“Soul murder is a small price to pay for a good story.”
An essay criticizing the media’s often tabloid-like coverage of health information. After all, stories about catastrophes sell more papers than those about safe care. Some points:

Professor Tallis said there had been many other instances of “disgraceful” treatment in the press, with the “unhuman pursuit of the human story.” He said, “Numerous doctors have been hounded and when they have been exonerated of crimes, no apology has been issued.”

He also criticised what he considered journalists’ failure to put things that go wrong in perspective . . . “two unfortunate events out of tens of millions of transactions do not amount to a trend.”

He also criticised what he saw as the media’s practice of giving equal weight to individuals involved in controversy and people in a position to give authoritative comment. A world expert on vaccination reporting a carefully controlled study of 1.5 million children who had received a vaccine would be given the same airtime as a mother convinced that her child had been harmed by the vaccine, he said.

An “infantile preference for conspiracy theories over data” had worldwide consequences, he said. The credence given to the theories of US virologist Peter Duesberg—that HIV does not cause AIDS—by the Sunday Times and others in the 1990s, was still having an effect. “The after-echo is Thabo Mbeki’s hostility to antivirals in South Africa, costing perhaps 100 000 unnecessary deaths a year, 35 000 of them children.”

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