Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I wish to recognize the valuable help of Hamed Razaviny and Erin Barker provided
during my research.
ABSTRACT
Explanatory journalism has long been an established source of ideas for the
Media, but reporters still have a hard time providing reliable and precise results from
an academic study. Most articles with “revealing headlines” often fail to meet the
Recent media reports (from October 2017) covering the AWARE study (multi-hospital
clinical study of the brain and consciousness during cardiac arrest) ended up fitting
this trend. Whereas different media outlets (“The Independent”, “The Sun” and “The
Mirror”) reveal “the shocking truth” about the “mind still working after death” when
referring to the respective academic source, the study itself states only a 2% occurrence
exclude certain information while referring to academic papers in order to make a story
more appealing and seem more factual. Whereas an academic research invests a lot of
time into eliminating bias, media articles use bias to their own advantage, making
study.
Explanatory journalism has long been an established source of ideas for the
Media, but reporters still have a hard time providing reliable and precise results from
an academic study. Most articles with “revealing headlines” often fail to meet the
Recent media reports (from October 2017) covering the AWARE study (multi-hospital
clinical study of the brain and consciousness during cardiac arrest) ended up fitting
this trend. Whereas different media outlets (“The Independent”, “The Sun” and “The
Mirror”) reveal “the shocking truth” about the “mind still working after death” when
referring to the respective academic source, the study itself states only a 2% occurrence
Thus, this paper sets out to evaluate the three media reports mentioned above
for their validity and accuracy by comparing them to the original research done by
Parnia et.al (2014). The author will explore whether the press reports use speculative
language, “cherry-pick” the facts or misinterpret the results extracted from study in
some way.
Based upon many of the findings reported in the scholarly literature, it has been
concluded that the vast majority of patients had no memory recall and were unable to
reported results based on interviewing 140 patients that survived cardiac arrest and had
NDEs, stating that only 39% (55 of 149) of respondents answered positively to the
question “Do you remember anything from the time during your unconsciousness?”,
whereas 61% reported no perception of awareness. In the study done by Parnia (2001)
56 out of 63 patients (the vast majority!) had no memory recall of their period of
Nevertheless, all three newspapers reported that cardiac arrest survivors were
aware they were dead (Downey, 2017) “seeing things that were going on around them”
(Maclean, 2017) and could even “hear their death announced” (Kitching, 2017),
completely ignoring the fact that the academic study found a relatively low incidence
(2%) of visual or auditory awareness. The semantics used in the media reports were
effect in order to add more flare in their reporting. In fact, the effect is quite miniscule,
as only one (out of 140 respondents) patient was able to specifically demonstrate full
awareness during the event by accurately describing people, sounds and activities
A closer look at published media articles suggests that the bias is built into the
choices reporters make in writing their stories with the purpose to convey a certain
attitude toward their articles. When “The Sun” calls the study results “terrifying”, or
“The Independent” writes “death just became even more scary”, these statements
clearly appeal more to the emotions than to logic. Conversely, the study indicates that
none of the patients who had a NDE found it to be traumatic or distressing, rather it
It is important to shed light on the fact that most participants for the study were
men (95 out of 140 – it could be a coincidental outcome, as the study does not give
explicit explanation for this phenomenon) between the ages 21 to 94 years old (no
specific indication on background, whether the study was done on African Americans,
for example). The mean age was 64 years with standard deviation (plus-minus) 13
describes only “some of those studied”. If these metrics (like age, gender) were
properly described in the Media, it would give the reader another impression of the
results, which would not allow generalization (as the study done on women, for
example, could result in a lower incidence of heart attacks, less data on this
(who led the clinical research group) in the press articles, it was recognized that many
Mirror” and “The Sun” quote him as follows: "They (patients) will describe watching
doctors and nurses working and they'll describe having an awareness of full
conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known
to them," leaving out the critical fact that Dr.Parnia is talking specifically about two
respondents (one of them, however, could not be interviewed in-depths due to ill
A closer look in the academic paper suggests that both patients were men (no
mention about it in the Media), both had suffered ventricular fibrillation (which results
in cardiac arrest with loss of consciousness and no pulse) in non-acute areas, where
shelves (placed by medics in order to evaluate patients’ auditory recollections) had not
been placed (no mention about it in the Media again). Why is this information
important? Taking the first point (that the patients were men) into consideration, one
is unable to generalize the effects onto the greater population as both cases of memory
recall were men. Secondly, the fact that the both patients had suffered ventricular
fibrillation (VF) potentially raises the question of some possible correlational effect
between the VF and some form of awareness. Lastly, by leaving out the third point
(about shelves) the Media articles elegantly omit the fact that the precise examination
of the validity of the specific claims associated with visual recollection is not possible.
There is worth in looking at how omitting information about the sample size
could greatly effect how one views the statistical significance of a study. Consider this:
“(…) we're trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they
go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal
experience we're all going to have when we die." (Maclean, 2017). This statement
made by Dr.Parnia in the press article was implemented in a way to give off the image
that some account the findings in his study was statistically significant. These kind of
tactics are presented through a lens, to generalize the findings of research by omitting
important information, like sample size (too small), gender (male respondents), age,
background etc. Technically speaking, to allow generalization and to extend the results
obtained by the given sample to the whole population, a statistical significance test is
needed. Only when the results for the given experiment pass the significance test they
are validated. What does it mean for the comparative analysis? The AWARE study
took a survey of a group of 140 patients. If somebody decides to draw any conclusion
based on this data, the results are likely to be highly erroneous because the population
size is far greater when compared to the sample size. Thus, The academic article
indicates that it would be unwise to draw any significant conclusion from the research
The aim of the AWARE study was to investigate the frequency of awareness,
while attempting to correlate patients’ claims of visual awareness with events that
occurred during cardiac arrest (Parnia et.al, 2014). The academic article highlights the
correlational relationship between the two variables, which does not imply that one
thing causes the other. Still, the articles in the analysed newspapers tend to exaggerate
the effect, which could deceive readers that the results of the study are causal and not
correlational
exclude certain information while referring to academic papers in order to make a story
more appealing and seem more factual. Whereas an academic research invests a lot of
time into eliminating bias, media articles use bias to their own advantage, making
REFERENCES:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4713871/when-you-die-you-know-youre-dead-
terrifying-study-reveals/
5. Maclean Dave (October 2017) “The Independent “
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mind-works-after-death-consciousness-
sam-parnia-nyu-langone-a8007101.html
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/you-die-you-know-youre-11368627