Can TV news be hazardous to your health?
While health and medical news is a popular topic on local television newscasts, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan found that the typical story was only 33 seconds long, lacked specifics and, in a few cases, contained egregious and sometimes potentially deadly errors, according to an exhaustive analysis of 1,799 TV health stories.
The study, which was led by Michigan’s James Pribble and Ken Goldstein, a UW political scientist, examined 2,795 news broadcasts during October 2002. Nearly 1,800 of those broadcasts featured health stories, accounting for 11% of the news portion of late evening newscasts analyzed. The report was published in the March issue of the American Journal of Managed Care.