Veteran health care journalist Trudy Lieberman says that she’s long observed that U.S. health reporters are reluctant to reach out globally to inform their reporting.
She points out that the health stories we’re asked to report are the same ones our counterparts abroad are writing and that this “reportorial parochialism results in poor understanding of foreign health care and makes it easy to report misleading or false claims because we have no knowledge to judge their correctness or to give context so audiences can judge for themselves.”
She has gathered nine journalists from seven countries, representing the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Italy and Portugal. The panelists represent different areas of expertise ranging from hospital safety practices and insurance systems to antibiotics, overtreatment, and conflicts of interest in medicine.
In this new tip sheet, she suggests some ways to add an international perspective to your health care reporting and why it might be important to your readers, listeners and viewers.
