Webloggin » AP News and the New York Times Report Inflated Number of Deaths in Iraq

Now that the most recent scandal appears to be losing steam we should expect that the AP and others will return to reporting the news in an objective manner based on facts rather than speculation right? Wrong.

A news story that first circulated in 2004 is being put back into circulation because a researcher at Johns Hopkins has updated a study that was originally panned because of its high margin of error.

The latest news to hit the AP wires inflates the estimated deaths attributed to the war in Iraq by a factor of 13 as it reports in glaring headlines, “Study: 655,000 Iraqis die because of war”. The New York Times version is reporting 600,000 deaths in its headline.

NEW YORK - A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates.

The timing of the survey’s release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to call it "politics."

In the new study, researchers attempt to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer. - source AP News

The New York Times takes a similar approach in its report.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The researcher claims that the new estimate is more credible because they expanded the number of families interviewed in the study from 1000 to 1849 and included a larger geographic footprint.

At least the AP version considers that the timing of the release may be political.

"They’re almost certainly way too high," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He criticized the way the estimate was derived and noted that the results were released shortly before the Nov. 7 election.

"This is not analysis, this is politics," Cordesman said.

The New York Times does provide some dissenting voices as well but they rebut their own rebuttal with language that is meant to bolster the claims of the study.