USA Today is pushing the envelope with its story, “Mother’s Day gift guide: 5 picks for a health & beauty-obsessed mom like Gwyneth Paltrow.” The first line of the article refers to the actress as a “(self-proclaimed) health and beauty guru.”
But the story is just crappy click-bait because there’s nothing of substance about Gwyneth Paltrow’s health and beauty tips. (Granted, that might be hard to do under any circumstances.) But using her name was just the lure to suck you in.
This might not be the best week for USA Today to take that approach, since this week Timothy Caulfield’s new book, “Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? How the Famous Sell Us Elixirs of Health, Beauty & Happiness,” was released.
While the heading on the USA Today web page where this appeared is ENTERTAIN THIS with a subhead of Fashion, we found it through a health search, as shown in the image at left.
The piece offers “some ideas about how you can treat the health and beauty-obsessed mom in your life — without dropping, like, $500 on a Goop-endorsed tank top.”
Here are a couple of the gems it promotes, without questioning any of the evidence for any of these – just outright “journalistic” promotion:
Or, you could get Mom a copy of Caulfield’s book.
On Vox.com, Julia Belluz wrote, “This professor put Gwyneth Paltrow’s health advice to the test. The truth is even worse than you’d think.”
But, nice try, USA Today. At least you spelled her name correctly.
Opinions on other issues in news, journals, PR, advertising, marketing
In researching this @bopinon column on medical misinformation, I reached @garyschwitzer who said the information pollution problem goes back to the 1980s, when PR people started tempting reporters with easy, uplifting, prepackaged hype.
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