By Gary Schwitzer
In the same week when Kaiser Health News published a story about "Hospitals Promoting Bargain CT Scans For Smokers"
— raising questions about "whether the strategy is a marketing ploy
that could bring more harm than good" — CNN published a severely flawed
story, "Will you have a heart attack? These tests might tell,"
in which a conflicted source is allowed to make claims about various
heart screening tests without any scrutiny of the evidence for those
claims.
News organizations appear to take on a cultural bias about screening
tests. The newsroom bias may be a healthy one of healthy skepticism,
demanding evidence and scrutiny of that evidence. Or a news team can
assume a bias of accepting promotional claims for screening without
evaluating evidence, without considering true costs and harms as well as
benefits.
Judge for yourself.