The Life of Facts
Tuesday my newspaper ran half a dozen letters to the editor, as it usually does. One of them had an editor's note attached to the end. That's unusual.
The letter addressed a notorious local case. In a burn barrel behind an Amish school, children found a newborn baby with her throat cut, dead. The letter was one anyone could have seen coming, if anyone in the shock of such a case can be cynical enough to be thinking of letters to the editor. As a former editorial page editor, I can't help it.
The writer noted that police and authorities are trying to track down the killer, and plan to prosecute him or her. Then the writer said that if the parents "had decided to have an abortion five days before" the baby was born, "no crime in the eyes of man would have been committed."
The editor's note said, "Elective abortion is banned when a fetus is deemed to be viable. That usually occurs after the second trimester."
That's probably true (I'm not up on the local abortion laws), but it seemed rather a quibble. The writer didn't address the issue of viability (or of danger to the life of the mother, or of incest, always a possibility in this area). I suppose there are situations in which it would be legal to abort a late-term pregnancy. I don't want to open the abortion hornet's nest here, what interested me was the editor's decision to step out from behind the curtain in this case.
Letters to the editor are the American newspaper's equivalent of the Hyde Park soapbox. The whole rest of the paper belongs to the editors. This third of a page is the people's place. An intrusion of editorial comment needs to be justified.
Or, what do you do if a letter to the editor arrives that has obvious factual errors. Do you spike it? Do you run it and hope some reader writes in later to correct it? Or do you append an editor's note? It's a tough call sometimes. But however you call it, you ought to be consistent.
And we're not.
On the same page as the abortion letter another writer attempted to justify the "X" in "Xmas," but along the way he completey mis-explained its evolution from the Greek "chi." No editor's note pointed that out.
But this was the one that got me. In another letter from the same edition, a writer ranted about Iraq: "the Iraqi casualties (mostly innocent) total more than 100,000. That is a lot of dead Arabs .... How many more will we have to kill before we are satisfied with our 'revenge.' What an obscenity!"
According to a library search, that 100,000 figure has turned up in our newspaper's letters section at least five times since Nov. 8.
And it's wrong. That is, it's a wild guess based on flawed statistics. But because it comes from a "Lancet" study, it is passed off as a hard fact. To call a guess a fact is a lie, and a dangerous one. (It's what the war opponents accuse the Bush administration of doing.)
The 100,000 statistic was picked apart soon after it appeared. The authors of the study seem to have counted on the public's gullibility about statistics. They gloss the fuzz in their math, but readers who knew better realized this huge, round, memorable number was all but plucked out of thin air (or some other place).
The civilian casualty numbers most often quoted by war opponents to that point were between 10,000 and 15,000. The "Lancet" authors did the best they could with the data. I suspect they were bitterly opposed to the U.S. military overthrow of Saddam, probably for the usual reasons. I suspect they wanted to find a breath-takingly high number. The "Lancet" authors didn't have near enough data to make even an educated guess. They made one anyhow, and it was useless, but they ran with it.
And thanks in part to our newspaper, it's now passed off as a fact.
As the Slate article explains:
The letter addressed a notorious local case. In a burn barrel behind an Amish school, children found a newborn baby with her throat cut, dead. The letter was one anyone could have seen coming, if anyone in the shock of such a case can be cynical enough to be thinking of letters to the editor. As a former editorial page editor, I can't help it.
The writer noted that police and authorities are trying to track down the killer, and plan to prosecute him or her. Then the writer said that if the parents "had decided to have an abortion five days before" the baby was born, "no crime in the eyes of man would have been committed."
The editor's note said, "Elective abortion is banned when a fetus is deemed to be viable. That usually occurs after the second trimester."
That's probably true (I'm not up on the local abortion laws), but it seemed rather a quibble. The writer didn't address the issue of viability (or of danger to the life of the mother, or of incest, always a possibility in this area). I suppose there are situations in which it would be legal to abort a late-term pregnancy. I don't want to open the abortion hornet's nest here, what interested me was the editor's decision to step out from behind the curtain in this case.
Letters to the editor are the American newspaper's equivalent of the Hyde Park soapbox. The whole rest of the paper belongs to the editors. This third of a page is the people's place. An intrusion of editorial comment needs to be justified.
Or, what do you do if a letter to the editor arrives that has obvious factual errors. Do you spike it? Do you run it and hope some reader writes in later to correct it? Or do you append an editor's note? It's a tough call sometimes. But however you call it, you ought to be consistent.
And we're not.
On the same page as the abortion letter another writer attempted to justify the "X" in "Xmas," but along the way he completey mis-explained its evolution from the Greek "chi." No editor's note pointed that out.
But this was the one that got me. In another letter from the same edition, a writer ranted about Iraq: "the Iraqi casualties (mostly innocent) total more than 100,000. That is a lot of dead Arabs .... How many more will we have to kill before we are satisfied with our 'revenge.' What an obscenity!"
According to a library search, that 100,000 figure has turned up in our newspaper's letters section at least five times since Nov. 8.
And it's wrong. That is, it's a wild guess based on flawed statistics. But because it comes from a "Lancet" study, it is passed off as a hard fact. To call a guess a fact is a lie, and a dangerous one. (It's what the war opponents accuse the Bush administration of doing.)
The 100,000 statistic was picked apart soon after it appeared. The authors of the study seem to have counted on the public's gullibility about statistics. They gloss the fuzz in their math, but readers who knew better realized this huge, round, memorable number was all but plucked out of thin air (or some other place).
The civilian casualty numbers most often quoted by war opponents to that point were between 10,000 and 15,000. The "Lancet" authors did the best they could with the data. I suspect they were bitterly opposed to the U.S. military overthrow of Saddam, probably for the usual reasons. I suspect they wanted to find a breath-takingly high number. The "Lancet" authors didn't have near enough data to make even an educated guess. They made one anyhow, and it was useless, but they ran with it.
And thanks in part to our newspaper, it's now passed off as a fact.
As the Slate article explains:
The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference—the number of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion period—signifies the war's toll. That number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:
We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.
Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.
