With Lancet Leak, Are the Days of News Embargoes Numbered?

[rodeodance]

Media Takes: With Lancet Leak, Are the Days of News Embargoes Numbered?

By Liz Halloran

Posted 10/12/06
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The whispers had been out there for weeks: Johns Hopkins University researchers were preparing to announce that they had established statistical evidence that hundreds of thousands have died in Iraq since the 2003 U.S. invasion–tens of thousands more than would have died in prewar conditions.

And Tuesday afternoon, journalists finally got the anticipated heads-up from the university: The Iraq deaths survey–a follow-up to a mortality assessment released in 2004–had found that more than 600,000 people may have died of violent and nonviolent causes in the war-torn country over the past three years, 10 times the most widely accepted estimate.

But within the news business, how the report came out is now proving just as controversial as the findings themselves, which the Bush administration and others have dismissed as unreliable.

For the blockbuster information, released to reporters earlier, had come with a caveat: The results were embargoed. News organizations were told to hold the politically controversial information until 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, when the British scientific journal the Lancet would release the findings.....

[Lerkfish]

1. news stories are embargoed all the time.

nothing unusual about that.