Digby: Snooker List

Eleanor Clift put together a column in which she outlines a few of the Bush administration lies for the year. (I'm sure we could come up with a list that goes on for days with that one.) But what is more interesting to me is the following:

The administration had the media snookered much of the time. Stories that were underreported largely because they ran counter to administration spin include:

• A study that shows the death toll among Iraqis has reached as high as 655,000. Extensively researched by teams of doctors commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., the study—and the controversy over its sampling methodology—was given scant attention by the media because it was so far out of line from the administration’s projection of perhaps 50,000 civilian deaths. That’s still a horrendous death toll of innocents in a country the size of Iraq. Now, 100 bodies routinely turn up every day in Baghdad’s morgues, the victims of sectarian violence, and the report, published in October in The Lancet medical journal, seems to be closer to the truth than anything the Bush administration has acknowledged.

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