So much for an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases among Medicare patients. Michael Miner does the math: "To stick with absolute numbers, among Americans 20 to 24, there were a total of 545,934 cases of chlamydia and syphilis in 2011; among Americans 65 and older there were 1,202. To picture these STDs rampaging through both populations in the same way takes a certain bravado. It also takes credulous editors." More from Ronni Bennett.
Criticism
Angelina Jolie's well-publicized preventative mastectomy prompts this account from David Kroll on two papers analyzing how the news was covered. The upshot: Neither reporters nor readers placed Jolie's risk in context: "While the researchers addressed other issues, their most striking reminder on the overall impact of any health reporting relates to the inadequate math skills and probability or risk understanding among a large percentage of the U.S. population."
Did you see the recent photos from Egypt of the pyramids blanketed in snow? How about the video of an eagle snatching a child from the ground? Writing in Esquire, Luke O'Neil takes aim at the too-good-to-check new media culture that has led to this proliferation of just-aren't stories: "The media has long had its struggles with the truth — that's nothing new. What is new is that we're barely even apologizing for increasingly considering the truth optional."
Journalists took the wrong message from a recent meta-analysis on food costs by researchers at Brown and Harvard, Joe Rojas-Burke writes. Many reports emphasized that a healthy diet costs only $1.48 per day more than an unhealthy one, but Rojas-Burke has the rest of the story: "An earlier study, not mentioned in any of the news coverage I saw, found that the cost of substituting healthier foods can cost up to 40 percent of an American low-income family’s food budget."
William M. London takes apart a Bakersfield TV station's credulous report on a local doctor who turned to "natural remedies and spiritual healing" after his terminal cancer diagnosis: "Perhaps viewers would have been interested in a follow-up story to see how long Dr. Dulan maintained his healing program and avoided use of prescription medication," London writes, before disclosing that Dulan died just two months later. More from Gary Schwitzer.
How often do you read a science story that cites work from a prestigious university? Anders Sandberg and Avi Roy call that one of seven science writing clichés: "Science, unlike religion, doesn’t work based on authority. Don't assume that an experiment is well constructed and executed because it's from an elite university … Would you still read this article if the research was performed at the University of Never-heard-of-them in Where-in-the-world-is-this city?"
She may be the nation's best-known TV newswoman, but Katie Couric's episode Wednesday on the HPV vaccine is being attacked for an anti-vaccine bias. Here's Slate's Amanda Marcotte: "Couric spent a half-hour of her show drumming up fears that the vaccine will make you very ill or even kill you." At Forbes, Matthew Herper dissects the slant. More from Alexandra Sifferlin and Seth Mnookin.
A European Commission plan to regulate endocrine disruptors drew an editorial attack from a toxicology journal, followed by defenses in two other journals. Most news outlets just covered the back-and-forth, Alexis Sobel Fitts writes in CJR. But Environmental Health News checked out the first journal article's writers, and found potential conflicts of interest with 17 of the 18 authors. Fitts calls it "a comprehensive story of the influences behind science policy."
The popular Discovery Channel programs and their imitators may do a disservice to conservation, John R. Platt writes for Scientific American: "Undoubtedly these programs will attract their usual massive ratings, but they may be guilty of the same kinds of film fakery that plagues many wildlife films, where the images on your screen don’t tell a full or even truthful story." More from David Shiffman and Brian Switek.
In Slate, Jon Entine critiques a first-person account in Elle of a woman's supposed allergies to genetically modified corn: "It represents a major setback for science journalism, and for consumers who rely on hugely popular lifestyle publications to make their way through complicated issues … Elle perpetuates a 'controversy' that just doesn’t exist in the mainstream science or medical communities." Follow-up.