In the November 27 article "Iraqi Parliament OKs U.S. Troops for 3 More Years," by Christopher Torchia and Qassim Abdul-Zahra, AP editors approved the following characterization of Iraqi deaths suffered since the US invasion: "The war has claimed more than 4,200 American lives and killed a far greater, untold number of Iraqis."...

How's that for a statistically rigorous accounting? With the exactitude of a third-grader's book report cribbed from a novel's dust jacket copy, the AP--America's No. 1 wire news service--blankets U.S. news outlets with a quantification of Iraqi casualties that would've made Stalin proud.

While the AP completely giving up on estimating Iraqi deaths at all may appear outrageous to any American with a conscience, Jacobson sees precedent in the fact that

last April, when Opinion Research Business... released its January 2008 follow-up report estimating over 1 million Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion--which both reconfirmed its September 2007 estimate as well as supported prior findings of the 2006 John Hopkins study published in the British medical journal Lancet (650,000 deaths)--a LexisNexis search showed no U.S. mainstream news outlet carried the story.

See FAIR's recent Action Alert: "The Washington Post Undercounts Iraq Deaths: Paper's Feature Low-Balls Iraqi Casualties (10/27/08)