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The Trouble with Medical News Reporting.
"Today's health reporters may have been covering crime last week and politics the week before," points out this month's PLoS Medicine editorial, which discusses the current state of health news reporting and the steps that can be taken to improve it. One initiative to monitor the quality of health reporting is HealthNewsReview.org, launched two years ago. In a Health in Action paper (Schwitzer, e95) published in this month's issue of PLoS Medicine, the publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, Gary Schwitzer, reports on the project's findings after the evaluation of 500 health news stories. And an essay (Moynihan et al., e106), also linked to the editorial, looks at how disease mongering—the corporate creation of new diseases in order to sell treatments—has become part of the global health debate.
Image Credit: Giovanni Maki, originally published as Figure 2 in Schwitzer G, Mudur G, Henry D, Wilson A, Goozner M, et al. (2005) What Are the Roles and Responsibilities of the Media in Disseminating Health Information? PLoS Med 2(7): e215 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020215
Citation: (2008) PLoS Medicine Issue Image | Vol. 5(5) May 2008. PLoS Med 5(5): ev05.i05. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pmed.v05.i05
Published: May 27, 2008
Copyright: © 2008 Giovanni Maki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
"Today's health reporters may have been covering crime last week and politics the week before," points out this month's PLoS Medicine editorial, which discusses the current state of health news reporting and the steps that can be taken to improve it. One initiative to monitor the quality of health reporting is HealthNewsReview.org, launched two years ago. In a Health in Action paper (Schwitzer, e95) published in this month's issue of PLoS Medicine, the publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, Gary Schwitzer, reports on the project's findings after the evaluation of 500 health news stories. And an essay (Moynihan et al., e106), also linked to the editorial, looks at how disease mongering—the corporate creation of new diseases in order to sell treatments—has become part of the global health debate.
Image Credit: Giovanni Maki, originally published as Figure 2 in Schwitzer G, Mudur G, Henry D, Wilson A, Goozner M, et al. (2005) What Are the Roles and Responsibilities of the Media in Disseminating Health Information? PLoS Med 2(7): e215 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020215