Does it matter who writes medical news stories?

Title: Does it matter who writes medical news stories?
Creator: Wilson, Amanda; Robertson, Jane; McElduff, Patrick; Jones, Alison; Henry, David
Relation: PLoS Medicine Vol. 7, Issue 9
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000323
Publisher: Public Library of Science
Resource Type: journal article
Date: 2010
Description: The media can influence health literacy and health seeking behaviours, but few studies have looked at the quality of news stories. We examined whether experienced specialist health reporters write better stories than other categories of journalists. We compared the quality of stories written by specialist and non-specialist journalists, and those sourced from major news organisations, in Australia from 2004–08. We found that it does matter who writes news stories that cover the benefits and harms of health care interventions. Stories written by specialist health journalists working for a single media outlet scored more highly than those written by less experienced writers. Our findings are important because this source of health literacy is currently under pressure as falling revenues threaten the future of the traditional media.
Subject: medical journalism; health literacy; mass media; Australia
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/917918
Identifier: uon:8456
Identifier: ISSN:1549-1277
Language: eng
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