Press underreports wounded in Iraq

Scotty · Oct 23, 2003

I originally read a summary of this article last week, whcih first appeared in The New Republic. Now it has made the front page of Yahoo.

The national media (or "filter", as Bush likes to call it) has been focusing almost entirely on the deaths in Iraq, while ignoring those who are wounded. Many have had their limbs blown off or received severe facial injuries. The author, Lawrence Kaplan, has stated that Walter Reed Army Medical Center has taken on "the feel of a Civil War hospital."

This comes from the Yahoo article:

Few newspapers routinely report injuries in Iraq, beyond references to specific incidents. Since the war began in March, 1,927 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq, many quite severely. (The tally is current as of Oct. 20.) Of this number, 1,590 were wounded in hostile action, and 337 from other causes. About 20% of the injured in Iraq have suffered severe brain injuries, and as many as 70% "had the potential for resulting in brain injury," according to an Oct. 16 article in The Boston Globe.
Click to expand...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ep/20031023/en_bpiep/pressunderreportswoundediniraq

And here is a link to the original article in The New Republic:

America's near-invisible wounded

CrewDust · Oct 25, 2003

I saw an article about this a while back and the reason for not reporting the wounded was because it's to a point that soilders getting wounded was a regular enough occurance that it's not a story anymore.