Robert Naiman: Yesterday a radio interviewer in South Africa asked me what had been the response of the “mainstream media in the United States” to Just Foreign Policy’s ongoing estimate of the Iraqi death toll from the U.S. invasion and occupation, which on Thursday crossed the one million mark.

Sadly, I had to report that it has been ignored by mainstream media, even the wire services. But this is hardly surprising. A main motivation for constructing the web counter was to keep the “Lancet study” alive. The “Lancet study,” you’ll recall, was a study published last fall in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. The media largely buried the Lancet study when it was published - and have largely ignored the question of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion - so it’s little surprise that they have ignored our attempt to shine a light on this question.