Source: MEDIA LENS
September 12, 2005
In our Media Alert, Burying The Lancet - Parts 1 And 2 (September 5 and 6), we focused on the media response to a November 2004 report in The Lancet which estimated nearly 100,000 excess civilians deaths in Iraq since the March 2003 US-UK invasion.
Source: MEDIA LENS
September 6, 2005
We learn some ugly truths when we compare the media response to Les Roberts' report on Iraq with the response to his earlier work in Congo.
In our analysis we found that in both the US and the British press, news reports initially presented the estimates of 100,000 deaths in Iraq and 1.7 million deaths in Congo without critical comment. The difference lies in the days, weeks and months that followed. Whereas the Congo figures and methodology were accepted without challenge, the Iraq figures and methodology were subjected to steady, withering criticism by both politicians and journalists (with rare defences in comment pieces by, for example, Seumas Milne and Terry Jones in the Guardian).
Source: MEDIA LENS
September 5, 2005
"It is odd that the logic of epidemiology embraced by the press every day regarding new drugs or health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of death is their armed forces." (Les Roberts, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health)
Sourece: Media Lens Alert
November 4, 2005
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.
Source: Media Lens Alert
November 2, 2004
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:
