FAIR has a new Action Alert about last night’s CBS Evening News report about the Iraq War. Read the alert and let CBS know what you think– and post your letter in the comments section below.
Peter Hart
Peter Hart was the activist director of FAIR for 15 years, as well as the co-host of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin. He is now the senior field communications officer for Food & Water Watch.
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Comments
50k Iraqi deaths???? Are you guys just idiots? It’s gotta be way more than several hundred thousand. We killed them off whether they were men women or children. As snipers. As cowardly soldiers.
Get it right.
Dane
I’m disappointed to see that CBS news seems to be engaging in damage control in its current reporting about the Iraq war. Scott Pelley’s claim (Dec 1) that “more than fifty thousand” Iraqi citizens were killed in the war, while technically true, is wildly off by at least 50% according to reliable sources (The Lancet, Brookings Institute, World Health Organization) that put the number anywhere from over a hundred thousand to six hundred thousand. Why low-ball the Iraqi casualties? Americans need to know the truth about the costs of this war, not only to ourselves but to the people we now expect to be our allies.
Please correct your December 1 report with more accurate statistics.
Thank you.
Christine Berardo
Studio City, CA
I’ve just sent the following note to CBS:
Gentlemen, your business is journalism. Journalists inform. You are not doing that. You are misinforming.
Most recently, the information you have published about the number of civilian deaths in the Iraq war is wildly inaccurate. Your figure is around fifty thousand. From what I understand from official statistics published elsewhere, a much more correct figure would be around a million, perhaps fewer perhaps more, but nothing like your figure. This is simply not good enough. You might ask yourselves why. Please publish a correction. Scott Griffith.
During the December 1, 2011 CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley reported: “What began in 2003 as an effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein became a vicious religious war, pitting Iraqi against Iraqi–with the U.S. caught in the middle.” This assertion does not square with the historical record. The US invaded Iraq based on charges that Hussein was stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — charges that have proven baseless. Any suggestion that the US was caught in the middle of an internal conflict is, at best, shoddy reporting. At worst, this is deliberately misleading journalism.
What’s more, in using icasualties.org’s lowest estimate of civilian casualties (50,000), based on figures from January 2005 — nearly two years after the invasion — CBS is low-balling the death toll in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. At the very least, CBS News should provide clarification to the figure Pelley reported last evening. A more forthright clarification would note how other estimates, including those of the highly respected British medical journal the Lancet, put the figure much higher. Lancet’s 2006 study put the number of “violent deaths” at 600,000.
Finally, reporting on the withdrawal from Iraq should remind viewers of the number of “trainers” that will remain in Iraq. Likewise, CBS would do well to discuss the role that private military contractors have played, and will continue to play, in Iraq for the foreseeable future.
It is a shocking example of the manipulative practices of mainstream corporate news services that you way under-reported the Iraqi civilian casualties from 2003 to 2011 on your evening news report. The American people need truth in reporting! One of the reasons that things are in such a mess and the citizenry is so disgusted and distrustful is the irresponsibility of the American corporate media. Please get back to the Edward R. Murrow model!!!
What we need is some reporting about the skewing of the whole country and world towards war, militarism and funneling what amounts to tribute money, a private taxation on every American and citizen of the world towards a hierarchical militant evil group of murdering people who lie and try to put a good face on what amounts to genocide for empire.
I am not against the US taking military action in the world to stop dictators and spread democracy. That would be a good helpful thing to do … if it were in fact what we are doing.
But what we really seem to be doing is managing these countries for OUR dictators. We use the excuse that these bad dictators kill their own people in order to invade and kill many times more people. Yet, no one runs the numbers or tells the real story, and if they do our media system will do whatever it can to push their own fantasies that go along with the virtual military junta that owns this country, and make sure any real or contrary numbers or ideas never see the light or day or are yelled down and discredited before they do in the most illogical and nefarious ways.
There is just one name for this, and it is called totalitarianism. There is but one solution to this, and that is to take the people who are running the US at the top public and private levels out of power and keep them away from having any political influence.
And the only way to do that is to remove their control of wealth which they use to trickle down to only those who serve their ends, in a big immoral fascist pyramid of violence and disinformation.
This is why we need to go after those who have financially benefited in the past 10 years … at least, and impose very high taxes on the rich including surcharges on existing wealth and property.
We need to continue that pressure to prevent these corrupt interests from even rising again the level where they can threaten the whole world by adding more margins to our tax system and ever higher rates of taxation at the top levels.
If we do not do this and take action soon we are going to blink our eyes a few times one day and see clearly that the only difference between the US and the Nazis or the Confederacy is that we do not have slaves, we have virtual slaves, and we do not have concentration camps, we just have virtual concentration camps where the used up people are just thrown out to die.
There is no moral, intellectual, financial, basis for the cesspool the US has become in terms of what it has done to its own people. If we want to lead the world, we should stop trying to do it at gunpoint and start living up to our own ideals, which now seem to be just as shallow as the advertising lies that drive this country.
I’m mad as hell, and you should be too, and none of us should have to accept this crap in America a minute longer.
After this inaccuracy is corrected, CBS news should also tell how many were injured, some permanently. How many fled the country and have yet to return? What a price to pay for the imperial overstretch of the U.S. and all in the name of WMD which were never found.
If only one million, or one thousand, or one hundred Jews, Russians, et al had been murdered by Adolf HItler, would that have absolved him from his place in history as a tyrant seeking to own the entire world? With our diabolical drone bombs and surveillance from the sky technology (not to mention the Wikileaks exposure of U.S. embassies being asked to provide leaders’ routines), he might very well have succeeded, as might some future U.S. president seeking oil, minerals, even water, whatever was considered a necessity for the U.S. while seemingly uncaring about the deaths, maiming, torture and refugee existence inflicted on the invaded and occupied countries owning these assets nor the fate of our own troops forced to do this to others. When I picket against this action, my sign says, “Endless war=more deaths, destruction, deep debt and retribution” (in the form of insufficient funds for citizens here). Why do you encourage it?
Sent to evening@cbsnews.com:
“Please air a correction to the faulty number of Iraqi deaths that was reported on your evening newscast of Dec. 1. As journalists, you should make the effort to report information as factually as possible, and the number of Iraqi deaths reported on your newscast was absolutely, provably, incorrect. Please take a moment on-air to correct that mistake. “
Read 10 years ago here at fair:
It’s worth noting that on 60 Minutes, Albright made no attempt to deny the figure given by Stahl–a rough rendering of the preliminary estimate in a 1995 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report that 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of the sanctions. In general, the response from government officials about the sanctions’ toll has been rather different: a barrage of equivocations, denigration of U.N. sources and implications that questioners have some ideological axe to grind (Extra!, 3-4/00).
There has also been an attempt to seize on the lowest possible numbers. In early 1998, Columbia University’s Richard Garfield published a dramatically lower estimate of 106,000 to 227,000 children under five dead due to sanctions, which was reported in many papers (e.g. New Orleans Times-Picayune, 2/15/98). Later, UNICEF came out with the first authoritative report (8/99), based on a survey of 24,000 households, suggesting that the total â┚¬Ã…“excessâ┚¬Ã‚ deaths of children under 5 was about 500,000.
Source:
https://fair.org/index.php?page=1084
To Whom it May Concern:
Your latest report on Iraq is despicable, insensitive and out right wrong! How dare you play down what is up to now the greatest crime of the 21 Century; the illegal and criminal invasion of Iraq and a blatant example of American Imperialism! Many international organizations, including the icasualties website, the site that you quoted in your program, puts the death toll of Iraqis civilians in the hundreds of thousands, and some up to over a million dead, with many more millions maimed, and millions displaced. And how dare you categorize the invasion as an ‘oopsy’ moment, where the U.S. had to reluctantly play referee in an internal quarrel between Iraqis. The U.S. instigated the war that led to the criminal invasion and occupation of that country, and instigated the civil war to further destabilized the country, divide the resistance forces and reflect attacks on its forces.
And if the Iraqi deaths you and other organizations are counting is the Iraqi civilian death, not the deaths of Iraqi combatants, then using the same logic, theoretically no U.S. lives were lost in the Iraq War. Because if the death of Iraqi combatants don’t count -resistance fighters, “terrorist”, insurgents, partisans and Iraqi National Army soldiers battling invading forces -then the death of U.S. soldiers shouldn’t count either. When counting the deaths of Iraqi combatants, then the death toll of Iraqis should go even higher than most organizations count.
I suggest you be honest, do your job as journalist for once, and correct your earlier report, as well as apologize to the Iraqi people for the slaughter and destruction this country caused them (with our tax money), and for the way your program down played the event, and to all of the U.S. soldiers and spouses who have been impacted by this war (dead, maimed or widowed) for also being victims of this country’s foreign policies, which placed them to partake in this terrible crime.
Letter to CBS: I was most dissapointed and quite angry to see the shoddy and inaccurate reporting CBS engaged in as part of its’ Evening News Report on December 1, 2011. For a major news outlet to so blatantly engage in an attempt to rewrite history about the Iraq war is inexcusable and a gross disserve to its’ viewing public as well as the country as a whole. Any country who goes to war deserves and needs the truth of that war and its consequences to be known. News services in that country have a moral and professional obligation to make that happen. Anything less is an immoral shirking of that responsibility. One that ought to lose that news outlet its broadcast license, granted to it by a government elected by the citizens of that country.
Not only did CBS fail in its’ journalistic duty during the build up of the war by reporting threats of WMD and nuclear ambitions that were false, and known to be false at the time, CBS has continued to this day in an inexcusable mission to purposely mislead the public as to the truth of the situation in Iraq. The US was not “a caught in the middle of a religious war”, like some innocent bystander. The US created a religious war by invading Iraq without just cause and tearing down every shred of civil infrastructure without replacing it with anything. Hence chaos and a religious civil war broke out, as any idiot could have guessed it would.
Further, CBS’ reporting of the number of Iraqi civilians deaths as “more than 50,000” is very misleading, to the point of lying by omission. It uses a number that does not even include deaths prior to 2005, pulled from a website that itself states the number is only those death “reported by news agencies” and therefore missing many, many deaths. Yet CBS states none of this in its’ reporting and chooses instead to try and fob off its responsibility to clarify these facts by pointing people to the website itself for “more information”. In other words, to find out the truth rather than the lie CBS implied by its spin on the number, go to the website. Really! So, what does that website say its estimated body count for the entire war is? Over 100,000 deaths, double of what CBS reported the site as reporting. And other, more inclusive studies and reporting show higher numbers as well (World Health Organization, The Associated Press, The Brookings Institute), some as high as 600,000 to 1 million (The Lancet and Opinion Research Business). Yet CBS does not feel this is information worthy to include as part of the true picture and history of the war.
Why? How can a national news outlet choose to mislead and misinform the public it serves so blatantly and consistently, proving itself to be a propaganda tool rather than a legitimate news outlet? Who is pulling the strings and why? Now that is a story I would like to see.
Sent to CBS Evening News on 12/2/11
To whom it may concern,
I have just finished watching the segment of your December 1, 2011 CBS Evening News broadcast on the “ending” of the Iraq War and the number of Iraqi civilians killed. This segment grossly under-reported the actual number killed. The number that was displayed by CBS was 50,152. The source of this information was the website iCasualties.org. A quick check of the website shows that the number CBS used is the reported number killed since 2005 and is NOT a complete list nor is it a verified total. On the same page of the website, iCasualties.org actually writes “This is not a complete list, nor can we verify these totals. This is simply a compilation of deaths reported by news agencies. Actual totals for Iraqi deaths are much higher than the numbers recorded on this site.” CBS does not include the first two years of the Iraq War in its number of Iraqi reported dead – which, based on different studies, puts the number anywhere from 100,000 to a Lancet study that puts the number at roughly 600,000. No matter how you look at it, the number of Iraqi Civilians killed is far more than CBS lead its viewers to believe. This is unacceptable.
Not only does CBS misrepresent the number of dead, they also make the Iraq War sound like the U.S. was innocently caught in the middle. This, too, is unbelievable. The U.S. invaded Iraq on the grounds Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Once this lie was uncovered, more excuses were made for the U.S. invading Iraq. At no point was the U.S. “caught in the middle”.
CBS is supposed to report the news as fact and as it happened – for both the good and the bad. At no point should information be hidden or used to misinform. I ask that CBS please correct its error in reporting the number of Iraqi Civilian dead and clarify the position it took regarding the beginning of the Iraq War to its millions of viewers.
Thank you.
I expect accurate reporting Why would the Dec. 1 evening news choose the lowest possible count of Iraqi civilian deaths — using a site that tallied only deaths mentioned in news reports since 2005 — and a number that the site itself notes as not comprehensive. The Iraq Body Count estimates civilian deaths as close to 110,000 and of course the 2006 Lancet study estimated 600,000 violent deaths.
Is this an attempt to sugarcoat human fatalities in the name of “The US can do no wrong?!”
I see that you have once again, and egregiously, underreported Iraqi casualties resulting from the US invasion in 2003.
The best estimates, from the standpoint of professional methodology, were the Lancet study and the OPR study, which produced estimates of approximately 655,000 and one million, the latter being calculated at a later date. These were both generally respected by the professional colleagues of the people who produced them. By contrast, the low estimates such as the one you cited, were Rube Goldberg efforts by naifs who have no understanding of how to conduct statistically sound surveys.
You do not go to Rube Goldberg engineers to discuss rocket science, so why do you change your standards when public health is at issue? Surely people paid in six to eight figures should be able to grasp the point that specialists spend years training in their fields in order to gain a mastery non-specialists lack. If your staff do not understand this, they are incompetent. If they do and are deliberately misleading the public for political reasons, they are depraved and anti-American. Either way, you owe your viewers an apology.
Dear CBS,
It is disappointing to see inaccurate reporting on your newscast,
especially given the amount of data available about the reasons
for illegally invading Iraq and the number of casualties.
I respectfully request that you create a segment in which you
correct your casualty miscount and accurately portray the
reasons the United States illegally invaded a sovereign nation on
trumped up evidence regarding WMDs that never existed.
Thank you
Michael P Dague