Judging journalism: how should the quality of news reporting about clinical interventions be assessed and improved?

Abstract

Health care receives a lot of attention in the media. Rarely a day goes by without the wonders or horrors of some screening programme, drug, surgical procedure, or clinical service being discussed in the pages of our newspapers and on our television screens. Most of the major newspapers and television channels employ correspondents who specialise in health and medicine. Every day, these correspondents expect to be alerted to many potential “stories” by medical journals, policy makers, health service managers, professional interest groups, consumer interest groups, the pharmaceutical industry, research funders, and researchers. The correspondents’ interactions with these sources and their own activities in seeking, selecting, and structuring information all contribute to the shaping of stories. Media reports can influence the use that people make of healthcare interventions. Recent contraceptive “pill scares” communicated via the media have been associated with increases in the numbers of terminations of unwanted pregnancies among some populations, 2 although not others. 4 Women themselves have directly reported that they became pregnant after they stopped taking their oral contraceptives because of adverse media publicity. A systematic review of the eVects of media “campaigns” has shown that these can, at least in some circumstances, affect the use people make of health services. For example, publicity about the extremely high rates of hysterectomy among women in one Swiss canton appears to have triggered a fall in these rates, and there have been several examples of media campaigns that have increased the uptake of immunisations. 8 It seems likely that both healthcare professionals and the general public are influenced. Although it is not clear how and to what extent the specific characteristics of media reports of a particular issue influence their impact, most people would agree that media coverage of healthcare interventions should be of good quality. Their judgments about what constitutes good quality, however, are likely to vary according to their values and perspectives, and what they consider the purpose of such coverage to be. Representatives of diVerent groups tend to judge the quality of news reports according to diVerent criteria. The quotations in box 1 summarise several published opinions about one newspaper article that discussed possible genetic causes of asthma and the factors that aVected its publication.