Media Mistakes in Coverage of the

Perhaps it was only fitting that news coverage of the Institute of Medicine’s(IOM) report on medical errors should start with a slip-up. When the IOM dis-tributed its meaty 223-page report last year, it imposed a routine press embargo to give journalists sufficient time to review the document carefully before the contents were made public. But NBC’s health correspondent, Robert Bazell, obtained a copy ahead of time, outside of the normal IOM distribution process. Feeling free to ignore the embargo, he broke the story on November 29, 1999, two days before the embar-go was to have been lifted. As a result, the report’s dramatic conclusions—especially the projection that anywhere from 44,000 to 98,000 Americans would die in 1999 from errors in hospitals—led that evening’s NBC and ABC evening news broad-casts, even though the news conference at which the IOM was planning to unveil the document was still two days away. By the next morning, November 30, coverage of the report had crested to tsu-nami-like heights. The IOM report got front-page treatment in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and other major daily newspapers. It was featured on all three network morning-news shows, in multiple reports on wire services, an