The reporters might point out that they quoted Allen Steere, the doctor who discovered Lyme disease. But does Steere say chronic Lyme disease is a phony diagnosis being treated by pseudoscientists with unproven cures? Here’s his quote:

“I don’t think of it as a mysterious disease that causes a lot of vague symptoms,” said Steere, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has spent decades studying Lyme disease and sat on two of the expert panels. “It doesn’t.”

It’s clear that Steere doesn’t buy Lyme disease as a cause of all kinds of seemingly unrelated symptoms. But his statement is far more measured than those of the reporters. Further, this is the entire quote. I was eager for a more extended report of Steere’s views of chronic Lyme, but this is all we get. Further still, the quote does not appear until 1,000 words into the story, after we’ve already heard about a doctor repeatedly disciplined for treating chronic Lyme, and from a woman who thinks Lyme disease was manufactured in a government lab. The reporters also quote a Robert Bradford, identified only–and unhelpfully–as the founder of the Robert Bradford Research Institute, who says chronic Lyme is the plague of the 21st Century and might be responsible for half of all cases of chronic illness.

Steere’s quote is set up with a paraphrase of the findings of two doctors’ organizations who concluded that “the diagnosis is suspect.” Again, this is far more measured than what the reporters are writing in their own voice.

They then quote chronic Lyme advocates at length before introducing another expert, Dr. Paul Lantos of Duke University, whose quote, in its entirety, is: “Why take needless risks with people’s lives?”

Again and again, Callahan and Tsouderos give far more space to advocates making questionable claims than they do to experts who refute those claims, allowing the serious case for chronic Lyme disease, whatever that might be, to be buried under the dubious claims of advocates.

The reporters go on and on impuguning patients and advocates without ever telling us whether there is a debate among legitimate experts about whether Lyme disease might assume a chronic form.

The reporters bolster their case that chronic Lyme disease doesn’t exist by noting further down that Bradford was convicted more than 30 years ago for conspiring “to smuggle a banned cancer treatment.” If Bradford is a crook, why do the reporters spend so much time reporting what he has to say? Why is he even in the story?

The writers give the last word to an activist whose rebuttal to one of the doctors’ groups that was skeptical of chronic Lyme disease is this: ‘”Infecting the committee members with Lyme sounds great because we are pissed off.”

Not exactly reasoned debate, eh?

In short, what Callahan and Tsouderos have done is to argue that chronic Lyme disease can’t exist because the people who say it does are nuts.

A far better approach would have been to report the evidence, pro and con, and to quote the most persuasive advocates for and against chronic Lyme disease–not the least persuasive. And to give both sides equal time to speak.

(Thanks for the heads-up to Pam Weintraub, features editor of Discover Magazine and author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic.)