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Published in the October 2005 Issue of PLoS Medicine
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Correspondence
The Focus of the Media Is Medical Intervention, Not the Pursuit of Health
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1 Barbados Cancer Society, St. Michael, Barbados
Citation: Gale DA (2005) The Focus of the Media Is Medical Intervention, Not the Pursuit of Health. PLoS Med 2(10): e362. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020362
Published: October 25, 2005
Copyright: © 2005 Desmond A. Gale. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Competing interests: DAG is Honorary Director of Tobacco Control Program, Barbados Cancer Society, St. Michael, Barbados.
E-mail: dayrellscourt9@yahoo.com
As the title of my response to the PLoS Medicine Debate [1] implies, the media know little and care less about the pursuit of health or about the requirements for health promotion, health maintenance, health protection, and disease prevention. Equally regrettable is the fact that very few journalists have the medical or scientific knowledge to qualify them to analyse and to think and write critically about medical policies and practices. Another shortcoming of the media is that their priority is not to educate and inform but to entertain the public. The outcome of this priority is that the most the public can expect from the media are meaningless fragments of information often calculated to confuse rather than enlighten them.
References Top
- (2005) What are the roles and responsibilities of the media in disseminating health information? PLoS Med 2: e215. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020215.
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