655,000 Iraqis die because of war - CNN headline (Page 3)

Good point!  That would be 2.5% of the entire population.  If we lost 2.5% of our population do you think the news media would lose track of 7,000,000 people?

Given that we're not a war torn country, yes it would be rather sensational.

So your only basis for rejecting is that you don't think it's beliveable?

A private group called Iraqi Body Count, for example, says it has recorded about 44,000 to 49,000 civilian Iraqi deaths. But it notes that those totals are based on media reports, which it says probably overlook "many if not most civilian casualties."

For Burnham's study, researchers gathered data from a sample of 1,849 Iraqi households with a total of 12,801 residents from late May to early July. That sample was used to extrapolate the total figure. The estimate deals with deaths up to July.

The survey participants attributed about 31 percent of violent deaths to coalition forces.

Accurate death tolls have been difficult to obtain ever since the Iraq conflict began in March 2003. When top Iraqi political officials cite death numbers, they often refuse to say where the numbers came from.

The Health Ministry, which tallies civilian deaths, relies on reports from government hospitals and morgues. The Interior Ministry compiles its figures from police stations, while the Defense Ministry reports deaths only among army soldiers and insurgents killed in combat.

The United Nations keeps its own count, based largely on reports from the Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry."

The source for this you ask?  That wonderful left leaning massively biased news site, Fox.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,219638,00.html 

Media bias research...

Several folks in this thread have called for documentation and research regarding media bias.  I knew I had read something about this several years ago.  Here's a some research done in 2004.  Plus they also site some other research.  Pretty interesting...

FYI...I just skipped over all the "math" when reading it. Made my head hurt.  Tech_geezer would like it though.   :-)

http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Media.Bias.8.htm

And the WSJ has a bit more information in it's writeup:

here

And as another number to throw out there, in 100 days in Rwanda it's estimated that 800,000 people lost their lives.

Just an interesting note.  In WWII approx 214,000 were killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone...

But wait, you forgot to blame GWB for this!  C'mon, you know there has to be a tie to GWB and an excuse to slame our President!  I'm sure someone else from the board will chime make the connection.  ;-)

The thing I find most ironic is how willing....no, anxious people seem to be to accept these numbers.  It's almost like some people are hoping the higher number (655,000 instead of 50,000) is right so they can make thier political case that the war is a disaster.  Hatred of GBW seems to have skewed some people's reasonable thinking.  Go ahead and flame away...but first review this thead and see what I mean about the defense of these indefensible numbers.  More civilian deaths in Iraq than Japanese in all of WWII including Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  Unbelievable that people are still trying to defend the 655,000 number!

~Mike

In reading through the thread, to me it seems like it's not so much the number that's being defended as it is the manner in which the number was derived.

But I agree that it would be pretty sad if people were happy about that much death.

I'm wondering if it's legit to compare situations where the country had no extended period of insurgency or internecine fighting with a situation like Iraq.

The highest mortality rates do seem to occur in situations where there is internal conflict eg. the American civil war, Rwanda, Turkey/Armenia.