Why Bolstering Trust in Journalism Could Help Strengthen Trust in Medicine

Mistrust and confusion created by the 21st-century information ecosystem have contributed to outbreaks of once-eradicated vaccine-preventable disease, to overhyped research findings that confuse the public, and to distrust in the financial motivations of physicians, hospitals, insurers, and drug and device manufactures alike.

Co-authored by KFF Vice President David Rousseau, Vineet M. Arora of University of Chicago Medicine, and Gary Schwitzer of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, this perspective highlights the important relationship between medicine and trust in news media and articulates three ways that clinicians, health care organizations, and journalists might begin to rebuild the foundation of trust on which both medicine and journalism rely. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.