BBC and Iraq violence- No news is good news

When it comes to Iraq it seems that the BBC motto is "No news is good news". Anyone who has been closely following the US surge strategy ( still referred to by the BBC as the "so-called surge") will have been aware that overall levels of violence had begun to plummet over the last month or so. Not that you would have known this very easily from reading the BBC website.

The BBC had been charting the progress of violence during the surge period but appeared for no obvious reason to stop charting the violence as soon as there appeared to be signs of a significant reduction in violence. See BBC Iraq violence chart. That was a few weeks ago. It has been obvious in the ensuing weeks that the violence had continued to be at a much lower level. Given how big a story Iraqi violence has been on the BBC and how often they have made it a subject of online debate you would think that they would see the significant drop in the violence as a big story. But no. There has been hardly a cheep from the BBC about it.

Today scanning the site I finally found an article buried away in the Iraq "latest news" list with the title "Iraq violent death rates plunge". However the story is given no prominence. This is despite the fact that the number of Iraqi civilians killed per month in bombings and shootings has fallen to the lowest level this year and that the figure for Sept was half the level that it was for August. US casualities were the smallest in a single month since July 2006.

Is the BBC biased? Hmm What do you think?

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