I'm watching Outfoxed with Jeff and Brian. If you're not familiar with it, Outfoxed is a documentary that sets out to expose Fox News Channel as a conservative propaganda machine. I admit is a very biased piece, but they just showed a clip that I just HAVE to blog about.

In the clip (from August 26, 2003), anchor Brit Hume says the following on air:

277 U.S. soldiers have now died in Iraq, which means that, statistically speaking, U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California, which is roughly the same geographical size. The most recent statistics indicate that California has more than 2,300 homicides each year, which means about 6.6 murders each day. Meanwhile, our U.S. troops have been in Iraq for 160 days, which means that they are incurring about 1.7 deaths, including illness and accidents, each day.

At first, that almost makes sense... and I'm sure a LOT of FNC's viewers took it at face value. But if you look closer, you'll see what Britt forgot to mention:

At the time, there were approximately 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and the population of California is roughly 33.8 million. When Brian, Jeff, and I took the two figures above (6.6 and 1.7) and adjusted them for the difference in population, we got the following:

	Population	Deaths per Day	Deaths/day per mil. pop
CA Residents	33,800,000	6.6	0.20
US Troops in Iraq	150,000	1.7	11.33

So, at the time, the chance of a US troop dying in Iraq was actually 58 times higher than the chance of a California resident being murdered. Can we all agree that Mr. Hume (Managing Editor for the Fox News Channel's DC Bureau) was at best irresponsible, and at worst intentionally misleading?

As a side note, Brian has been to Iraq and to California, and asked me to let anyone reading this know that he would much prefer to return to California.

WTF! I happened to be channel surfing, and stopped for a moment on Fox News... where I saw a discussion of comments made by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). Durbin compared American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, and I agree that he took things too far in making that comparison. What really upset me, though, were the comments made by the Fox News anchor and her guests. At one point, she actually said "Whether or not he apologizes, his words are already being played on Al-Jazeera and helping terrorists harm Americans abroad and here at home!"

It's really too bad nobody has told the terrorists of the world that it's impossible to mistreat a prisoner if you're feeding them well. Maybe Al-Jazeera should air the press conference held by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-CA).

For nearly every question that reporters asked about aggressive interrogations and lack of judicial process involving the 500-plus detainees, Hunter's answers were "honey-glazed chicken" or "lemon-baked fish," served with whole wheat pita, various vegetables and fruit.
-- Copley News Service