“A leader with the headline All the troubles in the world: Handover of Basra (page 28, December 17) used the phrase “Up to 85,000 Iraqi deaths ...” referring to the consequences of the invasion of Iraq. We should have said that this was the upper figure published by the Iraq Body Count at the time and we should have explained that Iraq Body Count publishes a tally of violent deaths recorded in media reports since the invasion. Other organisations, using different methods - including a 2006 survey of Iraqi households, which examined mortality trends - have produced much higher estimates, although each (estimate) is subject to dispute.”

(“Corrections and clarifications”, Guardian, 13 March 2008)

“That’s true, and by the same reasoning we could dismiss the fact that 6 million people were killed in the Holocaust, on the grounds that this figure has also been criticised, albeit by skinheads. The issue is not whether the study has been criticised, but whether the criticism is valid. …

“We can expect the US and UK governments to seek to minimise the extent of their war crimes. But it’s time the media stopped collaborating.”

(George Monbiot, “The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq”, Guardian, 8 November 2005)

You can see the original complaint here. The Guardian’s response to this email was simply silence: they failed to respond, and getting the above “clarification” published required a formal complaint through the Press Complaints Commission. Even then, the paper refused to acknowledge the figure of the Iraqi death toll (the Opinion Research Bureau, a group whose clients have included the BBC, the Conservative Party and the Financial Services Authority, performed a second survey in January 2008, which “confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict”); that the Iraq Body Count is, by its own admission, necessarily a severe underestimate; that the paper had reported uncritically the results of a survey applying similar methods of sampling and extrapolation to the Democratic Republic of Congo two months previously; or to refrain from insinuating that the figures of the Iraqi dead are somehow unreliable (not an issue with regard to the DRC study, curiously).

The Guardian, it should now be abundantly clear, is no exception to the British media’s bias in favour of established power – a bias that is likely to persist as long as our current media system remains in place. Until that system is fundamentally overhauled, we shall have to expect more of the same.