ABSTRACT
While the educated “public” receive medical and health information that is disseminated through 25,000 scientific/medical journals throughout the world, most of us get the vast majority of our health information from popular media sources. Everyday, as we flip through the pages of newspapers, listen to the radio on the way to work, read billboards on the highway, thumb through magazines, or “surf” the hundreds of available channels on television or pages on the world wide web, we are bombarded by a subtle and not so subtle montage of health messages. Simultaneously we encounter newscasts each day on radio and television informing us about the latest “discoveries” by scientists from throughout the world. Some of this information is pre-determined in the form of paid advertising. Some is quasi-planned-late breaking news. Yet, the product of this message mosaic is our mediated reality. Such data-scientific as well as “scientistic”—floods the secondary and tertiary wave of discussion within the public. Information evolves into accepted truth without real verification. Information becomes fact-the “stuff’ of public discourse without real verification. In remembering Cooper’s warning, “they say” takes on its own significance becoming the ethos, the common terminology and foundation from which our reality flows.
