Burried information

By: Shauna Agan

An article on MSNBC.com caught my eye today. The headline read, “1 in 5 young Americans has personality disorder”.

Reading through this article, several things seemed wrong to me.

First off, never in the article is young adult defined. Is young adult anyone under the age of 30, or is it anyone under the age of 25? What constitutes of a young adult?

Second, the source of all the information isn’t even told until halfway through the article. Furthermore, there is no link to the source making it harder to find all the information and not just the information shared in the article.

Although the headline is very catchy, it is not necessarily accurate for the article either. Reading into the article, it is explained what these disorders are, and the label personality disorder does not exactly sum it up. Disorder maybe, but not necessarily personality disorder.

When I traced the source of the article back to its root, I found out the source that this article is written about is a much broader scheme than just personality disorders. It is about mental health conditions in college studetns compared to non-college individuals.

Finally, although I understand the article is meant to just tell the facts and get the information to the public, newsworthiness comes into question. The source of the information was just published recently, but the information is based from 2001 and 2002. This also should have been noted higher up in the article to let the reader understand where the information was coming from.

Sometimes a journalist buries information such as this into the article to make his or her own article look more newsworthy and credible. However, I don’t believe any good journalist should have to do this. If the true story is good enough, they wouldn’t bury information throughout their story.