Journalists and the media regularly cop a bagging for how we cover health. We exaggerate the benefits of medicines and other interventions, focus narrowly on health as a function of genetics or behaviour, spread fear, and fail to disclose the commercial interests of our sources.

If you’re interested in more details of our failings, I’m happy to supply a list of references as long as your arm. Or you can keep an eye on the HealthNewsReview blog, run by University of Minnesota journalism academic Gary Schwitzer.

Interestingly, the very publications that publish so much of the critique of health journalism — medical journals — are coming under fire for their own contributions to journalism that misleads and misinforms.

The Lancet recently issued a mea culpa of sorts for publishing now discredited research by Andrew Wakefield which triggered widespread alarm about the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella.

But this is really just a pimple compared with much bigger problems in medical publishing. As Adelaide psychiatrist Dr Peter Parry wrote yesterday, medical journals have often come to resemble one of the many arms of pharma marketing. They have, as a senior editor once said, become “information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry”.

Medical journals have also been criticised for failing to ensure that researchers report their results accurately and appropriately, and for how they promote themselves and the research they publish.

Two researchers who have been at the forefront of scrutinising how medical journals and other medical institutions shape media coverage are doctors Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz from the Centre for Medicine and the Media at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire.

In one study, they analysed press releases issued by several of the world’s leading medical journals and found many deficiencies, including that they often failed to mention the limitations of studies, and the conflicts of interests of researchers or editorialists. “We think that journals can and should do more to enhance the quality of medical reporting,” they concluded.

Following the recent fracas about the media’s misreporting of a study on homebirths, I asked them to assess the press release and editorial that accompanied the study’s publication in the Medical Journal of Australia. Their response, posted in full at Crikey‘s medical blog Croakey, is critical of both the release and editorial.

I also asked Schwitzer to comment. You can read his lengthy critique at Croakey but the short version is that he thought the press release was “awful”.

After I raised similar concerns in Crikey earlier this year, both the journal’s editor, Dr Martin Van Der Weyden and the AMA president, Dr Andrew Pesce, strongly defended the release and journal processes.

The editor seemed to suggest that journalists were the only ones with anything to learn from this case. It now seems, however, that there are others who see some lessons for journals themselves.

These are not only issues for the MJA, of course, but apply more broadly to all serious journals (as distinct from those set up by pharma as promotional vehicles). Then again, the MJA does have a particular responsibility as it regularly generates a whack of media coverage.

If journals cannot get their own houses in order, then it seems not only unfair but also unrealistic to expect journalists and the general media to lift our standards of health reporting.

At least the BMJ was this week prepared to publish an article from me on the MJA and the homebirth study, raising questions that might have been a tad too close to home for comfort.