Chapter 2: Reporting the Story

Discover—Reporting

Super Doctors - WFAA-TV, Dallas, Texas

Curiosity plus experience can often equal a great story. Super Doctors, reported by Byron Harris of WFAA-TV in Dallas, Texas, grew out of two stories he'd reported earlier.

First, he'd learned that magazines sometimes use flawed "studies" to determine who's the best or worst at something. When "Men's Health" magazine named Dallas the fattest city in the United States, Harris reported that it was based on only one measurement: the number of health clubs per capita.

Second, he'd covered the story of an oncologist in Dallas who had two patients die in his care within a few months of each other; they both died from overdoses of chemotherapy. Some time later, Harris noticed that doctor's name on a local magazine's list of "super doctors." Harris wondered how that could possibly have happened, and he knew enough to ask how the magazine came up with its list.

"It turns out that 'super doctors' is not anything except a marketing company in Minneapolis," he said. "And they say they have a rigorous scientific selection process, which is really nothing. They just make it up. They say 'we have a board' of this and that, and I said, 'Who's on the board?' They wouldn't tell me. And I said, 'What questions do you ask?' Well, we ask one question: which doctor would you go to yourself. I said, 'Is that really an index of quality?' Ultimately they quit talking to me; they hired a PR guy. I sent him three pages of questions. That guy helped me a lot because he was a jerk."

Harris knew enough about methodology to know that the survey was bogus. "There are people who purport to be journalists who have only a tangential contact with methodology, and this magazine editor was one such person," he said. "He couldn't understand why, if he sent out questionnaires, wasn't that good enough? Well, no, it's not good enough. What's the demo[graphic] of who you're getting answers from, how do you choose them, do you just ask one question? Are you kidding me?

"These magazines will say 'we got 25,000 votes.' Well it's technically true but what that means is, they got responses from 1,000 doctors, each of whom answered 25 questions [about different specialties]."

Harris didn't stop there. Knowing that at least one of the doctors on the list had been sued for malpractice, he and a producer took the list of 643 "super doctors" to the county courthouse and spent four hours looking them up. Harris calls the story that aired "conventional wisdom exploded."