents."
The report's lead author, Dr. Les Roberts, responded to this point:
"The civilian question is fair. About 25% of the population were adult males. >70% of people who died in automobile accidents were adult males. Presumably, they died more than other demographic groups because they are out and about more. 46% of people reportedly killed by coalition forces were adult males. Thus, some of them may have been combatants, some probably were not... perhaps they were just out and about more and more likely to be in targeted areas. We reported that over half of those killed by coalition forces were women and children to point out that if there was targeting, it was not very focused. Thus, we are careful to say that about 100,000 people, perhaps far more were killed. We suspect that the vast majority were civilians, but we do not say each and every one of the approximately 100,000 was a civilian." (Email to David Edwards, October 31, 2004)
Clarke concluded his Channel 4 report with a damning statement:
"Given the worsening security situation, it'll be a long time before we have an accurate picture for civilian losses in Iraq, if ever."
This suggested that flawed methodology meant the Lancet report could safely be dismissed as failing to provide "an accurate picture for civilian losses in Iraq". It meant the researchers, the Lancet peer review team, and the Lancet editors, had produced an unreliable piece of work.
To reiterate the response of the report's authors: "we have the scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty. I doubt any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent years as this one has!"
An October 29 Downing Street press release read:
"Asked if the Prime Minister was concerned about a survey published today suggesting that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the war in Iraq, the PMOS [Prime Minister's Official Spokesman] said that it was important to treat the figures with caution because there were a number of concerns and doubts about the methodology that had been used. Firstly, the survey appeared to be based on an extrapolation technique rather than a detailed body count. Our worries centred on the fact that the technique in question appeared to treat Iraq as if every area was one and the same. In terms of the level of conflict, that was definitely not the case. Secondly, the survey appeared to assume that bombing had taken place throughout Iraq. Again, that was not true. It had been focussed primarily on areas such as Fallujah. Consequently, we did not believe that extrapolation was an appropriate technique to use."
( http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp )
We again raised these queries with the report authors. Dr. Roberts replied:
"Point 1 is true and it is not a mistake on our part. We would have had a more accurate picture if we conducted a 'stratified' sample, with some in the high violence areas and some in the low violence areas. But, that would have involved visiting far more houses and exposing the interviewers to even more risk. Secondly, we do not know how many people are in the 'high violence' areas, so this would have involved large assumptions that would now be criticized.
"Most samples are taken with the assumption that all the clusters are 'exchangeable' for purposes of analysis. The difference between them is considered in the interpretation of the data.
"Point two, assumes bombing is happening equally across Iraq. There is no such explicit assumption. There is the assumption that all individuals in Iraq had an equal opportunity to die (and if we did not, it would not be a representative sample). It happens, that the one place with a lot of bombings, Falluja, and we excluded that from our 100,000 estimate....thus if anything, assuming that there has not been any intensive bombing in Iraq.
"Finally, there were 7 clusters in the Kurdish North with no violent deaths. Of those 26 randomly picked neighborhoods visited in the South, the area that was invaded, 5 had reported deaths from Coalition air-strikes. This, I suspect that such events are more widespread than the review suggests." (Email to David Edwards, November 1, 2004)
Almost none of the above has been debated anywhere in the UK press. It is clear that the Johns Hopkins researchers, the Lancet editors, and the Lancet's peer-review team, naturally took every precaution to ensure that the methodology involved could withstand the intense scrutiny a report of this kind was bound to generate. Their results point to the mass slaughter of 100,000 civilians. The media is just not interested.
Part 2 follows shortly...
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to Observer editor, Roger Alton
Email: roger.alton@observer.co.uk
Write to the Observer's foreign affairs editor, Peter Beaumont
Email: peter.beaumont@observer.co.uk
Write to Andrew Gowers, editor of the Financial Times
Email: Andrew.Gowers@FT.com
Write to Martin Newland, editor of the Daily Telegraph
Email: Martin.Newland@telegraph.co.uk
Ask them why they have failed to so much as +mention+ the Lancet's report of 100,000 excess civilian deaths as a result of the US-UK invasion of Iraq.
Email Channel 4 News about their reporting:
Tom Clarke, Science Reporter, Channel 4 News
Email: tom.clarke@itn.co.uk
Jim Gray, Channel 4 News Editor
Email: jim.gray@itn.co.uk
Please also send all emails to us at Media Lens:
Email: editor@medialens.org
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MEDIA ALERT: 100,000 IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS - PART 2
By way of a splendid coincidence, Media Lens received this delayed response from the BBC on November 3:
"I am writing in response to your email to Caroline Hawley dated 13/10. Apologies for the delay in replying. The estimate for the number of people killed by Saddam Hussein is based on the figure from Human Rights Watch. They estimate that as many as 290,000 Iraqis were 'disappeared' by the Iraqi government over the past two decades, and that many of these 'disappeared' are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves in Iraq.
"The investigators are working for the Iraqi Special Tribunal which was is under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi interim government.
Yours sincerely,
Jenny Baxter"
Notice the lack of scepticism about the methodology used in arriving at the figures, and about the credibility of the Iraqi Special Tribune - there are no reservations, doubts or caveats.
On October 13, we had written to BBC correspondent Caroline Hawley asking the basis for her claim that Saddam Hussein had killed 300,000 Iraqis. In her BBC News report, Hawley had also expressed no reservations about the figure.
By contrast, a BBC website review of last week's Lancet report of 100,000 excess civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion, included several balancing comments:
"UK foreign secretary Jack Straw said his government would examine the findings 'with very great care'. But he told BBC's Today that another independent estimate of civilian deaths was around 15,000." Meanwhile a "Pentagon spokesman said 'there is no accurate way to validate the estimates of civilian casualties by this or any other organisation'." ('Iraq death toll "soared post-war"', October 29, 2004)
http://newswww.bbc.net.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3962969.stm
On November 2, we received this response from Channel 4 News science reporter, Tom Clarke:
"The weakness I refered to in my piece is a direct reflection of the limitiations highlighted by the researchers themselves in the discussion of their results. These limitations were also referred to by the lancet's editor Richard Horton in his commentary that accompanied the article. I direct you [to] the entire of page six of their paper.
"Remarkably, neither the MoD nor the FCO keep a tally of civilian casuaties in Iraq, and Downing Street dismissed -- pretty much out of hand, the only attempt to do so. By pointing these facts out in my report, I hoped the viewer might draw their own conclusions. My piece reported on the best attempt so far to quantify civilian casulties in Iraq, yet would have been seriously biased, had I not made plain its significant limitations (a study with a 95% confidence interval for the final death toll rangining from 8,000 to 194,000)."
One of the report's authors, Richard Garfield, has responded to the same challenge:
"Research is more than summarizing data, it is also interpretation. If we had just visited the 32 neighborhoods without Falluja and did not look at the data or think about them, we would have reported 98000 deaths, and said the measure was so imprecise that there was a 2.5% chance that there had been less than 8,000 deaths, a 10% chance that there had been less than about 45,000 deaths,....all of those assumptions that go with normal distributions.
"But we had two other pieces of information. First, violence accounted for only 2% of deaths before the war and was the main cause of death after the invasion. That is something new, consistent with the dramatic rise in mortality and reduces the likelihood that the true number was at the lower end of the confidence range. Secondly, there is the Falluja data, which imply that there are pockets of Anbar, or other communities like Falluja, experiencing intense conflict, that have far more deaths than the rest of the country. We set aside these data in statistical analysis because the result in this cluster was such an outlier, but it tells us that the true death toll is far more likely to be on the high-side of our point estimate than on the low side." (Professor Richard Garfield, email sent to Media Lens reader, October 31, 2004)
It is important to recognise that providing 95% confidence intervals is standard in scientific analysis of data. While Clarke was correct to mention these confidence intervals, he misrepresented the limitations of the report in stating that "the study's main weakness... is that it multiplies a small sample across the whole of Iraq".
This was not, in fact, a serious weakness. In response, we repeat here the comments made by report author Dr. Gilbert Burnham, quoted in part one of this alert:
"Can one estimate national figures on the basis of a sample?
"The answer is certainly yes (the basis of all census methods), provided that the sample is national, households are randomly selected, and great precautions are taken to eliminate biases. These are all what we did. Now the precision of the results is mostly dependent on sample size. The bigger the sample, the more precise the result. We calculated this carefully, and we had the statistical power to say what we did." (Dr. Gilbert Burnham, email to David Edwards, October 30, 2004)
Lancet editor, Richard Horton, emphasised these points in his editorial:
"This remarkable piece of work represents the efforts of a courageous team of scientists. To have included more clusters [of households interviewed for the survey] would have improved the precision of their findings, but at an enormous and unacceptable risk to the team of interviewers who gathered the primary data. Despite these unusual challenges, the central observation - namely, that civilian mortality since the war has risen due to the effects of aerial weaponry - is convincing". ( http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04cmt384web.pdf )
In addition, to reiterate, the twin facts that:
(a) violence accounted for only 2% of deaths before the war but was the main cause of death after the invasion, and
(b) the high death-rate Fallujah data was discounted in the estimated tally of 98,000 excess deaths, mean that any movement away from this figure is likely to be on the high side of the estimated range, thus +greater+ than 98,000 deaths.
The Lancet report authors candidly and correctly weighed up +all+ the possible limitations of their study. Having done so, the estimate of 98,000 deaths is, based on all the evidence and its careful interpretation, a +conservative+ estimate. The researchers also, correctly, call for verification of these results by an independent body such as the World Health Organisation. For Channel 4 news to dismiss so easily the care, courage and scientific rigour of this report is remarkable.
In a BBC Newsnight debate - the only debate we have seen on the Lancet report - Michael Clarke of the International Policy Institute challenged the Lancet's editor, Richard Horton:
"This 100,000 figure, remember, has a huge margin of error. It ranges from 8,000 - which is half what most of the rest of us think it is - to 194,000. And what they've done is split the difference and said, 'Well, we think about 98,000 with some measure of confidence,' because there is a sort of a confidence statistical factor built into that. But that really isn't, to my mind, very credible." (BBC2, Newsnight, November 2, 2004)
Horton replied:
"Well that's not true. What you just heard isn't a correct summary of the research."
Horton began explaining that the figures were higher than previous estimates because this was the first empirical research of Iraqis themselves carried out in Iraq. Newsnight anchor, Gavin Esler, then interrupted, starkly revealing his failure to understand the figures:
"But you haven't got 100,000 death certificates, you haven't got 100,000 bodies. You've got somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000 is where you've put it, and you've gone in the middle."
Horton continued his reply:
"But that again is a misunderstanding of the figures. The most likely estimate of excess deaths is 98,000. It's +not+ right to say that it's equally likely it could be between 8,000 and 194,000. The most likely figure is 98,000, and as soon as you go away from that figure, either lower or higher, it's much less likely it will be much lower or higher."
Remarkably, Clarke then instantly renounced his claim that the authors had simply "split the difference", before moving on to a second claim:
"Statistically, that's a reasonable assumption, but the numbers are too small. I mean remember, seven people - very brave people, who did a series of interviews in 33 different places - but seven people, spent a month interviewing the Iraqi families that they went to visit. And on the basis of interviews, and what Iraqi families told them, they've made these extrapolations. But the numbers are really very small. The number of confirmed deaths that they look at is 61 - not 61,000, or 610, but 61."
Of course the idea that the "numbers are too small" is +exactly+ the kind of issue that the serious scientists, peer reviewers and Lancet editors involved in producing the report would have focused on first in considering the merits of the research. According to the report's authors, it is simply not true that "the numbers are too small". Based on the chosen sample size, the 100,000 figure can be advanced "with great certainty". This is simply a matter of scientific logic.
Richard Horton concluded his comments by noting the shocking truth that "there has been no debate" on the Lancet report.
The Charnel House - A Simple Question From A Couple Of Amateurs
Ahead of the war, almost all journalists accepted that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was one vast torture chamber for the civilian population. Journalists and politicians talked often of a "charnel house", a "giant Gulag" and so on. In October 2003, Labour MP Ann Clwyd said:
"In June this year I stood on the edge of Saddam's killing fields. I saw the skeletons of men, women and children being dug up in this enormous mass grave. I do not believe, and neither do you, that we should turn a blind eye to such atrocities." (Paul Eastham, 'Blair safe as tears wash away Labour rebellion over Iraq,' Daily Mail, October 2, 2003)
In June 2003, the Telegraph's Con Coughlin wrote:
"Another day and another mass grave is unearthed in Iraq". He added: "So many of these harrowing sites have been uncovered in the two months since Saddam's overthrow that even the experts are starting to lose count of just how many atrocities were committed by the Iraqi dictator's henchmen... If this were Kosovo, the Government would be under fire for not having acted sooner to prevent the genocide."
Coughlin concluded:
"Having just returned from three weeks in post-liberation Iraq, I find it almost perverse that anyone should question the wisdom of removing Saddam from power." (Coughlin, 'So what if Saddam's deadly arsenal is never found? The war was just,' The Sunday Telegraph, June 1, 2003)
Journalists and politicians appeared to truly believe that genocide was ongoing in Iraq immediately prior to the invasion. And yet it appears not to have occurred to even one of them to check these claims against the findings of the Lancet report, which studied Iraqi deaths in periods before and after the invasion, interviewing 8,000 people around the country.
The point is that the report has produced a thorough scientific analysis of deaths for a period of time when Saddam Hussein was said to have been on a murderous rampage. It took a matter of moments for us - a couple of amateurs with virtually zero resources - to write to the report authors and ask them what they had found:
"Did your research uncover evidence of mass murder by Saddam Hussein's regime in the year prior to the invasion? There have been government and media claims of tens, even hundreds, of thousands murdered, whereas Amnesty International told me they estimated the figure to be in the hundreds. Did your research cast any light on that?" (David Edwards to Dr. Les Roberts, October 30, 2004)
The next day, we received this reply from the report's lead author, Dr. Les Roberts:
"There was one reported killing by Saddam's folks in the first days of the war (considered post-invasion) and there were a couple people who disappeared during the invasion (all adult males). We did not count disappearances as deaths. Thus, no, we have no evidence of that. That does not prove it did not happen. If it was only hundreds of deaths, our small sample probably would not have detected it." (Email to David Edwards, October 31, 2004)
Not one journalist has commented on the significance of the absence of evidence for claims that Saddam Hussein was involved in mass killing in the year prior to the invasion. Nor, in the case of reports of 300,000 alleged victims of Saddam Hussein, have there been consistent expressions of scepticism about, indeed dismissal of, 'dubious' methodology, statistical analysis and interpretation of results.
Coda - What Lester Luborsky Saw
Consider that, right up to the very eve of war last year, Tony Blair, Jack Straw and others insisted that "even now" a peaceful solution was possible. It was simple - all Saddam Hussein had to do was to comply fully with UN resolutions, cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, and give up his weapons of mass destruction. If that happened, the troops amassed in the desert would all go home - everyone would be happy. Journalists consistently reported Blair's claim that he was "going the extra mile for peace" as credible and sincere.
And yet, to our knowledge, not one journalist ever discussed what would happen in the event of a peaceful outcome. What would actually have happened if Iraq had somehow been able to comply fully by US-UK standards so that weapons inspectors were allowed to continue their work to the point where Iraq was given a clean bill of health? Would sanctions then have been lifted, leaving Saddam Hussein in power, Iraqi oil out of Western hands, and "coalition" forces wandering happily home? Would the US have been required to pick up the tab for sending a quarter of a million men around the world only to bring them straight back?
The reason no journalist ever discussed this possibility, we believe, was because they knew the US-UK governments would never permit such an eventuality. In other words, at some level, journalists +knew+ war was inevitable.
But, paradoxically, many of them also, simultaneously, +did+ believe that Blair and Straw were sincere in talking of a peaceful resolution. The intense propaganda brainwashing that persuades us of the fundamental benevolence of our leaders was in collision with the obvious realities. Media reporting reflected the propaganda but steered clear of areas of thought where the propaganda was quickly rendered absurd. And journalists were able to do all of this without knowing that they were doing it. But how on earth does this work?
In the 1960s, psychologist Lester Luborsky used a special camera to track the eye movements of subjects asked to look at a set of pictures. Subjects were asked to rate which pictures they liked and disliked. Three of the pictures were sexual in content, with one, for example, showing the outline of a woman's breast, beyond which a man could be seen reading a newspaper. The response of some subjects was remarkable. They were able to avoid letting their gaze stray even once to the sexually suggestive parts of the pictures. When later asked to describe the content of the pictures, these subjects remembered little or nothing sexually suggestive about them. Some could not even recall seeing the pictures. Psychologist Daniel Goleman explains:
"In order to avoid looking, some element of the mind must have known first what the picture contained, so that it knew what to avoid. The mind somehow grasps what is going on and rushes a protective filter into place, thus steering awareness away from what threatens." (Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths - The Psychology of Self-Deception, Bloomsbury, 1997, p.107)
Like all of us, journalists need to believe they are honest, reasonable human beings. There is a problem, however - career success depends on their not finding +too+ much to criticise in the operation of elite state-corporate power. The art of successful mainstream journalism is the art of reconciling these two irreconcilables without admitting the lie to conscious awareness.
As with the individuals in Luborsky's experiments, journalists somehow understand what is going on and rush a protective filter into place, steering awareness away from what threatens. It is an awesome and intriguing phenomenon of human psychology.
The consequences are awesome, too - incinerated children, dismembered bodies, and families smashed and broken in depthless grief.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to Labour MP Ann Clwyd
Email: clwyda@parliament.uk
Write to Daily Telegraph reporter Con Coughlin
Email: con.coughlin@telegraph.co.uk
Write to Tom Clarke, Science Reporter, Channel 4 News
Email: tom.clarke@itn.co.uk
Write to Jim Gray, Channel 4 News Editor
Email: jim.gray@itn.co.uk
Please also send all emails to us at Media Lens:
Email: editor@medialens.org
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MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
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