Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism
A paper in the current American Journal of Infection Control looks at how quickly – and erroneously – health information can spread via Twitter. ABC reports that one of the authors “said that even a single inaccurate tweet is broadcast on average to tens of thousands of people.”
Please allow us to issue that same reminder to ABC – with its much broader reach.
We stopped reviewing health news on ABC, CBS and NBC last fall because we had seen enough incomplete information after 228 stories reviewed in 3.5 years.
Besides ABC, it’s interesting that at this moment the only other major news organization I could find that reported on the Twitter health misinformation study was the New York Daily News. We don’t review them anymore either. Of 9 stories of theirs that we did review, 7 got scores of 0, 1 or 2 stars out of 5. One ran under the headline, “Latest anti-aging craze ‘Dracula Therapy’ involves injecting your face with your own blood.” Our review said, “Sensational, non-evidence-based – not much else to say about this one.”
People who live in glass houses…..
Overall, this was an easy-to-follow summary. But there was a clear difference between this and a competing Boston Globe story, which did a better job offering context and analysis.
This Boston Globe blog post gave its audience a more thorough understanding of an emerging approach to virtual colonoscopy than the Wall Street Journal.
Longer, but overall not any better, than the coverage from the competing LA Times story. Not thorough enough to explain what this preliminary research actually means for readers–which is not much at this point.
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