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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 2/19/2005 12:03:09 PM
Title: Hundreds of thousands of deaths (not 70,000)
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From THOMAS LANG: David Rubenstein asks how to improve the accuracy of reporting on the number of people killed in Darfur, Sudan. There doesn’t appear to be any easy answer.

I've been writing about this problem since the end of the last summer for the American Prospect and CJR Daily and it doesn’t seem like the coverage is going to improve. What’s truly disturbing about the problem is that continuing to report the 70,000 number defies simple logic. You don’t have to know anything about the Sudan to know the number is too low.

For example, two weeks ago the Economist ran a Leader that in one sentence proclaimed that 70,000 people have perished and then two sentences later reported that "some 10,000 lives are still being lost every month." How is that possible if the 70,000 estimate was calculated in October of last year. At the very least that number stands at just over 100,000.

For what it is worth, I think the problem is that the people writing about the Sudan -- the field reporters -- are unconcerned with keeping up with the nitty gritty details of the exact number of dead. They are rightly more concerned with chronicling the horrors of war. Emily Wax, the Washington Post's reporter in Sudan told me that "truth is the first casualty of war" and that she writes “tens of thousands" because everyone agrees on that.

Rubenstein makes it clear that not everyone agrees on that number. Genocide expert Samantha Power recently cited a figure as high 200,000 in a New York Times op-ed. If I were an editor I’d order my reporters to, at least, characterize the casualties in the hundreds of thousands. But, then again, I’m not an editor. Just a media critic who thinks everyone could be doing a better job covering Darfur.

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