Stop the biases...presses!

While flipping through the daily news section, people find that it is no longer out of the ordinary to see the astonishingly high number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq. In fact, there always seems to be a lengthy news article regarding the latest American casualty in the war abroad. These articles usually paint the picture of All-American war heroes whose lives are cut tragically short by barbaric and heartless Iraqis.

Readers are made to feel sadness, disgust, or anger over the deaths of these fallen soldiers, but hardly ever for them, the Iraqis. If anything, the Iraqis bear the brunt of the reader's disgust and anger since the mainstream media makes the public question why they should feel for them.

Well, perhaps one should feel sorrow for the glaring omission of the other side of the tale. Take, for instance, the Yahoo! news article, "US military deaths in Iraq at 3,874." The article outlines the number of deaths in the U.S. military since 2003, as well as the number of civilians killed, and those who died as a result of "hostile action." It even lists the number of deaths for the militaries of ally countries.

However, nowhere does the article mention the 100,000+ Iraqi civilians who have also lost their lives, or explain why the American military has adopted the "we don't do body counts" policy when concerning these civilians.

According to the ZNet democratic media article, "Holocaust Denial, American Style," a study conducted by doctors and scientists from the John Hopkins University School of Public Health estimated that over one million violent Iraqi deaths have actually occurred since the war's inception in 2003. But what does science know, right? The mainstream media seems to be more concerned with the number of American deaths, anyway.

Take into consideration the source of the aforementioned Yahoo! news article--the Associated Press. It is no wonder then that there is rarely any mention of the appalling number of Iraqi deaths at the hands of the American military. The Associated Press is full of news biases, most of which favour the American government and its positions. It isn't out of the ordinary for the Press to skew information in order to cast the U.S. in a more favourable light, and to make the country's enemies seem even more villainous.

The differences between the Yahoo! news article and the ZNet article lie mainly in the way the news is framed. In the ZNet article, the reader is fed the harsh reality of a war likened to the Holocaust. The victims here are the Iraqis, and the evil perpetrators are the Americans. It is the complete opposite for the Yahoo! news article, which makes no mention of Iraqi deaths, and instead, highlights those dead in the U.S. military.

When reading the news, one must first consider the sources, the apparent (or not-so-apparent biases), and the way the article is being framed in order to discern the fabricated from the truth.

In short, don't believe everything you read.