Health journalists’ perceptions of their professional roles and responsibilities for ensuring the veracity of reports of health research

Abstract

Health industries attempt to influence the public through the news media and through their relationships with expert academics and opinion leaders. This paper reports the results of a study of journalists’ perceptions of their professional roles and responsibilities with regard to relationships between industry and academia. Journalists believed that responsibility for the validity of their reports rested with academics and systems of peer review. However this fails to account for the extent these interactions and the failures of peer review. Health journalists’ retention of a critical stance regarding industry-academia relationships will include advocacy for and adoption of mandatory reporting of these relationships.