You didn’t explore many of the assertions you made in your article. You led your readers to believe that things were done wrong when you didn’t explore the facts.

You misused sepsis guidelines that were intended to apply to adults, then you hid the disclaimer at the bottom of the guidelines, then, when you were caught, you tried to justify your actions by stating that Rory was “adult sized.” None of those assertions was medically appropriate and you either knew or should have known that before making them.
Even if you did contact the hospital and ask for the doctors’ side of the story, offering releases from Rory’s family, you knew that HIPAA and or hospital policies would prevent the doctors from being able to speak candidly to you. And you hid that fact from readers who don’t know the intricacies of patient privacy laws and hospital policies.
You were correct in noting that labs were not addressed. Yet you have no idea who ordered them, who saw them, when they were seen, and whether they would even have made any difference.
Finally, you selectively published names of physicians who treated Rory and subjected them to public harrassment when, in all likelihood, they behaved appropriately. We don’t have enough information to make a conclusion one way or another on that point, but it was entirely inappropriate to do that to those doctors without more conclusive evidence. And you didn’t name the other people whose role in this story was much more definitive.
Because of all of this, you’ve dragged doctors through the mud and you’ve dragged Rory’s family through a vetting of his care that they neither expected nor deserved.
Through Rory’s death, you were able to capture your readers’ attention. You had the opportunity to teach millions of people about sepsis, how sepsis develops, warning signs of sepsis, even how antibiotic overuse contributes to more dangerous types of sepsis. You could have created such a positive influence to honor his memory. Instead, you used your words to cast blame and public hazing.

How are people going to remember Rory because of your article? Some will remember that he was a great kid whose life was cut short by a terrible and rare disease. Some will probably think that the horrible doctors and hospital system killed Rory. All the medical community will remember about Rory Staunton is that some journalist wrote a poorly-researched article about his death and got his pound of flesh from the docs who treated him.

Congratulations.

This is the end of the discussion.
Comments are now turned off on these posts.
If someone chooses to perform a search on Jim Dwyer’s journalistic integrity or Jill Abramson’s editorial integrity, they’ll hopefully have much more information on which to make that determination after reading these posts and comments.

The prime goal in all articles, not just this one, is to provide sufficient detail to give the readers confidence that the account is grounded in reality — that real people were involved, at an actual place, on particular dates. Such details make it possible for others to do the same reporting and replicate, repudiate, or revise the results.
You ask if it’s effective to include the names, and I don’t know the answer to that. The use of such particular details is, in the view of virtually all American journalists, the path to reliability.
You’re right that names are withheld from articles, typically when a fatality is involved, as in a car crash or in a combat situation, to provide enough time for the authorities to notify family members. Clearly, that circumstance did not apply here.
Finally, the individual I quoted anonymously in this article, who said the emergency room doctor was “hyper-conscientious,” provided a perspective on the ER doctor that I thought would be helpful to the readers.
Thank you for your consideration of this.

Thank you for the reply, it is greatly appreciated.  However, I asked a very different question and much deeper question, I think, than your paraphrased version of my question.  I asked this: “From a journalistic standpoint, in what way was printing the names of the physicians involved necessary to accomplish the goals of your article?”

Often times, I’ve noticed in the examples you mention such as car crashes and other calamities, one does see a disclaimer such as “names have been with held until further investigation….,” or “names have been withheld until family has been notified”. You even site an example of withholding one physician name, but not others, in your own article.  Why withhold one name and not the other?  If the unnamed person wasn’t pertinent enough to the events to be mentioned by name, why mention them at all? I am not a professional journalist so I won’t claim to know or imply that I know the right answers to these questions.

Would the article have lost any of it’s stated or implied goals or effectiveness if the physicians were not mentioned by name?  Might it have been equally as effective?  More effective? I don’t know, and you don’t even have to answer as far as I’m concerned.  These are just the questions that have interested me as I’ve watched the arguments fly back and forth about bands and CBCs.

Thank you for the replies.

To state the obvious, we have different perspectives. To you, I failed glaringly by not saying whether one doctor or another, one nurse or another, ordered the blood tests for Rory Staunton and didn’t read them.

I don’t know whose job it was. I tried but couldn’t figure that out. Someone or some ones — his pediatrician, his ER doctor, the nursing staff, a physician assistant if one was involved — should have read them.

Perhaps, as with the causes of an airplane crash, multiple failures will emerge in time.

To me, the most significant fact is not who didn’t read or follow up on the lab work, but that it wasn’t used in looking after the dire needs of Rory.

Most non-medical people believe that when blood is drawn for tests, that someone in the chain of care will read and rely on the results in order to make judgments about how to proceed. It is dumbfounding that they would not be. Perhaps it happens all the time and there’s usually no bad outcome. People often take their eyes off the road when driving. Only once in a while do they crash.

NYU (and other hospitals) are taking steps to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I realize that I have not answered all the criticisms you level, but you attribute many things to me that I didn’t write, and also accuse me of failing to do things that I, in documented fact, actually did. A constructive dialogue that tried to untangle insinuation from supposition from legitimate criticism would consume time and energy but probably not shed much light. People can read the original article on Rory Staunton (it’s here: http://nyti.ms/NjLrPH)
and decide if it’s a responsible account of a serious lapse or an act of journalistic ignorance. Perhaps it’s best to conclude my comments with that.

Thank you for having posted my replies, however truncated, naive or dishonest they may seem to you.

You asked: why include the names of the doctors involved in the case of Rory Staunton?

Just as every news organization does in covering car crashes and plane accidents, I included the names of the individuals and institutions involved in this calamity. Those are basic requirements in assembling a narrative.

(The only person not named in the article was a senior associate of an emergency room doctor. That senior associate was anonymously quoted describing the ER doctor as “hyper-conscientious.”)

You asked: why include the names of the doctors involved in the case of Rory Staunton?

Just as reporters do when covering car crashes and plane accidents, I included the available names of the individuals and institutions involved in this calamity. Those are basic requirements in assembling a narrative.

(The only person not named in the article was a senior associate of an emergency room doctor. That senior associate was anonymously quoted describing the ER doctor as “hyper-conscientious.”)

For a man of your journalistic expertise, answering this question should be much easier than arguing the intricate medical details of CBCs, bands, and pediatric sepsis with medical doctors:

From a journalistic standpoint, in what way was printing the names of the physicians involved necessary to accomplish the goals of your article?