MEDICAL MATTERS:Health literacy depends on the quality of media information, writes MUIRIS HOUSTON
JOURNALISTS who cover specialist subjects like to think they bring an extra dimension to their reportage. They will tell you it’s a combination of experience, qualifications and probably an intuitive ability to appreciate the impact of specialist news as well as a well-honed nose for political spin and corporate fudge. But we would say that, wouldn’t we?
There is now some evidence to back up our grandiose notions, at least where health matters are concerned. Researchers at two Australian universities, Newcastle and Western Sydney, looked at the quality of health-news coverage in Australian media between 2004 and 2009. Of 1,337 news stories analysed, 142 were written by health/science journalists, with 228 by specialist health journalists. The researchers set out to answer the question of whether more experienced specialist health journalists write stories of a higher quality than journalists in other categories.
Assessment criteria included whether journalists reported on evidence supporting the treatment or intervention and whether they quantified the harms and benefits of the health intervention. Points were also given if the writer avoided “disease-mongering” and consulted independent experts.
The results, published last week in the open-access journal PloS, showed broadsheet newspapers scored highest, while stories carried by human-interest TV and radio programmes met the fewest criteria. And while specialist health journalists had the highest scores, the variation in score between specialists and generalists was 15.5 per cent.
But does it really matter? The authors argue that our collective health literacy depends on the quality of media information on medical advances; they are concerned that there has been little evidence of an improvement in health reporting in the past five years.
“A number of recent studies have pointed to the poor and variable quality of many health stories in the mainstream media, particularly those covering new drugs and procedures. Some outlets are capable of producing excellent stories, but common flaws across all media include lack of attention to the quality of the research evidence, exaggerated estimates of benefits, inadequate coverage of potential harm, no information on the costs of new treatments and a failure to identify unbiased expert sources,” they say.
“The reasons for poor-quality journalism are complex, and include lack of specialised knowledge, time pressures on journalists, space limitations, the difficulty of accessing expert unbiased informants, and the desire of researchers, their institutions, and [sometimes] journals to exaggerate the significance of the research.”
Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get worse, given the financial pressures facing traditional media.
Meanwhile, in a recent science blog in the Guardian, Martin Robbins took a tongue-in-cheek look at how science and health stories might be dealt with, in a generic way, by a news website. Here are some extracts:
“In this paragraph I will briefly [because no paragraph should be more than one line] state which existing scientific ideas this new research ‘challenges’.
“If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for sufferers or victims.
“This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like ‘the scientists say’ to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.
“Here I will state that whatever was being researched was first discovered in some year, presenting a vague timeline in a token gesture toward establishing context for the reader.
“To pad out this section I will include a variety of inane facts about the subject of the research that I gathered by Googling the topic and reading the Wikipedia article that appeared as the first link.
“This paragraph contained useful information or context, but was removed by the sub-editor to keep the article within an arbitrary word limit in case the internet runs out of space.
“The final paragraph will state that some part of the result is still ambiguous, and that research will continue.”
Caveat emptor.