Preventing Alzheimer’s: Where’s the reporting?
Admittedly, it would be a better story if researchers had reported that we can prevent Alzheimer’s disease, rather than concluding we can’t.
Still, this is a major illness, and one that aging members of the mainstream media presumably have at least a passing personal interest in. And when a panel of experts convened by the National Institutes of Health concludes we don’t know how to prevent it, that’s news. Or it should be. Especially because many entrepreneurs (I use that word euphemistically) have claimed that they can help you prevent Alzheimer’s.
But it’s hard to find a reporter who covered this story, beyond recapping the panel’s conclusions.
An NPR blog post by Rose Raymond sounds like something out of the pages of a women’s magazine: Smoking: Don’t do it….Physical Activity: By all means, do it! That is to say, it sounds like health advice, not news.
Shari Roan, in a post on the Los Angeles Times Booster Shots blog, recaps the findings and adds that “consumers should discuss prevention strategies with their doctors.” Excuse me, but didn’t we just learn that there’s nothing we can to do prevent it? So why are we wasting our doctors’ time with questions about prevention strategies?I’ve claimed here in an earlier post that such reflexive “consult your doctor” admonitions are a cop out. Reporters shouldn’t simply write that and figure they’ve done their due diligence.
Kelly Brewington at The Baltimore Sun posted a quick recap. These short posts on blogs operated by newspapers should, it seems to me, make it harder and harder for the papers to dismiss blogs on the grounds that they simply feast on and regurgitate what the papers have reported. News execs who don’t like blogs could make a stronger argument against them if they didn’t use their own blogs for quick-and-dirty throwaway stories–in effect, doing exactly the sort of superficial job that they accuse bloggers of doing.
Sadly, the best source of information I could find on the panel’s report was the NIH press release, which, unlike these other posts, links to the panel’s consensus statement. The newspaper blogs could have at least linked to the panel’s report, if the reporters didn’t want to waste time reporting it themselves.
NIH’s press office did a better job on this story than most of the stories I saw. The lesson? Skip the media and go right to the source if you want to know what the panel said.
That can’t be good for the future of the news business.
- Paul Raeburn
