The Other Side

Of course criticism of the New York Times isn't limited to just the Right Side of the dial. FAIR has some criticisms of how they have reported the war as well. Take this story on how they have dealt with Civilian casualties, for example. Basically FAIR argues that the times minimizes the numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths.

In three recent reports about the military invasion of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, the New York Times has misreported the facts about the April 2004 invasion of the city and the toll it took on Iraqi civilians.

On November 8, the Times reported: "In April, American troops were closing in on the city center when popular uprisings broke out in cities across Iraq. The outrage, fed by mostly unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties, forced the Americans to withdraw. American commanders regarded the reports as inflated, but it was impossible to determine independently how many civilians had been killed."

The next day, the Times made the same point, reporting that the U.S. "had to withdraw during a previous fight for the city in April after unconfirmed reports of heavy civilian casualties sparked outrage among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis." And on November 15, the Times noted that the current operation "redressed a disastrous assault on Fallujah last April that was called off when unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties drove the political cost too high."

FAIR's opinion is that these stories portray the casualties as unconfirmed. My read is that they are placing the stories in time; at that time that the United States withdrew from Fallujah, those reports were unconfirmed. That said, I would be interested to know if the original stories had some message about the information on Iraqi Casualties that has come out since then.

This issue does, however, underline the point that we know a lot more about how many American Soldiers have died verses how many Iraqi civilians have died during our occupation.

There are some difficult questions that have to be answered before you can start counting Iraqi Civilian Deaths. Do you count just those deaths caused by the Coalition forces? Do you count those caused by insurgent movements? How do you count insurgents? Obviously President Bush and his supporters would like a standard that minimizes the number of Iraqi Casualties. Opponents of President Bush want a standard that shows the maximum number of Iraqi casualties. So you see a pretty wide range of numbers.

But it strikes me that the media has largely chosen to face this issue by avoiding it. Which I'm not sure is the best strategy. If we are to judge whether the Iraq war is a success or failure we need to have at least some idea of the cost of the war.