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Hey {{ first_name | Reader }},
Two of the biggest outlets in the country covered my work this month.
Fox News Digital ran a piece built around an interview with me. The Wall Street Journal covered a survey I co-authored on estranged parents. On paper, that is the kind of week most researchers wait years for.
Then I read what they actually printed.
Fox News ran the headline "5 reasons more Americans are cutting off their own parents, according to psychologist."
To be clear, I have a PhD in psychology. But I am not a licensed psychologist, and I never told the journalist I was one. Nobody at Fox checked. That one-word swap now sits in a headline with my name under it.
The WSJ’s mistake hits closer to home, because it is about data I actually generated. Peter Anderson and I ran two surveys of estranged parents in 2025: 1,027 people in the first, 4,226 in the second (Anderson and Blake, 2025). Add them together and you land at roughly 5,300 respondents. The Journal reported 7,000. I still do not know where that number came from. Half a dozen outlets have repeated it since, and none of them are technically wrong, because they are all just quoting the WSJ.
Here is what actually worries me about this:
Both of these errors happened on stories where the source, meaning me, was reachable and answering questions the whole time. Most stories do not have that luxury.
While I am grateful for both pieces — the estrangement research needs to reach parents living through this, and most of the journalists I have worked with take real care with sourcing — it does worry me. If two outlets can get details wrong on a story where I was sitting right there, that tells you something about every other story you read where nobody involved gets a say.
And it gets worse once you look at what heavy news consumption does to the people reading it, separate from whether the story is even accurate.
In the weeks after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, researchers surveyed nearly 4,700 adults, some who had been at or near the finish line and most who had watched it unfold from home (Holman, Garfin and Silver, 2014). People who spent six or more hours a day taking in bombing coverage that first week reported acute stress levels nearly three times higher than the people who were actually there. Watching the story on a loop did more damage than living through it.
It is part of why I stopped doomscrolling and started reading 1440 every morning instead. It is a five-minute digest pulled from over a hundred sources, and it strips out the outrage framing rather than adding to it. No hot take bolted onto the headline, and no algorithm picking today's crisis for me. That’s why it is the first place I get my news from now. You can try it out for free by clicking the image below.
Hold steady,
Richard
Smart starts here.
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P.S. If you want the actual estrangement survey data instead of someone else's summary of it, the full write-up sits on the Open Science Forum. You can read it here.
References
References
Anderson, P. and Blake, R. (2025) Parental Perspectives on Family Estrangement: Two Large-Scale Surveys. Coalition for Ethical Standards in Mental Health. Available here. at: https://osf.io/6xt53/
Bernstein, E. (2026) 'Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?', The Wall Street Journal, 21 July.
Holman, E.A., Garfin, D.R. and Silver, R.C. (2014) 'Media's role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(1), pp. 93–98. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1316265110. PMID: 24324161.
Rudy, M. (2026) '5 reasons more Americans are cutting off their own parents, according to psychologist', Fox News, 5 August.