"The Civilian Casualty Conundrum" by Lucinda Fleeson, in American Journalism Review (Apr. 2002), Univ. of Maryland, 1117 Journalism Bldg., College Park, Md. 20742–7111.

How many civilians did U.S. forces inadvertently kill in the war in Afghanistan? Critics, many eager to show that the number was large—more perhaps than the thousands of Americans killed on September 11—complained that the U.S. news media soft-pedaled civilian deaths and were too slow coming up with a total. Fleeson, a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is having none of it.

"Obtaining accurate accounts of civilian deaths is one of the most difficult challenges of war reporting," she writes. "Journalists must weigh conflicting information, exaggerations and lies as they constantly debate: How many sources do we need? How reliable are eyewitnesses, who might be in shock or have political agendas? What good are secondhand accounts?" Compounding the usual difficulties were Afghanistan’s terrain and "near Stone Age conditions." Correspondents had to travel in armed convoys and risk encounters with "bandits, warring tribes, land mines and stray bombs."

Unfazed by the absence of hard data, some American academics used the Internet to gather news accounts from around the world and came up with their own estimates of civilian deaths: 3,767 as of last December 6, said Marc W. Herold, an economist at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. But the studies depended entirely on others’ accounts, including ones that uncritically accepted second-hand reports. Herold, for example, relied on an opinion piece that merely asserted that 400 civilians had been slaughtered and on other reports that repeated unconfirmed Taliban claims. The foreign press, which displayed reports of civilian casualties more prominently than the U.S. news media did, gave more credence to such Taliban claims.

In January the Associated Press did a painstaking on-the-scene reconstruction. Laura King, an AP special correspondent, poured over hospital records, visited bombing sites, interviewed eyewitnesses and officials, and coordinated reports from fellow AP reporters elsewhere in Afghanistan. Cautioning that the figure King arrived at still was not definitive, Fleeson writes that "the February 11 story concluded that the civilian death toll probably ranged from 500 to 600."