On August 7, 2021, Breaking Belize News published an article titled Cholesterol drug could reduce COVID-19 infection by up to 70 per cent says study.
I will use this article to illustrate some lazy and, at best, misleading journalism in Belize.
The first thing that jumped at me because of its absence was no reference to the data source.
The best we get is according to a study carried out by researchers in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Denmark. The research published on Friday, August 6, in Frontiers in Pharmacology, was led by the University of Birmingham and Keele University in the UK and the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Italy. The University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Liverpool in the UK also collaborated with the research., but the author does not provide
a link to the actual source he read, nor the name of the research paper. It makes me suspect that he did not read the study,
but instead, he is redacting a redacted article published somewhere else. He should have also linked to that source.
He further quotes a statement from a press release by the University of Birmingham. Why not lift a quote from the research paper itself? Or better yet, why not provide his take on the research outcome instead of quoting a press release. But he also did not give a link to the press release he was quoting. Breaking Belize News has this lousy practice of never citing its sources, a capital crime in journalism. He uses this quote to establish that fenofibrate was tested in a lab with COVID infected human cells. However, he should have proceeded to caution that this research is still in its infancy, primarily because he did not provide links to his sources.
The article then mentions that "researchers are calling" for clinical trials on humans and makes another uncited claim that two hospitals are doing human trials with COVID patients.
But probably the most troubling claim in the article is from "unpublished data." This data claims that the medication can reduce infection by up to 70%. But not only that, but it is also effective against new variants. All this, from unpublished data. What is the intention of publishing this, other than sensationalism?
This is how misinformation spreads—writing articles without correctly citing the sources and using nebulous unpublished sources. This makes it difficult for the readers to investigate further and is forced to take the author's claim as an undeniable truth. But worst of all, they can use an article like this to justify self-medicating with fenofibrate.