On The Media

Thank you ON THE MEDIA and Prof. Schwitzer for this critical review. A real public service for putting this constant health misinformation in its proper place. I'm forwarding this segment to all my friends who do no like the "feeding the worry well" past time and character in our public discourse.

EXCELLENT!!!! BRAVO!!!! Finally someone talking the truth about corporate controlled media. How can you trust a news organization that takes money from Big Pharma's and Monsanto?

Please review the book "Into the Buzzsaw" and "Project Censored" Please!!! Let the public know about these two important books.

The extrapolation from misinformation on morning news shows to opposition of health care reform feels like a stretch, if not an unfair pigeonholing of the audience for those shows. I doubt there's any provable causation there. That's not to say that I would characterize mass-marketing of misleading information as anything other than a disgrace.

The segment touches on healthcare reform, and in that light, it's a shame that OTM didn't cover all of the misleading advocacy reporting (including NPR) on the Stupak Amendment.

All week long we heard either bogus or suspicious claims made by feminists and advocated in the reporting of NPR of what Stupak would lead to including suspicious claims that:

1) Women are smart enough to buy apt/home/car insurance but would be too dumb to plan for unintended pregnancy by purchasing a low cost abortion supplemental

2) A national market of women would need abortion supplemental insurance but no insurance company in "our free market" would create or sell such insurance.

3) Stupak would return us to the days of coathangars, even though 1973 did not have emergency birthcontrol, or RU-486, or even the Internet and the relative easy modern transportation system, much less the many organizations all devoted to women's reproductive health issues

4) Stupak would return us to thousands of women dying each year from coathangar abortions, even as Harvard Studies claim that lack of health insurance kills up 45,000 people a year.

All of these claims have been feminist / pro-choice talking points that were advocated without question in NPR reporting.

Instead we got On the Media on Morning Show Science.

How disappointing. As a person who suffers from nail fungus I was taken in by your advertising for this segment, hoping that there was possibly some cure for this affliction.

Instead what I found was that the program did what it accused other programs of doing, using a misleading "hook". Nail fungus wasn't even mentioned during the program. I personally find this to be unprofessional and unethical . From now on I will listen to NPR with the same reservations I have for main stream media.

R. Nicewander

Why isn't Congress investigating this? Rather than wasting time looking into a few injuries in the NFL.

Wide-eyed reporting about miracle cures not only twists public perception about medicine, it also boomerangs on doctors. It gives people unrealistic expectations about modern medicine. Then, when doctors are unable to meet those expectations, patients and families are often angry, disappointed and feeling they got substandard care. The next step is into the office of a medical malpractice attorney. Doctors themselves ought to be wary about constantly playing the hope card for patients, who in the end all have a 100 percent mortality rate.

Sad.