Someone stop me if you ever hear me say that I’ve seen the worst TV health news piece. The bottom keeps dropping. This piece is a contender for bottom-dweller. (Note: before you can actually enjoy the piece, you’ll have to watch a CBS promo in this clip for all the awards they’ve won. And you’ll [...]
If there’s any doubt about the impact of public relations efforts on news coverage of health products, look at what the PR company Fleishman-Hillard brags about on its website. They describe a campaign for a diarrhea vaccine. From their website: Don’t Leave Home Without It Fleishman-Hillard launches Dukoral. A three-pronged media relations campaign resulted in [...]
Last year the Kaiser Family Foundation asked me to research and write a report on the state of health journalism in the US. That report will be released and discussed at a news conference in Washington, DC, in three weeks. The announcement was made yesterday:
A collection of recent stories by mid-sized Midwestern newspapers are worthy of special attention. They all reported on issues of conflict of interest in health care and medical research. A series of reports by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked tough questions about financial ties between drug companies and medical school physician faculty members. * "Doctors [...]
There are WMD’s lurking inside your body. And you better find them ASAP. In its health section today, the Washington Post gives men of all ages screening test advice – much of it not grounded in the best medical evidence or at least not reflecting real controversies in health care. They do one of those [...]
Some of the very disparate views about how health news should be covered in the daily news media were on display recently at a debate, sponsored by the Guardian newspaper, held during a Lancet conference in London. BMJ associate editor Rebecca Coombes wrote about it in last week’s journal. Excerpts: The event exposed the gulf [...]
Newer is not always better. Evidence is important. Simple themes, oft forgotten in health journalism. Back in October, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story talked of the wonders of virtual colonoscopy, saying it replaced the dreaded colonoscope and lessened patient risk. It used these words to refer to the technology: “science fiction, Star Wars, video game, Disney [...]
“The specter of the government coming between doctor and patient raised its head again,” Trudy Lieberman writes, about a CNN segment that she says “ranks among the most irresponsible health stories I’ve seen over the past year.” Which reminds me: what’s the update on the Surgeon General choice? Do you think Daschle’s conflict of interest [...]
Kudos to Chen May Yee and the Star Tribune for a front-page story on how screening tests offered by for-profit companies may cause more harm than good and may be a waste of money. I slammed the Strib almost exactly one year ago for a non evidence-based article promoting screening tests. So let this blog [...]
WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 –The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is the first news organization to receive an award for Excellence in Health Journalism from the Boston-based Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making. The Foundation, which presented the award yesterday at its Research and Policy Forum in Washington DC, chose the Milwaukee newspaper because of its consistently high [...]
We look for more critical analysis of FDA expedited approval of a new drug like this.
Five-star story on small study that tries to counter large body of evidence on soy supplements for hot flashes.
Our reviewers, including a leading women’s health clinician-researcher, felt this piece would have been benefited from more data and context.
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