News Analysis--Hospital PR Releases

Expect to see a lot of medical articles in the coming weeks on the front page of the Grove Sun Daily, as the local hospital public relations office preps the public for the $1 million tax donation from the city for a new hospital.
One such article appeared Monday in the Sun Daily, "Hospital Foundation Gives Back to the Community." It talked about a program begun nine years ago to provide defibrillators for every school in Delaware and Ottawa counties and how it saved lives.
The article was accompanied by a photo of three persons who survived cardiac arrest incidents and was obviously pulled from a hospital filing cabinet and recycled with the article.
The bad news is that one of the persons in the photo had died some time ago, forcing the Sun Daily to issue a front page Apology in Wednesday's edition. The family of the deceased person must have been sorely upset at the photo, which identified the man as surviving a cardiac arrest incident, which at one time he had, but had since passed away.
The second bad news is this is what happens when a PR department gets so full of itself and fails to check the facts before putting out a news release and photo to an unsuspecting reporter.
Newspapers don't have the resources to fact check every PR release that gets dumped on the desk and they depend on professional PR people for accuracy.
But here at The Observer we can relax---the local hospital has refused for two years to send us any of their news releases. We might ask too many questions.