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July 2, 2007

NYT's selective skepticism

By Ed Lasky

The New York Times manages to find room for a report on decline of Iraqi civilian deaths. Good for them! That's better than simply ignoring news that doesn't fit the agenda. But it casts doubt on figures because death counts in Iraq are "highly inaccurate"

However, the size of the decline was hard to gauge because death counts in Iraq are highly inaccurate. Some bombing victims' bodies are never recovered, families often collect their dead before they can be counted by officials, and the dead bodies found around Baghdad, while generally taken to the city morgue, are sometimes taken to hospitals where they may not be counted.

Does anyone remember the Times ever commenting on the accuracy of the number of deaths in Iraq when the news was bad? In the last 90 days, for example, the Times has never questioned the accuracy of death counts in Iraq (a search using the terms "Iraq", "Accuracy" and "Accurate" shows)

It seems that only when the news is relatively good, does the Times casts aspersions on their accuracy. Welcome to 1984.