The New York Times sent an email "breaking news" alert and also posted an article to its Web site about the latest batch of Wikileaks documents asserting that, as the Times put it, "The deaths of Iraqi civilians — at the hands mainly of other Iraqis, but also of the American military — appear to be greater than the numbers made public by the United States during the Bush administration."
Well, that is one way of looking at it. But another way to look at it is that, even with the worst face that the Times-Wikileaks combination could put on it (Headline "A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq" — "In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures" ), the civilian casualty toll is far lower than the 600,000 that had been claimed by two researchers at the Bloomberg School of Health at Johns Hopkins University.
The Times had reported the Bloomberg School of Health study in 2006 in an article that ran under the headline, "Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says." The study was controversial at the time; the New York Sun did an editorial about it.
So the Times could have put out a news alert about the Wikileaks archive that, instead of saying Iraqi civilian deaths appear to be greater than the numbers made public by the United States during the Bush administration, said instead that the estimated Iraqi civilian deaths are only a sixth of the absurdly exaggerated claims made by researchers at a major American university at a school funded by and named after the mayor of New York, claims that had been parroted by the New York Times.
The Times story about the Wikileaks civilian death estimate doesn't even make mention of the Johns Hopkins-Lancet 600,000 figure. It's weird.