Old news, actually:
Time cover issue
It's not unreasonable that you posted it now. In fact, it's damned surprising (to me, anyway) that this could be considered anything like an "Angelina Effect." Sure, I don't religiously track women's health issues or Twitter trends, so maybe I missed a real groundswell of support. My first reaction was that they were downgrading patients talking to doctors, as if reading a magazine could replace that step, or that the "Angelina Effect" would mean that somebody couldn't have a legitimate reason to opt out of going with what is, in my understanding, a fairly innocuous procedure. I thought they were trying to manufacture an "Effect" for the sake of using a celebrity to push a procedure. I don't mind using coincidences (here's a celebrity who had a procedure done, here's her aunt who died) as a springboard for making a usually faceless medical story have some human interest, but the whole thing smelled wrong to me.
Fake edit: And I wrote all the above before reading the OP, LOL! Time's quality standards have apparently been slipping ever since they kept Fareed on - bless him, though; it was the right choice not to let him go, but that Time could have allowed that to happen was terrible and inexcusable. This is bad too, not merely because of the abuse (IMO) of a cover story slot, but because this is a naked attempt to distort the discussion and it flew entirely over the heads of the editing staff.
Speaking of distortion, on to Natural News. While I think that many of their talking points could be defended, at least in generalities (there's some views in that article I'm sympathetic to, i.e. that screening can lead to unnecessary treatment that hurts women - or men, in the case - is certainly true, although it's not the public health disaster it's portrayed as there), they're not engaging with the issue at all. Their article is basically their going "look at this terrible conspiracy!!" and then listing everything they don't like (and, coincidentally, everything which they aren't running an ad for). If Time (and People Magazine, and anybody else who ran the story as it was in Time) made a mistake in its choice of tone, this little fly-by-night online gossip column is going to confuse people even worse. You don't say "here's my research!" and then just lay out a bunch of what is, at a glance, unresearched conspiracy-mongering. They've basically stated the doctors, and the hospital where Jolie underwent treatment, were part of a conspiracy. Okay, got any proof of that? LOL, you won't find any - because it didn't happen.
Really, I'm rather disgusted with the hype from both sides on this story, but one side comes off immeasurably worse. Is it cool to abuse celebrity to try to be an "opinion leader," or (in the case of the magazines) to wink and nod about it with your headlines? Arguably not, but that story is as old as humanity. Is it cool to try to springboard off the core attempt to educate people, even if the original hook was kinda dumb, with an apparently unsubstantiated claim, misleading people about pretty much every aspect of the story? Clearly not. "Natural News" looks to cancer reporting as L. Ron Hubbard was to psychiatric care journalism. If you had to choose between a 'manufactured P.R. campaign' that is attempting to give people a new way into the story almost any cancer doctor will agree with, or a site which is trying to piggyback off that to sell ads which play off common health fears and which is advertising unregulated quack remedies - damn, I wouldn't have to think twice.
It goes to show that people who want their stories wrapped up with a neat little bow, and who live by the soundbite or headline phrase, will be disappointed. As always. It's also a dumb thing to do.
I would say that this reminds me of the time years ago when I posted some "independent historical research" without carefully reading both sides (or using my brain, that would've helped too), although I shouldn't mention it since it wouldn't help OVB to make that specific comparison, lol
MadScientist wrote:
Jolie spoke out against the high cost of medical testing for BRCA1 mutations in her statement. To say that she's part of some conspiracy to maintain these patents is... patently absurd. Hopefully these patents get shot down as their high cost is scandalous. It now costs less to sequence an entire genome than to perform one of Myriad's tests.
And while I write a treatise on media ethics, MadScientist finds the smoking gun. Nice work!
O. Van Bruce wrote:Guys, the problem is not Angelina Jolie getting a mastectomy, which in any case could have been a real prevention treatment. The problem is how the human genome investigation is being merchantilized and used ultimately for profit.
Is it? I was upset about that when I heard about the probable Supreme Court deliberations - long before the Time cover story - but I doubt that if I had posted anything you would have responded. Or not, maybe. Lately I was thinking about posting
this - also something damn important - but decided against it. You have to admit that the only reason this thread seemed marketable was because your source shamelessly manufactured a sinister spin on a human-interest story, one which has very little to do with whatever "lesson" we try to draw out of the clusterfuck of a website that is "Natural News." You could probably load up any unrelated story and they would spin it the same way, finding some tenuous reason or other to spring into their usual pet issues, and the same ads - "if you take vitamins you're eating rocks," "delicious algae," and "breaking news: dipshits don't understand vaccination," etc.
