The Press and Liberal Politics Co-Dependent Relationship

October 12, 2006 at 7:21 am (Election2006, Fourth Estate, Village Idiots, War on Terror)

I’ll be out of pocket beginning this afternoon until Monday. Taking a long weekend off and heading north to gaze at fall foliage.

But to the matter at hand. Just when you think the American Politic Landscape And Associated Hangers-On couldn’t top their latest act of hilarity.

You know, you get used to the usual spew from the NYT, CNN, etc. Mostly background noise. Spinning, bending, making up news on the hour to suit their agenda du-jour, but today this just amazes me.

Now a medical journal is getting into the act. Yep, you heard me right….a medical journal.

A controversial study by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and others is to be published Thursday October 12 on the web site of The Lancet, a medical journal. This study contends 655,00 Iraqi have died from violence in the Iraq War, a figure roughly thirteen times previous estimates. This report is being published, “fortuitously”, at the height of the US campaign season.

… Omar Fadil of Iraq the Model …writes, in part: “This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives. Behind every drop of blood is a noble story of sacrifice for a just cause that is struggling for living safe in freedom and prosperity.”

timmah! comments on Mr. “Scientist”:

“For Burnham’s study, researchers gathered data from a sample of 1,849 Iraqi households with a total of 12,801 residents from late May to early July. That sample was used to extrapolate the total figure.”

So they did some house-to-house, then did an extrapolation. The devil is in the details of that extrapolation. The last time this same researcher did this kind of extrapolation, he was laughed out of town for using some really dodgy statistical fudge factors that inflated the number of deaths by over an order of magnitude. The researcher also openly stated that the last study, released just before the 2004 presidential election, was explicitly political in its intent.

Bottom line: real scientists don’t need press releases.

Everybody wants to be a rock-star. Swimming pools, movie stars. It is so incredibly sad that a war being actively waged to free a neighbor from oppression is so politicized that even the doctors and scientists are fighting for their 15 minutes. What next? My local barista? Thanks, but no thanks. I like my lattes politic-free.

(delinked) LGF has additional links to prior publishing by The Lancet. Allahpundit asks “Where are all those bodies?” Texas Rainmaker explores the Democratic shadows behind it all. It’s all Bush’s fault. Yeah.

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Disturbingly Yellow uses similar research algorithms to find that 600K WMD have been found in Iraq! Stop the presses!
Unbelievable.

And here, the media trots out more “experts” to push the agenda of raising the minimum wage. The Anchoress wonders

Who wrote this thing? It’s an unsourced story without a byline that bitches about the GOP not doing what it wants. Did some intern make this up out of whole cloth and put it over the wire?

I too, wonder where these “Hundreds of leading economists” who “urged Congress” came from. Were they on C-Span? Where’s the evidence of their research? Was it published in some journal (oops, see above)? Videoed as part of a lecture series? Or are they the sort – “I’m not an economist, but I play one on TV.”

Oh, sorry, that’s right. The press doesn’t need EVIDENCE. For anything.