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# FDA News Releases Get ‘C’ Grade: Publication
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/fda-news-releases-get-c-grade-publication/
- Published: 2016-11-03T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T21:45:04.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: FDA Policy/General, #legacy-id-D5137254

HealthNewsReview.org, which last year began reviewing healthcare PR news releases from a variety of sources on a 10-criteria system, gives a grade of “C” to the five FDA releases it has looked at. The good news for the agency, the report [says](http://www.healthnewsreview.org/2016/10/early-report-card-on-quality-of-fda-news-releases-c-at-best/?ref=fdaweb.com), is that the releases generally scored three out of five stars on its scoring system, meaning that they got satisfactory scores on five or six of the 10 criteria. But the bad news is that none of the releases satisfactorily met both criteria addressing medical evidence.

The first medical evidence criterion asks whether a news release adequately quantifies the benefits of an intervention, while the second looks at whether the release adequately gives a sense of the scope of potential benefit. “These two criteria, when both reported adequately, provide the reader with the basic tools needed to assess the claims being made,” the report says. “One would expect that FDA, which reviews reams of research before a product is approved, easily has that information on hand and could include it in news releases. Instead, the releases we’ve reviewed include mostly vague statements that may come across as endorsing new products without providing the context that readers need to make decisions. Admittedly, this is a small sample of the agency’s PR news releases and doesn’t support sweeping conclusions. But it does raise questions about FDA’s diligence in providing balanced, thorough information to the public about the drugs it approves.”

HealthNewsReview says that releases should give readers a sense of the potential benefit from an intervention by proving the numbers behind the claim, the materials that are in the “results” section of a research paper. And it should provide a context in which the numbers can be understood.

The lack of information is a concern, the online organization says, because it overlaps with a broader effort by federal entities to stonewall journalists. ***FDA Webview*** publisher **Jim Dickinson** tells HealthNewsReview that agency public information officers (PIOs) are effectively sealed off from journalists, and that affects how FDA communicates with the media. “Their job is to help management control news coverage,” he says, “and keep journalists away from subject matter experts. This has led to an often-adversarial relationship between the PIOs and the reporters. It has also led to less informative news releases.”