Individualized reports from Americans caught in the catastrophe made national news, and numbers of Europeans and North Americans involved were a key part of the continuing saga. US embassies set up hotlines for relatives of possible victims to seek information. Quickly added into the mix was coverage of how the US was responding with relief aid and dollars. In Crawford, Texas President Bush announced that he had formed an international coalition to respond to such a massive disaster.
In sum coverage for most Americans was shocking, and emotional. Empathic viewer, with the knowledge that a terrible natural disaster of huge significance to hundreds of thousands people had occurred, wanted to help in any way they could. Church groups held prayer sessions for the victims, and the Red Cross received an upsurge of donations.
But US corporate media coverage of the disaster exposes a huge hypocrisy in the US press. Left uncovered this past year was the massive disaster that befell Iraqi civilians. Over 100,000 have died since the beginning of the US invasion and hundreds of thousands more are homeless and weakened. In late October 2004 the British Lancet medical journal published a scientific survey of households in Iraq that calculated over 100,000 civilians, mostly women and children, have indeed died from war related causes. The study was formulated and conducted by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, and the College of Medicine at Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. It involved a complex process of sampling households across Iraq to compare the numbers and causes of deaths before and after the invasion in March 2003. The mortality rate in these families worked out to 5 per 1,000 before the invasion and 12.3 per 1,000 after the invasion. Extrapolate the latter figure to the 22 million population of Iraq, and you end up with 100,000 total civilian deaths. The most common cause of death was aerial bombing followed by strokes and heart attacks. Recent civilian deaths in Fallujah would undoubtedly add significantly to the total.
The Iraqi word for disaster is meseeba. Surly the lose of life from war in Iraq is as significant a meseeba as the Indian Ocean tsunami, yet where is the US media coverage of thousands of dead and homeless? Where are the live aerial TV shots of the disaster zones and the up-close photos of the victims? Where are the survivor stories - the miracle child who lived through a building collapsed by US bombs and rescue by neighbors? Where are the government official's press releases of regret and sorrow? Where is the international coalition for relief of civilians in Iraq and the upsurge in donations for Red Cross intervention? Would not Americans, if they knew, be just as caring about Iraqi deaths as they are for the victims of the tsunami?
The US corporate media has published Pentagon statements on civilian deaths in Iraq as unknown and dismissed the Lancet Medical Journal study. It seems US media concerns are for victims of natural disasters, while the man-made disasters, such as the deliberate invasion of another country by the US, are better left unreported.
--
Peter Phillips is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Somona State University and Director of Project Censored a media research group which documents the penchant for mainstream media to ignore many policy issues which are important to the American public.
Post a Comment
