When Medical News Comes from Press Releases—A Case Study of Pancreatic Cancer and Processed Meat

Joseph W Taylor, Marie Long, Elizabeth Ashley, Alex Denning, Beatrice Gout, Kayleigh Hansen, Thomas Huws, Leifa Jennings, Sinead Quinn, Patrick Sarkies, Alex Wojtowicz and Philip M Newton

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 6, 1-13

Abstract: The media have a key role in communicating advances in medicine to the general public, yet the accuracy of medical journalism is an under-researched area. This project adapted an established monitoring instrument to analyse all identified news reports (n = 312) on a single medical research paper: a meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Cancer which showed a modest link between processed meat consumption and pancreatic cancer. Our most significant finding was that three sources (the journal press release, a story on the BBC News website and a story appearing on the ‘NHS Choices’ website) appeared to account for the content of over 85% of the news stories which covered the meta analysis, with many of them being verbatim or moderately edited copies and most not citing their source. The quality of these 3 primary sources varied from excellent (NHS Choices, 10 of 11 criteria addressed) to weak (journal press release, 5 of 11 criteria addressed), and this variance was reflected in the accuracy of stories derived from them. Some of the methods used in the original meta-analysis, and a proposed mechanistic explanation for the findings, were challenged in a subsequent commentary also published in the British Journal of Cancer, but this discourse was poorly reflected in the media coverage of the story.

Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0127848

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0127848

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