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October 31, 2006
more on the Lancet study
Since my last post, the BBC website has given the Lancet study authors an opportunity to defend their views. Medialens has also released a very critical account of the (lack of) media coverage given to this article.
One other interesting blog post (which I found courtesy of Medialens) - Iraq Body Count has allegedly gone to some effort to discredit the Lancet study. Apparently questions of how to count and/or calculate a body count have become a contested part of the politics of the Iraq war.
Posted by jon_mendel at 07:52 PM
October 24, 2006
Counting the Dead in Iraq
The media response to the recent Lancet article on ‘excess’ deaths in Iraq is interesting*. After a couple of days, it appears to have largely vanished from the news bulletins (here in the UK, at least). The US and UK government responses to the study's claims have -- in what was either honest perplexity or a brilliant media management strategy -- focused on the issue of whether the methodology used in the Lancet study was appropriate for counting casualties in conflicts such as we are now seeing in Iraq.
By and large, news bulletins just detailed some of the claims made in the Lancet study, and gave government counterclaims: even the more 'intellectual' outlets such as Radio 4 did not generally go into detail as to how the various claims stood up. It appears that, not unreasonably, media organisations do not believe that there is much public appetite for the discussion of statistics and research methods. For example, the large (reported) potential error in the new Lancet study's estimate of excess deaths was barely mentioned. Some blogs have done a much better job of covering such issues.
The problem with this is that it could serve to make ('mainstream') media management much easier. When a study comes out that the government disagrees with, there is reason to think that -- if the government that can erase detailed statistical issues regarding the study -- this will fall from the news bulletins relatively quickly and without detailed discussion.
* viewing article requires a username/password; however, it can also be accessed with the help of bugmenot.
Posted by jon_mendel at 07:31 PM
October 09, 2006
Media coverage of Islamist and neo-Nazi terrorism
Have just had an interesting e-mail from the Red Pepper discussion list. Pendle's local newspaper has reported that two men with links to the far right political party the BNP have been found with a large cache of weapons - including rocket launchers (plural), a nuclear/biological protection suit and "chemical components". This men allegedly had "some kind of masterplan"; one of the men had previously stood as a BNP council candidate.
What's unusual about this is that the story has not - so far as I can tell - made the national news at all. This is surprising: this is a pretty substantial weapons cache. This is also in real contrast to the way that Islamist terror is reported: where raids on Muslim suspects are reported even where nothing is found, this very successful police raid on the BNP didn't make the nationals at all.
PS: another member of the list has prodded the nationals to cover the story, so it'll be interesting to see if they do.
Posted by jon_mendel at 11:28 AM
October 05, 2006
Schnews on lizard aliens
Right. I really shouldn't write any more about lizards, but there's something oddly compelling about this stuff. To give me an excuse to post more, the wonderful Schnews (e)newsletter has e-mailed me some more detail on their story on Shayler and 9/11 'truth'. I'll just quote their e-mail below, and let it speak for itself:
we were at the big green gathering and 'off duty' attending Shaylor's talk... This talk was generally a ramble of incoherent fragments of conspiracy, but he definitely asserted that it was holograms designed to look like planes that hit the towers, and the technology to do this was alien. He certainly discussed the theory (without ever saying he didn't believe it) that aliens have been around since pre-civilisation - and in fact turn up periodically to give the human race a kick up the technological pants, at just the right times for them to make 'progess'... and that the blond gene is 'evidence' that this is so.He claimed that evolutionary theory would say that women had 'willed' themselves blond to become more sexually attractive (not what evol. theory says at all of course) and that this was blatant nonsense - it was because aliens had arrived and interbred with humans, and introducing the blond gene that way. of course!... thus everyone naturally blond has some part alien DNA... I kid you not. There were three of us witness to this, and our memories of these facts all concur. His talk did seem to cover all the bases and lurch from one topic to the next in haphazard fashion. He seemed like someone who'd got seriously spooked out (he relayed that he'd been hounded, intimidated and followed around by secret services etc) and inferred that he'd had a mini-breakdown after realising 'everything' he'd believed in was false, and pretty much locked himself away for a year to smoke grass and read counter-culture literature. He seems to have emerged convinced that the only things he can now believe in are things SO preposterous that they MUST in fact be true... On the surface he actually came across like a pretty sad character, however the possibility remains that he could (a) actually still be working for the 'service', tasked with spreading such nonsense that the 911 movement gets discredited or, more likely, (b) that he's sensed an opportunity to make a speaking / celeb-like media career, touring the 'alternative' scene as de facto spokesman for the 'truth-seekers' - and has decided that the best thing to do is be all things to all people - saying anything and everything to stir up interest - and please the brew-crew nuts who seemed to be heavily in attendance, a little like disciples - sagely nodding and vocally agreeing with everything he said practically before he'd even said it...
He may not have specifically mentioned Annunaki lizards, but blatantly lied on the indym piece when he said he didn't mention aliens... I only wish we had the tape...
And now he's (or Annie) accused SchNEWS of being part of the MI5 cover-up ! Poor guys really must be paranoid to think something as laughable as that..!
Posted by jon_mendel at 05:42 PM
