Medical breakthroughs and promising new treatments are a staple of health and science news coverage. But after studying a sample of 180 newspaper stories and 27 TV reports that appeared between 1994 and 1998, Moynihan, an Australian journalist, and his co-authors from Harvard Medical School and other institutions, conclude that reporters need to be more skeptical.

The researchers studied news coverage of the benefits and risks of three drugs: alendronate, used for the treatment and prevention of osteoporosis; pravastatin, a cholesterol-lowering drug used to prevent cardiovascular disease; and aspirin, also used to prevent cardiovascular disease. They found that only 124 of the news reports gave any quantitative assessments of the benefits of the drug, and 83 percent of those offered only the relative benefits, not the absolute figures (which might provide less reason to cheer). For example, in reporting the results of a study on osteoperosis treatment in 1996, three major TV networks all said that the new drug could cut the incidence of hip fracture in half, a benefit that one reporter declared "absolutely miraculous." Unreported was the fact that the incidence of hip fracture was very low in the first place—only two percent among patients who did not receive the drug.

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