More on the coverage of civilian casualties in Iraq. (I'm overcompensating because of my guilt for still not being able to find that big research paper I keep promising to post. Fair warning.)
We would have to kill an awful lot of Iraqi civilians to match the number that would have died if we had left Saddam in charge, of course, but that isn't an argument that the press is interested in. (I don't why this is coming up subscription required; I dug it up from Google. If need be, google "Gerard Alexander," and "Weekly Standard," and read "A Lifesaving war.")
The Pentagon won't count civilian casualties, which is a big rhetorical mistake, because it leaves the field open to any nut job willing to jury rig something that the press can claim is a "methodology" and if that nut job has a PhD and a job at an American university, well, then, they can say they got their figure from an academic study.
It's a sweet system.
During Afghanistan the "study" was run by a professor with a joint appointment in economics and women's studies. It might have had a bit more credibility if he ever actually went to Afghanistan, but no one seemed to interested in those little details. Or in the fact the fact that his "study" "proved" a higher number of civilian casualties than the Taliban claimed.
This didn't set off alarm bells somewhere?
But no one was looking past the fact that he had all those groovy charts. Surely he had some kind of real method. And almost no one realized that, at best, he had a method for studying the way the media covered civilian casualties, not for what was actually happening. A few bloggers noticed something was up. As that post mentions, the AP did an actual study (meaning they put people on the ground in Afghanistan, going to hospitals, morgues, villages.) Know what happens when you google it? Well, the results are better than the last time I checked, about six months ago, but still not good.
The American Journalism Review, a trade pub, published a piece that I would have thought just did Herold and his merry band in completely.
But by the end, his name was starting to get a little too much negative publicity to take any more risk, so a new group was formed -- using his "methodology," mind you, but with a new group of players.
Oh, they were every bit as qualified. The new "face man" was a professor of the "Psychology of Music." I have no idea what that is, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve training in Bomb Damage Assessment and how it correlates with possible civilian deaths.
Now I find out that the group itself may have a new face.
You know, right before the war, Newsweek wrote a little "Periscope" piece suggesting Iraqbodycount as a web site their readers might be interested in. I wrote them that they'd been snookered, that this was just Herold's team with a new face man to prevent Googling. The reporter informed me, quite testily, that she was well aware of Herold's rep, but felt the piece had quite cautiously informed readers that counting civilian casualties was a complicated business.
Yes, for professionals. The issue with this crowd is that they are both not professionals and have a huge axe to grind.
How do you count young men found in civilian clothes when the Fedayeen were ditching their uniforms as fast as possible? Who do you appropriately blame for the deaths of women and children pushed in front of Iraqi tank columns? And do you count as "civilians" the insurgents we're trying to kill?
In the current situation the very idea of "civilian casualties" has, frankly, lost useful meaning. Everyone technically is a civilian, I would think, but that doesn't make them an illegitimate military target. It seems as if, if they really wanted to do something useful, they'd count "non-combatant" casualties.
But they aren't interested in doing something useful.
And by the now the press ought to know it.
Shame on them for using this.
Any outlet that really wants to keep track of this can damn well use their charts if it comes to that, and do their own counts.
Put an intern on it.
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