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Schiavo coverage medically flawed, study says

By Mark Obbie

A new study documenting inaccuracies in four newspapers' coverage of the Terri Schiavo case focuses on the medical facts in hundreds of stories, rather than on the political and legal aspects. Here's the editors' synopsis of the study by five researchers in the journal Neurology of coverage from 1990 through 2005 in The New York Times, Washington Post, Tampa Tribune, and St. Petersburg Times:That made me wonder if the study suffered from a key misunderstanding -- accusing a newspaper of misstating facts when all it had done is quote a participant or observer in the battle -- but a close reading of the article shows that the authors carefully weighed the attribution of such claims and whether they were refuted by other experts (though these findings are tough to pluck out of the text and charts). The study seems to have a solid basis to argue that a scary number of stories reported medical impossibilities as fact, or did not challenge assertions by biased sources. Except for one, big caveat: Nowhere do the study's authors explain how certain Schiavo's diagnosis was before her death -- and how reporters were supposed to know the answer to that question in a heated battle with competing claims. That strikes me as the most crucial but unexamined starting point: Did journalists critically weigh the evidence, or did they mechanically provide "balance" and thereby mislead readers about the facts? The authors promise to continue their research, in part by studying more coverage of the case. I hope they also find a way to quantify whether reporters did all they could to put the competing claims into a truthful context.Despite those problems, the paper sheds new light on a critically important episode in legal journalism -- one we're particularly interested in here at Syracuse University. Questions about the case's impact on judicial independence were the spark that led to the creation of the Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media, a close affiliate of this blog's parent, the Carnegie Legal Reporting Program. Last semester, in the course that our two programs collaborate to teach, the Florida judge at the heart of the battle, George Greer, was part of our speaker series. The case continues to matter. According to the Neurology study, it's inspiring policy changes around the country concerning health proxies. And Tom Jacobs in Miller-McCune magazine (where I first learned of this) makes an interesting point about the journalistic lessons that should have been learned:

Full post as published by Lawbeat on August 15, 2008 (boomark / email).