There are a lot more people dying in Afghanistan than the media is reporting, according to University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold.

This Thursday, April 4, at 6pm, Herold will join a panel for a discussion entitled, "Media at War: Information and Democracy Post-9/11," at California State University Monterey Bay''s Institute for Teledramatic Arts and Technology. The event will be broadcast live on channel 42 (cable channel 26 on AT&T Broadband in the Monterey/Salinas area, and channel 17 in North Monterey County).

Herold, professor of economics and gender studies, has been keeping a tally of discrepancies in civilian casualties in Afghanistan as part of a research project for a new book. He says he began to tabulate and record the number of civilian casualties in a large database soon after the war began. He recorded the number of deaths according to location of province, using sources from newspaper accounts from Australia and Canada, as well as from non-governmental organizations. His numbers "have stood up to scrutiny and remained solid," he says. They have been quoted by the BBC, The New York Times, and the Boston Globe.

"The project stemmed from my interests in people''s everyday lives," Herold says. He says people''s lives there have not changed much in the past 50 years. "People have been making their own clothes since 1950 and there has been many documented hardships over there since."

The two other speakers will be Sunil Sharma, founder and editor of the Dissident Voice News Service, who will talk about the domestic effects of the War on Terrorism in the U.S., and David Cook, a hip-hop disc jockey from Oakland, who will discuss the pressures he says editors and others are under to suppress certain types of information because it might offend their advertisers.

To be a member of the studio audience email globalwakeupcall@hotmail.com, and put "TV audience" in the subject heading. A brief question-and-answer session will be open to all viewers and listeners after the show.