A call for a media investigation over the issue of Iraq mortality estimates

Following my e-mail exchange with the Independent on the so-called “human cost” of the Iraq war, a very curious website, Mediahell.org, [Please, see CORRECTION below] launched yet another hysterical crusade against concerned citizens who dared to reclaim the sacrosanct right to be honestly informed by the mainstream media and to speak out whenever this doesn’t happen.

I won’t comment on Mediahell.org peculiar “activism”. It’s always productive to listen to different points of view and to honestly try to understand the other’s reasons; it’s good to always challenge our own convictions: it helps us to not sit down but keep pushing on our limits to better know and understand the world around us and ourselves. Unfortunately for me, I have never found Mediahell.org challenging and the only thing I am left with whenever I happen to visit that website is a deep sense of sadness for their constant resort to bad faith, ad hominem attacks, personal slanders and other techniques used with the only purpose to confuse the readers and support indefensible, irrational positions for whatever reasons that may be. One good rebuttal of one of the many, many, many Mediahell.org crusades can be read here

I won’t comment on Mediahell.org hysteria then - life is really too short, besides I don’t believe in Hell – but it could be a good idea to give more resources to support the point I made in my exchange with the Independent:

1) Lancet study authors Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham have written an informative piece on Iraq mortality studies, available at the website for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School for Public Health.

2) MIT's John Tirman, who commissioned the second of the two Lancet studies, has answered critics of those studies, including what looks like a media campaign of disinformation

3) Regarding the WHO study estimate of 151,000 deaths, Les Roberts has noted that there is more in common with the Lancet results than first appears, while he also points to a likely under-reporting of violent deaths in the WHO study. [Also here]

4) Spagat's "50-page research paper" is a non-refereed, unpublished document that he uploaded to his own website (!!!) Serious flaws, including deceptive cherry-picking of data, have been identified by statistician Tim Lambert at his Deltoid blog.

For independent, brave, honest journalists who want to seriously report on what’s going on around the issue of Iraq mortality estimates, there is enough material to examine it in more detail, maybe even investigate the attacks that have been made against serious scientific studies in the Lancet.

Don't wait for the next celebration of media failure. As Martin Luther King, Jr said, “The time is always right to do what is right.”


UPDATE - CORRECTION: I agree with the criticism I received by the person who left the anonymous comment here below. I thought that post was from MediaHell's Editors. My mistake and I apologise to the MediaHell's Editors. I also would like to kindly invite MediaHell Editors to join me to call for a media investigation over this issue.