pollux
Posts: 657
Joined: 7/26/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Lilmissbossy I got twice as many results searching for "Israeli Casualties" as I did for "Palestinian Casualties". Considering the difference in casualty numbers, you'd have to agree something is awry. A couple of points: 1. Google News aggregates news from all over the world, not just the US. It includes sites such as antiwar.com, as well as China News Daily and Al-Jazeera. 2. Israel is fighting a two-front war, so you have to include the Lebanese (Hezbollah) in addition to the Palestinians (Hamas). Still, the numbers are interesting, but I don't think they support your point very well. "Israeli casualties": 506 "Palestinian casualties": 320 "Lebanese casualties": 53 The ratio of occurences of the phrase referring to non-Israeli casualties vs. Israeli casualties is (320 + 53 = 373) : 506 = 0.73. Hm... That's closer to 75% than 50%. Kinda hard to make the case that there are twice as many occurrences of that phrase with those numbers. What happens if we look at the phrase "... civilians"? "Israeli civilians": 2200 "Palestinian civilians": 2800 "Lebanese civilians": 3030 Gee, that doesn't look very fair at all, does it? Israeli civilians are mentioned 2200 times. Non-Israeli civilians are mentioned 5830 times. 2200 : 5830 = 0.38. So non-Israeli civilians are mentioned 3 times as frequently as Israeli civilians. In any event, I'm not sure what point we're making here, since the argument is about US media "ignoring" non-Israeli casualties, and Google News looks at media from all over the world. In the first case, it looks like the world media may be biased in the way you suggest. In the second case it looks like the numbers don't support your argument, and in fact make exactly the opposite point. So, go figure. Just so we're clear: my issue is with meatcleaver, who claimed the US media ignores or footnotes Arab casualties. I gave three examples from first-tier US newspapers who each have Arab deaths featured in prominent headlines today, so I don't think he has a defensible point.
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