The More You Know

[billroper]

It's Opening Day of the baseball season and I am reminded again that reporters omit things from their stories, whether through ignorance or malice.

In this case, Brewers catcher, Pedro Severino, has been suspended for 80 games for taking a banned substance. In the original story, he explains how he was prescribed this medication in the Dominican Republic, because he and his wife were seeing a fertility specialist. And the original article explains how the drug is used to induce ovulation, which -- of course! -- Severino would not be doing.

The more recent article then explains how the drug has been used by some athletes to counter side effects of steroid use.

The thing is, I actually know something about this, because Gretchen and I went through all sorts of fertility treatments before we had the kids. And one of the things that I was prescribed, because I had a low sperm count, was exactly this drug, brand name Clomid.

Any small amount of online research would tell the dolts who wrote the articles that this is a common off-label prescription for men dealing with fertility problems of this particular kind.

But the folks who wrote the articles don't care and don't bother to tell you that.

And this is why I have very little faith in what I read in supposedly reputable sources. If they can't get all of the facts straight about something where you *know* they've omitted something, why should I believe they got it right on something else?

Comments

[madfilkentist]

News reporting has always been bad, but I think it's gotten worse with the rush to be first on the Internet with a story, and with even the pretense of objectivity being abandoned.

[tigertoy]

I would say that the trend of corporate owners minimizing costs in newsrooms is more fundamental. Yes, the first story out will be poorly researched out of haste, but the subsequent stories will do little to check the details in the first story because the one guy writing it is trying to do the work of 10, and he's fresh out of college because that commands a lower salary than the guy with 20 years on that beat so the little time he can put onto it is not directed optimally.