Professional Relationship Between Physicians and Journalists in Bangladesh: Web-Based Cross-Sectional Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: A health care system is intertwined with multiple stakeholders, including government institutions, pharmaceutical companies, patients, hospitals and clinics, health care professionals, health researchers and scientific medical experts, patients and consumer organizations, and media organizations. Physicians and journalists are the key actors who play a significant role in making health care services and health information accessible to the people of a country. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to explore the tensions and alliances between physicians and journalists in Bangladesh, along with identifying strategies that could potentially improve the often contentious relationship and quality of medical journalism. METHODS: We conducted a web-based cross-sectional survey using the snowball sampling technique from September 2021 to March 2022. Adult Bangladeshi citizens belonging to the two selected professional groups (physicians and journalists), who understood the survey content, and agreed to participate in the survey were considered eligible for inclusion in the study. Both descriptive and logistic regression analyses, including the Mann-Whitney U test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test, were performed to determine the differences between groups concerning selected perception-related variables, and the associations of perceptions about lack of trust in each other's knowledge, skills, and professional integrity with background characteristics. RESULTS: A total of 419 participants completed the survey, including 219 physicians and 200 journalists. Among physicians, 53.4% (117/219) reported lower trust toward journalists' professional domain and expertise, whereas 43.5% (87/200) of journalists had lower trust toward physicians' professional domain and expertise. In terms of perception about not having respect for each other, the median value for the physicians was 5 (strongly agree), whereas it was only 3 (agree) for the journalists. We also found that male physicians (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 0.45, compared with female physicians) and medical officers (AOR 0.30, compared with specialists) had significantly higher odds of lacking trust in journalists' knowledge, skills, and professional integrity. When rating the statement "Regular professional interaction between journalists and doctors may improve the relationship between the professional groups," most physicians (186/219, 84.9%) chose "neither agree nor disagree," whereas most journalists (106/200, 53.0%) stated that they "slightly agree." CONCLUSIONS: Both physicians and journalists in Bangladesh have negative perceptions of each other's professions. However, physicians have a more negative perception of journalists than journalists have of the physicians. Strategies such as a legal framework to identify medical-legal issues in reporting, constructive discussion, professional interaction, and capacity-building training programs may significantly improve the relationship between physicians and journalists.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".