How media misstates medical conditions and affects patient understanding

Learning Journal: Media Mistakes

Even though many people believe that the media can do no wrong, and that it reports everything objectively, this is actually not the case. Instead, the media is made up of people, and those people can do many different things wrong, either because they have misunderstood what they were told or because they chose to deliberately misrepresent the facts. I have personally noticed a media mistake that I felt affected me specifically when I saw an Internet news story, from a reputable source, dealing with a medical problem that I have. Based on what I know about this problem, I know that what was said in the story could be accurate in some cases, but was not necessarily accurate for all cases. Because of this, the information that I saw in that story upset me greatly, likely for no real reason other than the opinion of a researcher that was not even accurate.

A did not do anything to try to get the error changed, because I am not a licensed expert on the subject. I did not feel that there was anything specific that I could do to change what the media was saying about this issue. However, I did feel differently about the media after that, because I realized even more strongly that it can make mistakes, and many of these mistakes can be important and affect people's lives. Individuals with the same medical concern may have less knowledge in general than I do, and when they see that news report, they will assume that it is all the complete truth.