Source: The Columbia Journalism Review
by Lila Guterman
March/April 2005

Last fall, a major public-health study appeared in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, only to be missed or dismissed by the American press. To the extent it was covered at all, the reports were short and usually buried far from the front pages of major newspapers. The results of the study could have played an important role in future policy decisions, but the press’s near total silence allowed the issue to pass without debate.

The study, though scientifically robust, had several elements working against it. One was its subject matter: Researchers had done a door-to-door survey of nearly 8,000 people in thirty-three locations in Iraq to estimate how many people had died as a consequence of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation. Americans, and their media, were reluctant to accept the study’s conclusions — that the number was likely around 100,000; that violence had become the primary cause of death since the invasion; that more than half of those killed were women and children.

Adding to the scent of propaganda was the fact that The Lancet had rushed the study into print at the lead author’s request. Some reporters may have guessed that the rushed publication — with the U.S. presidential election looming — meant that the study itself was essentially political. But medical journals often fast-track papers that have immediate importance to doctors or to public-health policy. When I was working on a follow-up article about the study for The Chronicle of Higher Education in January, I made three phone calls to other major medical journals and quickly discovered that the manuscript’s turnaround time, about four weeks, was not outside the norm for fast-tracked papers and did not necessarily mean that editing and peer review had been compromised.

But there’s more to the matter than ideology. The way the researchers presented their results made it difficult for statistics-shy journalists to grasp their significance. The scientists, from Johns Hopkins University,