Objectives : To evaluate health stories from several representative news websites in the U.K. and in Japan with the Media Doctor Australia rating instrument in order to contrast the strength and weakness of Japanese health stories with that of U.K. ones.
Design :Cross-sectional study
Methods : Stories describing treatment or prevention of diseases published between January and June 2007 were retrieved from U.K. (BBC, Guardian, Independent, Times, Yahoo! UK,) and Japanese (Asahi, Yomiuri, Yahoo! Japan,) websites which specialize in health / medical news. The quality of retrieved stories was examined with an instrument developed by Media Doctor Australia. Overall score was contrasted between two countries.
Results : 296 U.K. stories and 79 Japanese stories were retrieved. The overall score by media outlet ranged between 45.7 (Asahi) and 63.4 (Independent) out of 100. When all outlets were pooled, U.K. stories (average overall score 60.0, 95%CI 58.2-61.8) were rated significantly higher than Japanese stories (47.8, 95%CI 45.4-50.2) (p<0.001).
Conclusion : Stories reviewed in this study did not provide satisfactory information from the viewpoint of Media Doctor Australia. This suggests that journalists and health service researchers can help each other for the better dissemination of health information to the general public.

Objective: The objective of this study was to examine information quality by quantitatively evaluating newspaper stories on drug therapy using the “Media Doctor” instrument.Methods: A database search was conducted to extract newspaper stories on drug therapy published between July 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017. Two evaluators independently evaluated each story using the “Media Doctor” instrument. Each of the 10 evaluation criteria were rated as “satisfactory” or “not satisfactory.” When the content of the story was not suitable for the evaluation criteria, it was regarded as “not applicable”.Results: Fifty-nine news stories (Asahi: 13, Mainichi: 8, Nikkei: 8, Sankei: 14, Yomiuri: 16) were included. The median number of evaluation criteria that the two evaluators judged as “satisfactory” was 5. The proportions of stories that the two evaluators judged as satisfactory were “1. availability,” 73%; “2. novelty,” 66%; “3. alternatives,” 39%; “4. disease mongering,” 58%; “5. evidence,” 32%; “6. quantification of benefits,” 31%; “7. harm,” 41%; “8. cost,” 22%; “9. sources of information/conflict of interest,” 12%; and “10. headline,” 66%. Conversely, the proportions of stories judged as “not satisfactory” were “1. availability,” 0%; “2. novelty,” 5%; “3. alternatives,” 12%; “4. disease mongering,” 8%; “5. evidence,” 24%; “6. quantification of benefits,” 29%; “7. harm,” 41%; “8. cost,”44%; “9. sources of information/conflict of interest,” 32%; and “10. headline,” 12%.Conclusion: These results suggest that the quality of newspaper stories are insufficient as drug information in terms of the validity of its scientific evidence.