Playing Doctor with your TV

This study is a couple of weeks old, but LostRemote just brought it to my attention today. This is from Betsy's department -- Health and Medicine -- but she's been working 24/7 on the bird flu story, so here we go. A study was done that looked at how health stories were covered on the local tv news (Channel 3, Channel 30, etc.)

Viewer beware: Local TV news covers health a lot, but not always well, study finds

First-ever national analysis of local TV news health coverage reveals
opportunities for both broadcasters and health experts to improve

ANN ARBOR, MI – Local television newscasts, where most Americans get most of their news, are packed with medical stories and health information. But the first-ever national study of that coverage finds many problems with it, and sees room for improvement by both TV stations and the health experts whose work fills the news.

The good news. . . there's a lot of health coverage.

In all, health and medical stories comprised 11 percent of the news portion of late-evening newscasts in the one-month period studied, with 1,799 such stories carried on 2,795 broadcasts captured from the representative sample of 122 stations in the nation’s top 50 media markets.

The bad news. . . it's not exactly what you'd call "in-depth".

The average story was 33 seconds long, and most did not give specifics about the source of the information presented.

Oh, well, who needs to be bothered with all those boring facts. (Still, some facts are nice.)

But most disturbing, the study’s authors say, were the egregious errors contained in a small minority of studies — errors that could have led to serious consequences.

For instance, a story that aired on several stations reported on lemon juice’s effect on sperm and speculated about, or presented as fact, the use of lemon juice as an effective contraceptive, and its potential effect on preventing sexual transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Despite the fact that the study was done in a research lab, nearly all the stories failed to mention that it had not involved humans. Even more alarming, one of the stations misinterpreted the study altogether and stated that lemon juice may be a substitute for “costly” HIV medications.

As often happens in the media, especially on tv, certain topics got a lot of attention, while other important topics were ignored.

The two most common specific health topics for stories were breast cancer and West Nile Virus. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an occasion that many TV stations use to focus on breast health issues. And many areas of the country were experiencing an ongoing outbreak of West Nile Virus infections at the time.

But the coverage of these two topics highlights some of the problems found throughout the study, Pribble says. For example, breast cancer got far more coverage than lung cancer, which is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States; only five stories focused on lung cancer. And 40 of the breast cancer stories focused on one study about the effectiveness of teaching women to examine their breasts for signs of cancer. But those stories often contained conflicting messages with introductory statements such as “breast self-exams are a waste of time” followed by recommendations at the conclusion of the story that encouraged women to continue performing breast self-exams.

Meanwhile, most of the West Nile stories didn’t put the disease into perspective by comparing its prevalence and severity with that of other, much more common and deadly, infectious diseases. In fact, stories about West Nile made up more than half of all stories about infectious diseases carried by local newscasts in the study period.

To be fair, many tv stations will refer the viewer to their website, where they can get more information. If you see something on tv that seems important to you, you'll want to go out looking for more information. Fortunately, with the growth of the internet, that imformation is easier to find than ever.

And the study doesn't just blame tv. TV is what it is. It's up to the health care industry to give tv what it needs.

Pribble and Goldstein don’t blame just the newscast producers and reporters for these problems. They emphasize that public health authorities, clinical experts and researchers must give reporters information, interviews and pre-taped video that meet the demands of TV newscasts, which must tell stories quickly, visually and in language that’s understandable to non-experts. At the same time, the authors say, they should help reporters put individual news items into perspective, and help them understand what health and medical topics have the most bearing on the public’s health.