According to Sunday’s Reading Eagle, heroin has a tight grip
on Berks County.
The paper’s big headline is false. Cocaine caudillo Pablo
Escobar had a tight grip on Colombia. It’s not so bad in Berks. But it’s so
much easier to write a scary headline than to prove it.
The paper clearly violates one of the Society of Professional
Journalism’s ethical tenets:
“Journalists should make certain that headlines ... do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.”
The reporter gives only one fact supporting the claim that
heroin has a grip on Berks – heroin deaths have risen from six in 2007 to 23 in
2013.
Most reporters know that is misleading to represent changes
in small numbers in a large population – Berks has more than 400,000 people – because
such changes are statistically insignificant.
When I wrote a similar story in December 2012, treatment
centers told me they were seeing more people hooked on prescription drugs. It
would have been interesting to see what they say now. And the reporter could have asked how many people are treated
for narcotics in emergency rooms.
Shoddy reporting on a sensational topic again shows that
Berks needs better journalism.
If you are worried about prescription drugs leading to
heroin use, tell your state lawmaker you support a law that would let doctors check an online database to see if patients are getting painkillers from other doctors. It seems like a
no-brainer, though Big Pharma probably has some good reasons to keep the status
quo.
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