About Brenda Goodman
Brenda Goodman (@ReporterGoodman) has been a reporter for 15 years, covering health, science, and medicine for television, magazines, newspapers and the Web. She was senior news writer for WebMD before joining CNN Health. Her stories have appeared in Scientific American, The New York Times, Psychology Today, Parade, Self, Health, and The Boston Globe, among others.
Along with a story on aspirin and macular degeneration, my editors got a panicked note from me recently: “I struggled with the numbers on this one, and may not have gotten them right,”I wrote.
Odds are that I wasn’t the only reporter puzzling over the numbers in this study, which was published in JAMA Internal Medicine. That’s because some of them were made up, apparently by a journal editor.
The error added a scary statistic to research that was already generating some pretty alarming health headlines (i.e. “Aspirin Ups Risk of Age-Related Macular Degeneration,” courtesy of a website for doctors called Clinical Advisor.)
To make matters worse, the mistake got repeated in the press release. (Et tu, media relations team?)
Thankfully, it seems many health reporters noticed something was amiss and left the wrong numbers out of their stories. Continue reading →
Brenda Goodman (@ReporterGoodman) has been a reporter for 15 years, covering health, science, and medicine for television, magazines, newspapers and the Web. She was senior news writer for WebMD before joining CNN Health. Her stories have appeared in Scientific American, The New York Times, Psychology Today, Parade, Self, Health, and The Boston Globe, among others.