One reason MSM journalists are losing their audience is the open secret that much of what is reported as "news" comes pre-packaged in canned stories from various advocacy groups and advertisers. Add that to the herd instinct that produces "PC"-slanted reporting and it's not difficult to poke holes in what we read in the newspapers or see on TV.
Cyber-journalism has the opposite problem. Rather than lemming-like PC stories based on pooled source information like wire services, bloggers and Web authors come in all shapes and sizes of quality and credibility. Who to believe?
When it comes to making sense of the chaos of Internet health reporting, Google is trying to intervene -- to make money and, they hope, to help seekers of quality information pertaining to their precious personal health. Query: will this be another case where the surgery is successful, but the patient dies? Will the choices of the Google censors preserve the essence of scientific inquiry where competing ideas are bombarded with data that either confirms or destroys them? Or will the desire to "help" consumers understand the meaning of medical scholarship excise aberrant findings, leaving only politically-correct interpretations?
We share the concerns of Sandra Szwarc in Junkfoodscience.com :
Search engines have inordinate abilities to censor information by simply making it invisible to searches. It is not uncommon for key documents and papers that don't support government initiatives or special interest agendas to be buried and take extraordinary effort to hunt down, or to disappear from the internet altogether, something anyone who's been researching for any length of time quickly discovers...
Google has just announced that it has created a "Google Health Advisory Council." ... Says Google : "We want to help users make more empowered and informed healthcare decisions, and have been steadily developing our ability to make our search results more medically relevant and more helpful to users."
Screening out "irrelevant" and "unhelpful" information? That sounds like a euphemism for censorship. Look at every name on their new prestigious advisory panel and the interests they represent. Most will be familiar to Junkfood Science readers, as we've examined the soundness of their consumer information RAND Corp., the Cleveland Clinic, the AMA, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AARP, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc., California HealthCare Foundation, and others.
Despite all of the flaws and utter garbage on the net, it's still been the primary way for most people to break through the media groupthink to learn other viewpoints and sounder information. This development could be the beginnings of the world's biggest internet information firewall.
Substituting a Google censor for the rigor of true "evidence-based" analysis would be a clear step backwards. Search engines seeking access to the Chinese market, reportedly, have agreed to censor their search results. That's unfortunate for 1.3 billion Chinese and a disturbing parallel to the new Google Health Advisory Council. What we need in public health policy is more transparency and solid information, not greater opaqueness and opinion. As we blogged recently , the quality of the process is of paramount importance. We need to be able to "lift the hood and kick the tires " of new medical studies, not have a secret censor decide for us what's relevant and what's not.
