Newspaper Coverage of the Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting Report

Abstract

The accuracy of medical stories in newspapers is a controversial issue. This study evaluated the accuracy of newspaper reports on an annual consumer report that reports the expected number of deaths following bypass surgery conducted in Pennsylvania hospitals. Analysis of 42 articles published following the 1994 report identified 52 factual errors, 127 mistakes in technical terms, 29 misspellings of proper names, and 7 misquotations. Daily newspapers averaged 5.61 errors per article, weekly newspapers averaged 4.33 errors per article, and trade publications averaged 2.83 errors per article. The authors conclude that trade publications appear to have provided the most accurate coverage and recommend development of a voluntary certification program for science reporters and that scientists be encouraged to seek additional training in newspaper relations.

Information Women Receive About Heart Attacks and How It Affects Their Knowledge, Beliefs, and Intentions to Act in a Cardiac Emergency

“…Friends and family were the least frequently reported information source across content categories. The reliance on the mass media for heart-relevant information (in particular, for such speci c information as personal AMI risk pro le) is a potential problem since the mass media have been criticized for disseminating incomplete and/or inaccurate health information (Ankney, Heilman, & Kolff, 1996;Molitor, 1993).…”

Sources, Characteristics and Effects of Mass Media Communication on Science: A Review of the Literature, Current Trends and Areas for Future Research

“…Fourth, no matter what kind of science coverage is published, the reality as constructed in the mass media differs from science's viewpoint. A long research tradition has described the 'biases' of the media's science coverage, for example, by asking scientists to evaluate the precision of media reports, which in practically all cases finds inaccuracies: Ankney et al (1996), for example, found some 220 factual and terminological errors in 42 newspaper articles on medicine (cf. Bell 1994;Oxman et al 1993;Roche and Muskavitch 2003).…”

Structural problems of medical news reports in newspapers: a verification of news reports on an incident of mass nosocomial Serratia infection

“…Accuracy in media coverage has been discussed as a very important matter [7]. At the time of an incident, initially there is much coverage while the incident attracts public attention.…”