Women and children first

In much the same dopey wide-eyed manner that RTE reacted to Jim Beglin's belated criticism of Steve Staunton – “they were Liverpool team-mates!” voices cried in amazement but with only a modicum of truth, since Beglin was on his way out of Anfield with injury when Staunton developed as a young reserve – the national broadcaster reported recently that the US had admitted “killing 17 civilians” in Iraq, “all of them women and children”.

All of them? Oh dear, what are the chances of that? How awful. But it wasn't all bad, because the Americans in the same incident also “killed 14 insurgents”, RTE reported as though it were a matter of fact. It should have been obvious to anyone in possession of a shred of intact critical faculties that the US definition of insurgent for the purposes of recounting these events was “a human being whose testicles have descended”, with all others meeting the standard for civilianhood.

In fairness, a Morning Ireland guest did eventually intimate that this “information” from the US military might be regarded as a case of getting its spin in first. But this seemed to represent the outer reaches of scepticism; even then there was little sense of the drop-in-the-bucket this massacre represented in terms of American slaughter of Iraqis. And four decades after journalists in Vietnam mocked the “Five O'Clock Follies”, when military spokesman dished out, among other things, “enemy” casualty figures that were clearly utter spoofery – the great muckraker I.F. Stone did some elementary statistical analysis to discredit them – reporters still bring us such numbers as though they could be regarded as in any way authoritative.