Reporting Iraqi civilian fatalities in a time of war

We examined 11 U.S. newspapers and 5 non-U.S. newspapers using electronic databases or newspaper web-archives, to record any reports between March 2003 and March 2008 of Coalition and Iraqi deaths that included a numeric indicator. Reports were described as "events" where they described a specific occurrence involving fatalities and "tallies" when they mentioned the number of deaths over a period of time. We recorded the number of events and tallies related to Coalition deaths, Iraqi civilian deaths, and Iraqi combatant deathsU.S. newspapers report more events and tallies related to Coalition deaths than Iraqi civilian deaths, although there are substantially different proportions amongst the different U.S. newspapers. In four of the five non-US newspapers, the pattern was reversed.This difference in reporting trends may partly explain the discrepancy in how well people are informed about U.S. and Iraqi civilian fatalities in Iraq. Furthermore, this calls into question the role of the media in reporting and sustaining armed conflict, and the extent to which newspaper and other media reports can be used as data to assess fatalities or trends in the time of war.In February, 2007, the Associated Press (AP) conducted a poll of 1,002 adults in the United States about their attitudes towards the war in Iraq [1]. Respondents were asked to estimate the number of US soldiers and Iraqis who had died in the war. The median estimate for US soldiers was 2,974 while the actual toll at the time was 3,100 [2]. In contrast, when asked to estimate the number of Iraqi civilian casualties, the median answer was 9,890 at a time when it was at least 10 times this number, with some estimates putting the toll at 50 times this number [3,4]. The U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, for example, tallied more than 34,000 deaths in 2006 alone [5].This poll suggests that Americans were remarkably accurate in estimating the numbers of US military who had died but were inaccurate in estimating the nu