The Almighty News Release: How They Influence Health Journalism
A new post on the Embargo Watch blog, “The power of the press release: A tale of two fish oil-chemotherapy studies,” addresses an issue that had me running around in circles for hours last week.
Some news organizations were reporting on a paper in the journal Cancer, reporting that it had been published in that day’s online edition.
But it hadn’t been – not when the stories were published.
Instead, all I could find was a study by the same authors on the same topic that had been published in the same journal two weeks prior.
What apparently happened, as Embargo Watch surmises as well, is that many journalists simply covered what was in the journal’s news release – not what had already been published two weeks prior – which was a more impressive article. And they rushed to publish before the new study had even been posted online – all over a very short-term study in a small number of people. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
