How did the Science article come about?
Alberto Palloni and I were interested in combining our different approaches to a particular problem, as we had often done in the past. The media coverage of Darfur had settled into a pattern we found very disturbing. The State Department had made the lowest estimate of any organization in about April of 2005, that somewhere between 60,000 and 140,000 people had died. That had the effect of letting the media do a kind of one-sentence statement that it was tens of thousands who had died. We knew rather conclusively when we started that the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands. The challenge was to scientifically and persuasively make the case [for the higher number], and then frame the issue in a way that would attract the attention of the media. We now have conclusive evidence that what we were trying to do worked out. We looked at the news articles in major reporting services before and after the Science article appeared. What we see with both Reuters and the BBC is that prior t
