The civil war in Syria has now been dragging on for almost three years resulting in an estimated death count of over 100,000, as was asserted by the United Nations in July 2013. This week, the UN announced that it would discontinue a projected death count in Syria because of a fear that their numbers could possibly be “misleading.”

This creates an interesting dilemma because now, perhaps the most esteemed and trusted of all estimators in terms of calculating death counts has left the arena. The United Nations previously employed an extremely qualified group of statisticians that would cross-check numbers between various organizations including the Syrian government.

And that’s why the United Nations dropping out is a bigger deal than most people would like to admit. It highlights two really important components: One, that the United Nations believes their sources are becoming more and more unreliable, and two, that this war in Syria has become so politicized that bias has even infiltrated numbers – which are coined to “never lie.”

Al Jazeera even asserted that since the United Nations distanced itself from the Syrian numbers game, “given the inability of any third-party observer to directly verify information in war-ravaged Syria, no estimate can be truly reliable.”

A United Kingdom news source, the Observatory, has emerged as a media big shot in terms of reporting the death toll, but has been said to be “sympathetic to the opposition,” meaning the death toll they project is higher than reality would tell. And this makes sense, considering they have demonstrated a consistently higher death toll than other organizations, namely the UN.

Does the United Nation’s pulling out mean that there is an increasing apathy towards the Syrian conflict? Yes and no. Yes, because the length of the conflict and consistent, unsporadic nature of deaths has not garnered enough media control because it does not possess that “shock factor.” No, because the demands for death toll numbers is still extremely high.