Presentation made to a panel discussion on "Civilian Deaths in Iraq: Quantitative Estimates and Policy Implications," held at the United States Institute for Peace (USIP), Washington DC, 10 Jan 2007.
BBC Monitoring Middle East - Political
Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring, excerpts from 3 Oct 2006.
[Slide of translated news, with excerpts showing incidents reported by Iraqi newspaper Tariq al-Shab.]
Monitoring agencies such as the BBC provide daily summaries of individual Iraqi newspaper stories. This slide shows the kind of detail provided by the BBC just on one randomly chosen day. We store and analyse all this, each and every day. No doubt there are reports we have missed despite our best efforts, but no-one has provided evidence of any major discrepancy. It is a complete fantasy to postulate an alternate media universe busily reporting vast numbers of deaths missed by any of the Western media. If there are missed deaths, they are mainly deaths missed by all media.