Stopping News Zombies By Paying Attention

NoObfuscationForOurNation
MediaVille

On the weekend, following Cathie's and Alison's lead, I weighed in on the propaganda efforts of a hunk of US Dept of Justice fertilized Astroturf that were clearly designed to influence Canadian drug treatment policy.

And now Paul Willcocks, who knows about a billion times more than all three of us lowly bloggers put together (at least about how the media really works), weighs in:

We're not great in the media at reporting on health and science issues, with, as always, a few exceptions like The Globe and Mail's Andre Picard.

And we demonstrated the weakness this week with a story that produced headlines like "Safe injection site a failure, study finds.'

The study attacking Vancouver's safe-injection site contradicted all the serious research projects that had found improvements in health outcomes, community safety and other benefits.

The study involved no new research and came from an online journal that has published two issues and is funded by the U.S. Justice Department, which opposes harm reduction.

A couple of things.

First, I completely agree with Mr. Willcocks about the work of Andre Picard. He is one of the few mainstream media science journalists I read who, even when he writes about my own field, tells me something I didn't already know.

Second, I think that, over all, the Canadian Press (who sent the original piece out on the wire that resulted in the headlines that followed), does a pretty good job - especially on breaking news stories. In this case, however, there was absolutely no time pressure involved whatsoever and they fell down on the job very badly. As a result, what has come flying out of the Whirlitzer can now be used by the Cons to justify a shift in policy if they are so inclined (Ha!). And that, in case you are keeping score at home, is not a good thing.

OK?

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Of course, we are forever indebted to Mr. Willcocks for linking up to us (and Cathie too, sorry Alison - my mistake) on this one. Now, if only we could get him to do the same with the series of Dobranos 'Follow The Money' pieces that we are planning to write later this week (double Ha! Ha!, said we with tongue firmly planted in cheek).

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