Demagogue

Bloggers have long complained that members of the media are too lazy to do any actual research and have a tendency to just blindly report the "facts" put forth by those in power.

On Tuesday, Eric Reeves released his "Darfur Mortality Update" in which he chastised those in the media for repeatedly reporting to 70,000 had died in Darfur without ever bothering to understand just where that number came from or what it meant

Most news sources reporting on Darfur continue to cite a figure of "70,000" for total mortality in Darfur, even though this is a figure that, when tracked to its origin, is based only upon a September 13, 2004 UN World Health Organization (WHO) estimate of mortality in accessible camps for displaced persons, limited to the period from April 2004 through early September of 2004.

The figure was not, and was never meant to be, a total mortality assessment for Darfur.

The figure, originally "50,000" (September 13, 2004) and subsequently updated to the current "70,000" (November 2004), is more significant for what it does not include than for what it does: it does not include mortality for the period February 2003 to March 2004; it does not include mortality among the more than 200,000 refugees in Chad; it does not include conflict-related mortality in inaccessible regions of Darfur or among unregistered displaced persons in camp and urban environs; it does not include mortality since mid-November 2004; it does not include estimates of what epidemiologists refer to as "deferred mortality" (consequent upon present trauma and deprivation); and most significantly, it does not include a figure for violent deaths.

And yet still the figure of "70,000 deaths" persists. In some cases, even the September 2004 figure of "50,000 deaths" has not been updated: scandalously, an editorial in yesterday's Los Angeles Times used precisely this outdated and extremely limited figure: "The death toll in Darfur is estimated at 50,000" (The Los Angeles Times [editorial] January 17, 2005).

This is shamefully irresponsible journalism.

By Reeves' estimates, some 200,000 people have died from disease and malnutrition and another 215,000 have died at the hands of the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed.

Strangely, the media didn't listen to me about a month ago when I lodged a similar complaint, but they seem to be listening to Reeves.

Well, at least the AP is

Although the commonly cited estimates of the death toll in Sudan's Darfur region refer to fatalities from disease and hunger, analysis of a recent U.S.-commissioned survey strongly suggests that many thousands - at a minimum - have been killed in violence as well.

The AP doesn't provide any exact figure of the number of deaths, but at least they do admit that there is a "widespread consensus that the findings indicate the death toll from violence to be in the many thousands."

It is about time.