MICHAEL UBALDI has been looking at press reports on Afghanistan and he’s noticed that they’re leaving something out.
Well, Michael, that’s because the body count only matters when it’s ours. It’s as if they were, I don’t know, racist or something.
UPDATE: Unless it’s noncombatants, I should add. Then the numbers get inflated, rather than ignored. Matt Welch explodes the bogus dead Iraqi babies claim yet again.
Why it’s almost as if making America look bad were the unifying theme here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Michael Waldorf emails that we shouldn’t underestimate the laziness of the media:
That’s true with almost all media with respect to Iraq, not just the intentionally defeatist. Every day and night I hear “today/yesterday, [insert number] U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq by sniper/car bomb/land mine/etc.”. That’s for two reasons. Reason one is because many of the writers are defeatist and want to highlight American deaths in the hope we pull out and admit we were wrong to invade (fat chance, mind you!); reason two is because they’re downright lazy. Every day the local U.S. military command spoon-feeds the number of U.S. deaths to pool journalists and onto the wire, because it’s the sort of thing we can’t hide — the families will speak up when their sons and daughters don’t come home — and because these are facts, how many people died, and our government believes in the honest reporting of facts. The enemy casualties are always missing in these reports. That’s not because they aren’t any, of course, but because determining and verifying a number requires reporters to get out of hidey-holes Baghdad and work for a story, and if the U.S. military tried to estimate enemy dead for the public, they’d be taunted with endless cries of “show us the bodies, we don’t believe you” as we did in the case of Uday and Qusay.
Of course U.S. armed forces kill more than are killed. Our boys are very good at what they are trained to do. And the number of enemy dead does matter, because there are that fewer bad guys to take pot-shots at our good guys and maybe potential bad guys may be deterred if their buddies don’t come home. But I wouldn’t be looking for either Saddam Hussein or Al Qaeda to hold regular press conferences with accurate numbers of casualties on their respective sides.
Laziness is a factor, no doubt about it. And it might even explain the willingness of media folks to accept obviously-inflated civilian casualty numbers from the likes of Tariq Ali and Marc Herold. But would they lazily accept bogus numbers from obviously-interested parties if they made the United States effort look good?