Abstract
David Henry and colleagues review Australian news stories over a five-year period to assess whether quality is associated with who wrote the story: a specialist health journalist or a non-specialist.
Highlights
The news media have a crucial role in supporting health literacy, and multiple surveys have shown the extent to which the public relies on them for information about medical advances [1,2]
Some outlets are capable of producing excellent stories, but common flaws across all media include lack of attention to the quality of the research evidence, exaggerated estimates of benefits, inadequate coverage of potential harm, no information on the costs of new treatments and a failure to identify unbiased expert sources
The reasons for poor-quality journalism are complex, and include lack of specialised knowledge, time pressures on journalists, space limitations, the difficulty of accessing expert unbiased informants, and the desire of researchers, their institutions, and journals to exaggerate the significance of the research [8,9,10,11]
Summary
The news media have a crucial role in supporting health literacy, and multiple surveys have shown the extent to which the public relies on them for information about medical advances [1,2]. Some outlets are capable of producing excellent stories, but common flaws across all media include lack of attention to the quality of the research evidence, exaggerated estimates of benefits, inadequate coverage of potential harm, no information on the costs of new treatments and a failure to identify unbiased expert sources. Studies have revealed such deficiencies in Australia, Canada and the United States, with little evidence of improvement in reporting over the last five years [4,5,6,7]. The reasons for poor-quality journalism are complex, and include lack of specialised knowledge, time pressures on journalists, space limitations, the difficulty of accessing expert unbiased informants, and the desire of researchers, their institutions, and (sometimes) journals to exaggerate the significance of the research [8,9,10,11]
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