All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Today we inaugurate another new Public Eye feature: The "Evening News" Report. It's a discussion of a week's worth of "Evening News" shows, complete with comments on trends, stories that worked, stories that didn't work, and anything else that strikes our fancy. Below you'll find this week's report, which discusses last week's shows.

What do Mel Gibson, Angelina Jolie, the cast of "Sex And The City," Anna Nicole Smith, and Emma Watson have in common? You guessed it: They all made appearances on the "Evening News" last week. Gibson and Smith showed up in the supplements stories, Watson in a piece on "girlfights," and Jolie and the SATC women in a piece about the rise in unmarried women.

There are a couple of ways to look at these celebrity appearances. The uncharitable might simply chalk them up to a ratings grab – you flash Angelina Jolie onscreen and your viewers presumably aren't going to change the channel. But the celebrities can also serve a contextual purpose. The shot of the SATC women was a quick reminder of cultural representations of single women, for example, even if it also might have been a way to keep eyes glued to the screen. And Gibson did have something to do with the supplements legislation that was being discussed -- he was featured in a 1993 ad from the dietary supplement industry urging consumers to write Congress. At the same time, a line like this is pretty hard to swallow: "Think of Angelina, living with Brad and the kids without a ring." Can you make an argument that the situation "Angelina" now finds herself in is relevant enough for inclusion in a story about single women? You can try. But it's a hell of a stretch.

Read full post…

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, the "Evening News" ran a two-part story on supplements. Monday's story focused on herbal supplements, while last night's centered on dietary supplements. Both pieces featured science and medical writer Dan Hurley, who has a new book out that is critical of the supplement industry.

Hurley argues that most supplements don't work, and he says that some can even be harmful, an argument the "Evening News" backed up by interviewing a woman whose "nose was burned off" by an herbal supplement. Each piece also included a comment from someone who says Hurley has it wrong: Monday we had Steve Mister, who works for the supplement industry, and who said that Hurley's book should be discounted because of "lack of science, historical inaccuracies and emphasis on anecdotal evidence and opinion." And Tuesday gave us David Seckman, head of the Natural Products Association, who says supplements are safe and effective.

I came away from the pieces skeptical of supplements. When you have someone like Hurley, who bills himself as a dispassionate observer who simply "looked at what evidence I could find" and reported it, you tend to believe him over representatives of the industry that is being criticized. But I also wanted more. The "Evening News" gave us two sides of the argument, but it didn't tell us which one was right. From watching the pieces, I thought Hurley seemed credible, but I didn't know to what extent he had an agenda of his own – scary stories about burning noses tend to sell books, after all. So while I tended to believe him, I wanted more information.

When the press gives its audience two opposing perspectives, they don't really know who to believe. It's a problem you see all the time in political coverage – a Republican asserts one thing, a Democrat another, and you have no way of knowing who is right. Journalists, I believe, have a responsibility to step in and sort things out – even if that means suggesting that one side or the other had it wrong. But often they choose not to do so. In the "Evening News" supplements pieces, we learned that there have been "hundreds of studies" about supplements. Why, I wondered, couldn't someone from the "Evening News" have look at those studies and given us a sense of the overall thrust of them? Why couldn't we have heard from more voices who could provide a firmer sense of the truth? I asked CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported both pieces.

Read full post…