Today in bad journalism: Reuters on organic food
This brief wire report, while taking the time to discuss the economic market of organic food, completely lacks context to frame the sensational claim made in the unfortunately written headline and lede. It is a classic example of a lazy report story, one of the failures of latter-twentieth-century school of journalism thought.
Organic food is no healthier, study finds
Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.
A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.
“A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance,” said Alan Dangour, one of the report’s authors.
read the full story at: Organic food is no healthier, study finds | U.S. | Reuters.
While the lede mentions “health benefits” the article only discusses nutritional analysis. Ignored are the larger contextual issues: potential health and environmental risks/harms posed by agricultural runoff, over use of antibiotics in factory farming, pesitcides that have been banned in the last 50 years, and more.
It also cites that the study is a pure literature review of published reports. While we are told this is a “major study” we know very little of the sourcing of those reports (lots of reports published in the last 50 years that were sponsored by the tobacco industry said that smoking was not harmful to public health) or the methodology of the study.
But the headline sure does enough damage. Don’t crack on twitter, journalists. Copy editors have been misleading in 140 characters or less for a long time, and continue to do so.
You can search for the full report here: http://www.ajcn.org/current.shtml, but I couldn’t find it despite being told in the article it was in the current edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.