As Stalin-- who knew a thing or two about how to manipulate the dark side of human nature put it-- "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."
The coverage of the recent Lancet paper on the number of war-related deaths in Iraq perfectly illustrated this awful truth-- and how human beings have great difficulty accepting distressing realities. Especially in 2006 America.
Despite the fact that the methods used to estimate the death toll are widely accepted in the scientific community as valid, as my colleagues at stats.org point out here and here, coverage of the awful numbers focused on the political controversy over the results and did not even manage to report the study's tallies of causes of death correctly. Critiques echoed across the both the blogosphere and the mainstream media, as President Bush said that he did not consider the report "credible." Today, the Wall Street Journal weighed in with its version, but again, what it presents as a fatal flaw in the data is not seen that way by experts in these methods.
And, despite the media's usual penchant for overwhelmingly favoring anecdote as a way of making stories compelling, the coverage of this has been curiously dry. Not one of the stories I read was humanized by the story of a particular death or incident-- all focused on the political debate and/or the supposed methodological problems, even as the actual experts on this kind of data didn't find them.
It seems that we really don't want to think about what it's like in Iraq-- or the impact of the war on specific, human families. Though we usually prefer stories with raw emotional impact, here, strangely, we'd prefer to argue about numbers-- and what they mean to politicians. When there is a real problem with the data, I'm the first to say it must be carefully examined and qualified. But here, the problem doesn't appear to be with the methods, but the findings.
It seems we don't want to think too much about "a tragedy" when it comes to Iraq.