Yesterday, The New York Times' Denise Grady wrote about a study published in the Lancet that described a sharp decline in worldwide maternal mortality rates. In the middle was a seemingly uncorroborated claim from a Lancet editor, Dr. Richard Horton that advocacy groups had tried to pressure the journal into holding off on the study's publication:
Dr. Horton said the advocates, whom he declined to name, wanted the new information held and released only after certain meetings about maternal and child health had already taken place.
I have sympathy for the position reporters are in when they have a really important fact no one will go on the record with, and agree that this probably should have been part of the story. But as both the Columbia Journalism Review and Salon point out, there might be real reasons for the controversy that were completely ignored in much of the coverage.
First, CJR notes that there are likely to be questions over the study's methodologies and findings. Horton himself noted that questions were raised during the peer review process that should be good points of debate, especially because the findings of this study were very different from those of a United Nations study:
Ultimately, Horton concluded, “given the dramatic difference” between the results of the Lancet study and those reported by the U.N. in 2008 ... which found that little progress had been made toward reducing maternal mortality, “a process needs to be put in place urgently to discuss these figures, their implications, and the actions, global and in country, that should follow.” That perspective, as well a mention of uncertainties in the maternal mortality data, should have been included in the Times's story.
Secondly, as Tracy Clark-Flory writes on Broadsheet, it's probably more accurate to say that countries with big populations, like China and India, saw declines in maternal mortality rates. That would mean fewer deaths worldwide, but it doesn't diminish the problem in many other countries. And, as Clark-Flory relates, another recent study found that the maternal mortality rate in the the U.S. has been rising, largely because of poor access to health care. So if the message in the Times story seemed too simple and straightforward, that's because it probably was.
-- Monica Potts
