How viewers get facts from fiction

We have long secretly suspected that medical students learn more from television dramas such as ER and Casualty than they do on the wards. But now a report claims that the general public may also have been learning more than we bargained for.

The report, Dramatic Licence: Fact or Fiction?, published by the UK Broadcasting Standards Commission and commissioned last month from market researchers NOP, looks at how accurately television drama series portray their featured professions

(www.bsc.org.uk/pdfs/research/dramatic.pdf). The research involved 14 group discussions—10 among the general public and four …