Riffs
Nieman Fellowships in Global
Health Reporting.
Full-time or freelance
reporters interested in
reporting on health issues
in the developing world have
the chance to apply for a
fellowship program at
Harvard University. The
fellowships are organized by
the Nieman Foundation and
the Harvard School of Public
Heath and are funded by the
Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation.
Reporting on health.
Articles on
health and health care
reporting by various members
of the Association of Health
Care Journalists (AHCJ).
Nieman Foundation for
Journalism at Harvard
University.
HealthNewsReview.org. What,
if any, are the criteria
journalists use when
reporting on new ideas in
health care or on new claims
for old ideas? Gary Schwitzer,
Foundation for Informed
Medical Decision Making.
Science Idol: The scientific integrity editorial cartoon
contest
Editorial
Cartoons Are Funny. Political Interference in Science Is
Not.
Contest finalists. Union of Concerned Scientists,
10/06.
7
Words (and more) You Shouldn't Use in Medical News.
Journalists can get too close to a source and start to
write like a medical source talks.
Gary Schwitzer, Health News Reviews.
Web Site Launched to
Evaluate Health News Reporting in Mainstream US:
HealthNewsReview.org
gives Journalists, Consumers Unbiased Review
of News Articles that Cover
New Treatments, Procedures. Yahoo Finance, 4/17/06.
Tara Parker Pope on Avoiding the Press Release.
The Wall Street Journal
health journalist weighs in on how the media sometimes
confuses the message.
Felix Gillette, CJR, 3/03/06.
Social Networking for Journalists.
How journalists can make use of social networking Web
sites. Sree Sreenivasan, Poynter Online, 11/20/05.
Complaints, Customer Service and
Journalism.
How
newsrooms are right there with the motor vehicle bureau
and the Internal Revenue Service.Scott Libin, Poynter Online,
10/13/05.
Angels and Ghosts: Anatomy of a Story:
Confronting the frightening power and unspoken fears of
the story only you can do. Diana Sugg, Poynter Online, 7/27/05.
What are the roles and responsibilities of the media in
disseminating health information? Journalists have a
responsibility to mirror a society's needs and issues,
comprehensively and proportionally. Gary Schwitzer,
et al. PLoS Medicine, 7/05.
Improving Public Understanding:
Guidelines for Communicating Emerging Science on
Nutrition, Food Safety, and Health. International Food Information Council, 2005 update.
Tipsheet—For Reporting on Drugs, Devices and Medical
Technologies. Questions to consider and discuss when
researching stories. Ray Moynihan, The Commonwealth
Fund, 9/04.
How can we improve medical reporting? Let me count the
ways.
A critical look at how well (or poorly) the media report
on health news. Andre Picard, Globe and Mail,
12/30/04.
Users' guide to detecting misleading
claims in clinical research reports.
Tips for accurately identifying misleading
claims in reported studies. BMJ, 11/6/04.
Health Hazard.
Rachel Lehmann-Haupt,
Folio 5/1/04.
The
tricky interaction between health coverage - an
increasingly popular subject for all consumer mags, but
especially for women's service titles - and
pharmaceutical advertising.
Never Overlook the Bottom Line
When Covering Health Care. Most health reporting tends
to fall into distinct buckets--consumer tips for
better health, traditional business stories
about hospital and medical stocks and fraud when
"good" companies go astray. Trudy
Lieberman, National Center
for Business Journalism,
1/29/04.
Tips for Reporting on Food Safety,
Nutrition & Health. International Food
Information Council, 5/04. With the overload of health
information available through all forms of media, how
can consumers keep up? And how can journalists best help
consumers to keep up?
A
statement of principles for health care journalists. Gary Schwitzer
American Journal of Bioethics, 2004.
A code
that addresses journalists' unique challenges of
covering complex health care topics.
Nutrition Accuracy in Popular
Magazines.
How good is the nutrition information presented in
popular magazines? American Council on Science and
Health, 1/04.
|
Rants
Doctors balk at request
for data. The state's largest for-profit health
insurer is asking California physicians to look for
conditions it can use to cancel their new patients' medical
coverage. Lisa Girion, Los Angeles Times, 2/12/08.
Relationship between
Funding Source and Conclusion among Nutrition-Related
Scientific Articles. Industry of
nutrition-related scientific articles may bias conclusions
in favor of sponsors' products, with potentially significant
implications for public health. Lenard I. Lesser, Cara B.
Ebbeling, et al. PLos Medicine, 2007.
When drug companies
sponsor research, their products more likely to perform well.
Money talks -- and very loudly when a drug company is
funding a clinical trial involving one of its products,
according to this UCSF study. Victoria Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle,
6/5/07.
FDA to
tighten conflict-of-interest rules.
The agency will bar experts from advisory panel votes on
products made by companies they have financial interests in.
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Los Angeles Times, 322/07.
Big pharma
calling journals' shots? Money talks, and the drug industry's dollar talks loud and
clear through the pages of leading medical journals,
according to lead researcher Peter Gøtzsche who compared
reviews of industry funded studies with similar reviews done
without industry support. New Scientist, 10/06.
Skepticism: The antidote to 'truthiness' in American
government and media. Citizens must
want to be smarter about how to interpret the messages we
encounter every day in government, in media, in the
workplace, in business and advertising, says Clark. who
offers several steps as a start. Roy Peter Clark, Poynter
Online, 10/12/06.
For Science's Gatekeepers, a Credibility Gap.
Recent disclosures of fraudulent or flawed
studies in medical and scientific journals have
called into question as never before the merits
of their peer-review system. Lawrence K.
Altman, MD, New York Times, 5/2/06.
Article
urging heart exams shows conflicting interests.
Drug firm funded printing in journal. Stephen
Smith, Boston Globe, 5/25/06.
Health Industry Practices That Create Conflicts
of Interest.
Troyen A. Brennan, JAMA, 1/25/06. Conflicts of interest between physicians'
commitment to patient care and the desire of
pharmaceutical companies and their
representatives to sell their products pose
challenges to the principles of medical
professionalism.
How Drug Companies Convince
Americans They're Sicker Than They Are.
Shannon Brownlee, The Washington Monthly,
12/1/2005. An analysis of how the pharmaceutical
industry's sales tactics are turning healthy
people into patients.
Truth Is
Stranger Than Phiction:
The drug industry's
literary misadventure.
Third-party strategy gone wrong.
Shannon Brownlee,
Jeanne Lenzer, Slate,
11/29/05.
US
National Institutes of Health issue new ethics
guidelines. Janice
Hopkins Tanne BMJ, 9/3/05.
The new rules are tougher
than some NIH staff members had wanted but more
lenient than some critics had demanded.
Suddenly Sick.
Susan Kelleher and Duff Wilson, Seattle Times, 6/26/05 -
6/30/05. What can go wrong when the drug industry
influences what constitutes disease, who has it, and how
it should be treated.
The Side Effects of Truth.
Michael Scherer, Mother Jones, 5/05.
The scientist who brought the Vioxx scandal to
the nation's attention feels like a marked man.
The Media Matters: A
Call for Straightforward Medical Reporting.
Lisa M. Schwartz, MD, MS; Steven Woloshin, MD, MS. Annals
of Internal Medicine 2/04. An editorial about the
sometimes sloppy and sensationalized press coverage of
health care.
Readers Consider the Source, But
Media Don’t Always Give It.
Center for Science in the Public Interest, 7/8/04. How a reporter describes an expert source determines how
much credibility a reader gives to the expert’s
assertion.
Beyond cures, breakthroughs and
news releases. There is too much cheerleading in health and medical
news. Gary Schwitzer, Poynter Online, 3/4/05.
Bitter Pill. Trudy Lieberman,
Columbia
Journalism Review, 7/05.
The Longer View: TV Medical Reporters - Puppets and Pros.
There's something to be learned from how meteorologists
handle certification. See also
Schwitzer health news blog Gary Schwitzer,
University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass
Communication. Gary Schwitzer, CJR Daily, 6/28/05. |
