Bad News for Your Health; Study Cites Flaws in TV Reporting

By JOHN FAUBER and SUSANNE RUST

Can TV news be hazardous to your health?

While health and medical news is a popular topic on local television newscasts, researchers at the University of Wisconsin- Madison and the University of Michigan found that the typical story was only 33 seconds long, lacked specifics and, in a few cases, contained egregious and sometimes potentially deadly errors, according to an exhaustive analysis of 1,799 TV health stories.

“Most of the stories were not useful, but not overly harmful,” said lead author James Pribble, an emergency room physician and lecturer at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Good or bad, health reporting appeared to be a high priority among Milwaukee-area TV stations, which ranked 11th out of 50 markets in terms of the number of stories, researchers said. Milwaukee was ranked the 31st-largest market at the time.

The study, which was led by Pribble and Ken Goldstein, a UW political scientist, examined 2,795 news broadcasts during October 2002. Nearly 1,800 of those broadcasts featured health stories, accounting for 11% of the news portion of late evening newscasts analyzed. The report was published in the March issue of the American Journal of Managed Care.

“We all like criticizing local news,” said Goldstein. “And it’s easy. But, I also think there’s blame to go around.”

He said health officials should learn how to talk to the media so that the important points of their research the meaning, relevance, context are laid out clearly.

He said doctors and researchers should take lessons from politicians who have been trained to talk to the media, such as learning to use sound bites.

“They can learn better to package what they want to say,” he said.

The report says only 27% of all stories relied on interviews with health professionals.

Goldstein also said that accountability for errors in TV health reporting was low. That is partly because, unlike political reporting or community reporting, viewers may not catch the errors. And corrections are not generally delivered on air.

Jim Lemon, news director of Milwaukee’s WITI-TV (Channel 6), said he did not think the study’s general criticism of local TV health coverage applied to his station.

He said the station’s local medical stories were considerably longer than 33 seconds. He noted that the station has a full-time medical reporter, Julie Feldman.

“I expect her to know what she is talking about,” Lemon said. “There has never been a question about accuracy in her stories.”

Representatives of the three other major network-affiliated Milwaukee TV stations could not be reached for comment.

The study found that the most common general medical conditions reported on included infectious disease, cancer, injury or poisoning, and circulatory disease. According to the researchers, these categories coincide with common causes of death and illness in the United States.

However, the specific topics highlighted in each of these fields were not necessarily relevant.

For instance, the researchers said 79% of 316 stories about infectious disease covered just four topics West Nile virus, food contamination, smallpox and the treatment of warts using duct tape. Only six were about HIV, and four of those cited a study that said lemon juice might be useful in preventing transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. One story actually said lemon juice may be a substitute for costly HIV medications.

“This is an outrageous error,” Goldstein said.

Considering that only 1% of the population who contract West Nile actually develop severe disease, the reporting seems to have been excessive, the researchers said. However, they did note that the virus was still relatively “new” at the time, and that might account for its prevalence. The researchers also noted that while the stories appeared frequently, the reports did not put the disease into perspective explaining the risk or incidence of the disease and generally did not include preventive measures to avoid contracting the disease.

The researchers also said some of the stories provided inaccurate information and potentially dangerous advice.

Here are a few examples:

— In the story about lemon juice and AIDS which came from an Australian laboratory study, in which researchers exposed sperm, egg and HIV in a petri dish to lemon juice one station’s broadcast suggested that lemon juice might be an effective contraceptive.

All but one of the lemon juice stories failed to mention that the research was based on laboratory findings and did not involve human testing.

— Another story recommended that parents use their finger to remove an item lodged in a choking child’s throat, a technique that could actually push the item farther down the victim’s air pipe.

— One story said exercise could cause cancer.

— One of the most-covered stories was about removing warts with duct tape, which the authors said was a topic of “questionable public health value.”

Pribble said newspapers have some of their own problems when it comes to health news, although they do a better job than TV. For instance, the Journal Sentinel ran a short version of the duct tape story on page 5 of its main section.

“They (newspaper errors) are not as glaring,” Pribble said. “It may be that they have more space or they give opposing views.”

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