In today’s world, everyone should be a little bit of a journalist. Some may find this surprising, but we drive cars without being professional drivers, and we cook meals without being professional chefs. Journalism today follows the same principle.
To be a little bit of a journalist means:
A. Being able to write a text yourself: to express your own thoughts clearly, logically, and reasonably.
B. Understanding how a quality text should look: to distinguish a good text from a bad one based on formal criteria.
Essentially, this is what media literacy is all about.
While most people can write to some extent, though not everyone does so clearly, logically, and reasonably, very few consider how a media text should be created and what criteria it must meet.
“Since I like it, it must be good” — this is roughly how the average person thinks. Obviously, this is a flawed approach.
This gap (point B) must definitely be filled. Let’s examine this with the example of “what a quality text about medicine should look like.”
To assess yourself and how well you understand what constitutes a good text about medicine, you can take a TEST.
This test is based on the recommendations of the website healthnewsreview.org (unfortunately, the project ceased to exist in 2022), which evaluated articles on medical topics using 10 criteria. Although these recommendations were designed for journalists, there is nothing stopping regular readers from using them as a checklist to evaluate the quality of texts themselves:
1. Cost
It is ethical to write the truth — for example, that leukemia therapy costs $475,000. Don’t give people false hope.
2. Risks and Side Effects
If a drug reduces the risk of developing a disease by half, it’s important to specify what the initial risk was for your readers. It might have already been minimal.
Write about serious side effects. For example, how treatment affects the likelihood of a heart attack or death. It’s better to look at what happens to a patient’s weight a year after treatment rather than changes in their blood test results. Sometimes laboratory indicators may point to the likelihood of disease development, but these data are often manipulated by scientists and pharmaceutical companies.
3. Harm
If you are writing about screening procedures or new miracle drugs, discuss the flip side as well — how they might harm patients, especially when the harm isn’t obvious.
4. Study Limitations
If a study was conducted on rats, make sure to highlight this in the headline.
Write about correlations. Pyotr Talantov gives this example in his book “0.05. Evidence-Based Medicine: From Magic to the Search for Immortality”: People who carry lighters are more likely to die of lung cancer. Conclusion: Lighters cause lung cancer. But this is about correlation, not causation, which in this case is linked to other factors.
Don’t forget about conflicts of interest. Studies often indicate at the end whether the authors had any.
Show long-term results. For example, people lose weight on any diet during the first month but tend to regain it within a year.
Remember that small sample sizes are more likely to produce random results.
5. Fearmongering
This is a common issue in glossy magazines but sometimes occurs in serious publications too. They invent problems: If you don’t apply 10 layers of cream every day, you’ll die because your skin will turn into the Sahara Desert.
What should the sample size of a study be? Pay attention to nuances. For example, when studying rare genetic diseases, it’s understandable that the sample size will be small. However, if the issue is well-studied — such as using aspirin for colorectal cancer prevention or vaccination — the sample cannot consist of just a few dozen or hundreds of people. For treatments for respiratory infections, the sample size should include several thousand people. The smaller the sample, the less reliable the study.
6. Independent Source (and Conflict of Interest)
Check who funded the research. If you see articles claiming that dark chocolate cures heart attacks, strokes, and helps prevent them, know that most of these studies were funded by Mars, Inc.
Seek independent experts.
7. Alternatives
If a drug enters the market that halves the risk of melanoma and costs $100,000, remind readers of budget-friendly preventive measures for melanoma — hats, sunglasses, and sunscreen.
8. Accessibility
Specify if a drug is not registered in your country but is, for example, only available in the United States or the United Kingdom.
9. Novelty
If a drug has a long history, write about it. In the United States, bacteriophages are considered a new and exciting development. However, they are a simple Soviet-era invention that has been studied for a long time, with no proven efficacy.
10. Source
Even if you are short on time, don’t rely on press releases — they always lie.
Avoid False Balance
This is a general recommendation for any scientific text. If you are writing about vaccines and interview a pediatrician or infectious disease specialist, then follow up with a virologist who believes vaccines are the demise of the immune system, this is false balance. Ignore opinions that do not align with science.
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