Healthy Survivors are adept at distinguishing journalism and churnalism.
Journalism: Investigation, production, and distribution of accurate reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people to inform society.
Churnalism: A form of journalism where media stories are based on press releases and pre-packaged content provided by news agencies. Churnalism reduces production costs to survive the changed milieu of a rise in Internet news and decline in advertising.
My health information comes from both professional publications and major media. Along with churnalism, my perception of an increased frequency of misleading headlines concerns me. For example, a headline “Flu Vaccine Link to Purple Nose” makes me think I will increase my risk of a purple nose by taking the vaccine. In a middle paragraph of the article, I read that the study showed no increased risk. That negative result is the “link.” [BTW, I concocted a ridiculous headline to prevent my blog from amplifying a misleading headline.]
Patients have to deal with plenty of uncertainty without misleading headlines confounding our perception of risk and adversely influencing decisions about what we do. Sadly, it seems that major media outlets I’d long considered respectible now feel pressure to use attention-grabbing headlines that mislead readers who don’t read the whole article.
An article, Haircare Churnalism, offers a list of signs of churnalism and suggestions for not falling victim to poor reporting. Healthy Survivors who read upsetting headlines don’t despair! Hit the pause button and check (or have someone check for you) the article’s conclusions and reliability of those conclusions.
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