HealthNewsReview.Org

Posted By elissa on Aug 5, 2009 | 2 comments

…looks like a pretty interesting site.  Here’s the guy who runs it:

Gary Schwitzer
Associate Professor, University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Health Journalism MA program

Gary Schwitzer is the Publisher of HealthNewsReview.org. He specialized in health care journalism in his 30-year career in radio, television, interactive multimedia and the Internet. He joined the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota in Fall 2001, and is director of graduate studies for the School’s MA in Health Journalism program.

In 2000, Schwitzer was the founding Editor-In-Chief of the MayoClinic.com consumer health web site.

During the 1990s, he produced multimedia and videotape “shared decision-making” programs for the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making.

He has worked in television medical news for 15 years – at CNN in Atlanta, WFAA-TV in Dallas, and WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee. He was head of the medical news unit at CNN, leading the efforts of ten staff members in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

He was elected twice to the board of directors of the Association of Health Care Journalists, for whom he authored a journalists’ Statement of Principles.

Schwitzer has written about the state of health journalism in JAMA, BMJ, the American Journal of Bioethics, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, PLoS Medicine, Minnesota Medicine, Minnesota Health Care News, Minnesota Physician, Quill, CJR Daily, Poynter.org, and MayoClinic.com.

What he and his highly qualified group of medical reviewers do, is review and rate health/medical related stories that appear in major media outlets.  Why?

By reviewing health news coverage every day, we are able to see big pictures of clear patterns unfolding that the casual day-to-day news consumer may miss.

One picture is quite clear.  The morning health news segments on ABC, CBS and NBC do the following regularly:

• Unquestioningly promote new drugs and new technologies
• Feed the “worried well” by raising unrealistic expectations of unproven technologies that may produce more harm than good
• Fail to ask tough questions
• Make any discussion of health care reform that much more difficult

If you’re looking for a dose of perspective on the media’s (often misleading) presentation of health-related research, this looks like a good place to find it.  Check it out!