How We Rate Stories

HealthNewsReview.org reviews news stories that make a therapeutic claim about:

Specific treatments, tests, products or procedures (A story that includes multiple claims about multiple interventions or for multiple uses may not be eligible for review because our review criteria can generally only be applied to the review of a single, specific intervention for a single, specific condition.) So the stories may be about:

Investigational drugs or devices
Vitamins or nutritional supplements
Diagnostic and screening tests
Dietary recommendations
Surgical procedures

Who conducts the reviews?

A multi-disciplinary team of reviewers from journalism, medicine, health services research and public health assesses the quality of the stories using a standardized rating system. Stories are graded and critiques are published on this website. Two or three different reviewers evaluate each story.

Does Health News Review give medical advice?

HealthNewsReview.org does not provide medical opinion. Nothing in our reviews should be construed as medical advice.

Is HealthNewsReview.org fair to journalists?

We understand there are many challenges to achieving accuracy, balance and completeness in health care journalism. For a reporter, there are deadlines, editors, and corporate financial pressures. We hold the bar high for quality in health care journalism because it plays a major role in educating consumers. Consumers need to be well informed to make sound choices that affect their health and well being.

Which news organizations are reviewed?

News stories will be monitored each Monday through Friday in major U.S. media. We may, at any time, review any news story we see from any news organization. But on a regular basis, the following are the media we will review. We will only review what we find on the websites of these news organizations.
Each day we will review the websites of ten of the newspapers with the leading circulation. We excluded the New York Post and the New York Daily News because that would mean that three of the top 10 newspapers being reviewed were from New York. We wanted broader geographic diversity in what we reviewed.

USA Today
Wall Street Journal (health blog only since online is subscription only)
NY Times
LA Times
Washington Post
Chicago Tribune
Houston Chronicle
Arizona Republic
Denver Post
Dallas Morning News

Also checked daily:

National Public Radio health & science page
MSNBC.com health news section
CNN.com health news section
WebMD health news section

Wire services:

Associated Press health news
Reuters Health
HealthDay

Checked weekly: websites of news magazines

Time
Newsweek
U.S. News & World Report

NOTE:

During our first 3.5 years, we reviewed ABC, CBS and NBC health news stories every day. We decided in 2009 to stop this very time-consuming process of having three reviewers apply ten standardized criteria to TV news stories because, frankly, overall the stories were not improving. We have limited resources and can’t review everything. We chose to apply our time, resources and energy to new and different media with whom we might have more impact. That does not mean we are ignoring TV health news. In fact, since that decision in 2009 we have commented frequently on our blog about TV health news.