Jennifer Ashton, M.D., the new medical correspondent for CBS News, asserts that “when you look at the people who are really at the forefront of medical media and the medical correspondents, they are physicians” in an interview for Columbia News Tonight, produced by the Columbia School of Journalism in New York.
Ashton, a practicing physician, also says that she thinks the things that make a good doctor are the same things that make a good medical correspondent. “You can do it well without the MD but I think again its like learning or knowing a foreign language and going to that country. It really puts you one step ahead of the game.”
Gary Schwitzer, of HealthNewsReview.org and the University of Minnesota, disagrees with Ashton.
