MOST OF THE HEALTH NEWS YOU GET IS "PROMO"

THE COLLAPSE OF MEDICAL REPORTING

By Nicholas Regush

April 8, 2002 - Too bad. Just when a news organization shows some rare guts and enterprise in taking on Big Medicine, it gets whacked by another, in this case, much larger, news organization for "gotcha" journalism.

In March 2001, the Seattle Times published a highly-detailed six-part series raising serious questions about a 1980s experimental bone-marrow transplantation program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center ("the Hutch"). The paper alleged that patients were not properly informed about the risks of that procedure and that the cancer center had a financial interest in providing such treatment.

After snapping up some prizes for its effort, the Seattle Times and its reporters, Duff Wilson and David Heath, appeared to be well on their way to a Pulitzer. And that may well turn out to be the case - we’ll learn this afternoon- but last month, after holding back for an entire year, Laura Landro, an assistant managing editor at the Wall Street Journal let loose with an op-ed piece in her own paper attacking the Seattle Times series for getting it wrong about the Hutch.

And Landro, who, by the way, was a patient at the Hutch and makes generous donations to the medical institution, has since been strongly backed by the WSJ’s editorial bigwigs.

Keep in mind that the "dust" hit the fan just weeks before the Pulitzers were to be announced. Nice.

But while much of the to-do about this series rages on and is focused mainly on the possibility that this was either some sort of smear campaign related to the Pulitzers or a nasty bit of a personal vendetta against the Seattle Times, I see this rather extraordinary incident as yet another example of the potential obstacles news organizations face when they occasionally decide to take on Big Medicine. In fact, the term "once in a blue moon" best describes the type of in-depth medical reporting provided in the Seattle Times series.

News organizations sometimes dip into their resources and talent to probe medical matters such as lack of informed consent or some skullduggery related to the pharmaceutical industry. But, by and large, in sharp contrast to the big splash here and there, daily health reporting (including feature writing or TV "special" segments) often is little more than promo. By that I do not simply mean that reporters hack out information from press releases — and yes, they certainly do a lot of that rather shamelessly in both print and broadcast media — but rather that they do so little research that the net result might as well have been plucked from a press release. I’ve worked extensively in both print (e.g. twelve years at The Montreal Gazette) and at the TV network news level for a decade (including six years at ABC’s World News Tonight With Peter Jennings) to have first-hand knowledge of the often careless and flighty way that medical news is put together, day in and day out.

On the print side, editors often hand out health-related assignments to reporters who are clueless about the topics they need to cover and depend largely either on news clips available on computer or often extravagant PR packages that they can rip off. At the network level, pretty much the same goes on, when non-health producers and correspondents are given health-related stories to do, or as the saying goes, to "crash," meaning that they only have a few hours to put a piece together.

TV has its special medical correspondent and producers, but often they do not have the time to work up enough of a research sweat on a story, are handed promo-like stories to do by know-little-or-nothing senior producers who are thinking "promo" thoughts, or are compelled to deliver stories pegged to major journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) or the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). As though this highly focused attention somehow represents health trends. At World News Tonight, for example, the brass, which includes Peter Jennings, has slightly expanded the scope of daily health coverage by presenting a short string of headlines known as "The Medical File." I mean, why bother?

Frankly, lack of time to conduct proper research and a steadfast preoccupation with a highly limited health news focus is only a tiny part of the problem facing the major news shows and many newspapers. Given this considerable limitation, you can well imagine how difficult it is to explore issues of great complexity and controversy. Unfortunately, once a particular line of thinking on a health issue is more or less perceived by senior editors or producers to be "fact," it is difficult to budge away from it. In fact, challenges to health orthodoxy are typically buried; either no one sufficiently understands the dissenters or cares to do so. It’s simply seen as too risky. What if so-and so calls the next day and questions the health news judgement?

Any health reporter with smarts knows how intertwined medicine has become with commerce. Even the medical journals (and not just the two mentioned above) have been crying foul when it comes to issues such as lack of informed consent and conflict-of-interest. Anyone regularly covering health issues should know that it has become increasingly difficult to trust people who will be interviewed on a health issue, given the extraordinary ties so many medical professionals now have with industry, notably the pharmaceutical and biotech companies. In fact, there is often no real need for official PR because so many of the doctors being interviewed have financial interests in the work they do and they have learned to be "media savvy," meaning they know how to spin facts and what not to say in an interview. The end result — in print or on TV — is health hype and health news deception. The problem here is that it takes a fairly well-groomed health reporter to smell the bull when it is being released. Most ill-prepared producers and correspondents will likely have plugged-up noses.

Complicating matters further for an audience which is hungry for well-informed health news are the doctor "reporters," both in print and on TV. Yes, unlike many of their incompetent colleagues who would be hard-pressed to quickly locate the liver or pituitary gland on a poster of the human body, they do know the language of medicine and they can rattle off the names of major medical institutions faster than a side-show barker can describe the evil within the tent. So? But can they separate themselves sufficiently from the medical indoctrination they have received over the years and get reporter-tough? I’m sure some can, but on TV, for example, most will never make the grade beyond being a talking head, and talking in shallow tones, sometimes ending a report with such wisdom as "See your doctor." This little nugget always makes me smile because the average doctor knows squat about the complexities of the latest medical stories that are developing. So the poor viewer gets shafted twice. Nothing and nothing equals nothing.

With more and more media organizations hammering out health news — and mostly shallow health news with little attempt at context, or substance, for that matter, or digging into controversy — the end result is that readers and viewers are getting a dizzy fix of health trash. And there seems no end to it.

So whether the Seattle Times wins a Pulitzer or not for its extensive investigation of the Hutch and its experimental bone-marrow transplant program, I say good try and please keep that kind of enterprise alive because it’s collapsing and near death.