Drudge spreading lie that US casualties are down; rightwingers eat it up

QUOTE

Internet news site The Drudge Report is passing off Iraq casualty figures
from a questionable media outlet as fact, a journalist blogger asserts.

"Any legitimate news that U.S. troop deaths are sharply down, in a way that
is statistically significant, would be welcomed with open arms by all," says
Will Bunch, a senior Philadelphia Daily News writer, at his blog Attytood.

"Matt Drudge is running what purports to be just such a story on the top
left of his incredibly influentual Web site right now as I write this,"
Bunch continues. "The headline reads: 'Baghdad security crackdown seriously
curbs killings of US soldiers...'"

He invites readers to check the source of Drudge's link. "The article is not
from a credible, independent media outlet," he continues, "but from the
Kuwait News Agency (or KUNA). Kuwait is still America's biggest ally in the
Gulf (for obvious reasons) and so the source of the story is a huge tell
here."

The KUNA article credits the launch of new Baghdad security measures as the
reason for a 60 percent decline in "the rate of killings of US troops in
Iraq."

Bunch takes issue with a disclaimer in the piece that states, "The
statistics excluded US troops killed in other governorates such as Al-Anbar,
Diyala, and Salahiddin," which, he counters with data of his own,
misrepresents the story.

He accuses Drudge of "spreading a Big Lie," even as the Senate debates troop
withdrawal from Iraq.

Bunch writes, "No doubt, the gist of that headline is bounding around the
airwaves of talk radio and in the electrons of cyberspace as we speak.

"And it is also influencing the judgment of America's news directors," he
continues. "Mark Halperin, the political director of ABC News, and John
Harris, who had the same job at the Washington Post and now runs The
Politico, wrote a book chapter recently entitled 'How Matt Drudge Rules Our
World.'"

"If Matt Drudge really rules their world," Bunch concludes, "it's time for a
revolution."

Excerpts from the Attytood blog post, available in full at this link,
follow...

#
The thing is, I work with the casualty numbers three or four nights every
week, producing a feature for the Philadelphia Daily News called the Numbers
Racket. And I could tell that the figures in this Kuwait article/press
release are nowhere even in the ballpark of reality. For that, we look to
the indepedent Web site icasualties.org, which is used by many major news
orgs and bases alot of its info on Pentagon releases.

This is the table of all the deaths. First, the one piece of good news.
Overall deaths did drop during the period addressed by the article. But the
grim news is that the totals are much, much higher than suggested in this
story, that tens of thousands of Drudge readers are relying upon for talking
points.

The number of American troops killed from Feb. 14 through March 13 is 73,
not 17, or more than four times higher. In the prior month, from Jan. 14
through Feb. 13, which was a remarkably bloody period, 116 American troops
died. So the tally did drop overall, and that's great news, by it was 37
percent, not nearly the 60 percent as the story reports. And the decline in
deaths per day is even less -- because, as the article also fails to note,
February only has 28 days.

Here's what I find most significant. The U.S. death rate for the 28-day
period in question is 2.61 deaths a day. The daily American death rate since
the war began four years ago is 2.37 deaths a day -- so even now, Americans
are still dying now in Iraq at a higher-than-average rate for this conflict.

Is anyone really happy with that? As we've argued on this site almost every
day since we started it, even 1 American death is one too many in an
unnecessary and useless war, based on lies from the start. And now the
proponents of more war continue to lie in a desperate effort to keep it
going.

#
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Blog_Drudge_spread_big_lie_on_0314.html

END QUOTE


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