News stories need human drama, not dry data

“If it bleeds, it leads” is a catchy and convenient criticism of a certain segment of American journalism. But in our dismissal of it as a foundation for newsgathering and storytelling, we should not forget that the audience (and journalists) are human beings. And human beings have an innate desire to be told and to tell dramatic stories. I am at a loss to name a single operatic work that treats coronary artery disease as its subject, although I can name several where murder, incest, and assassination play a key part in the story. Check your own instinct for storytelling by asking yourself this: If driving home from work, you passed a burning building, would you wait to tell your spouse about it until you first explained the number of people who died that day from some form of neoplastic disease? Journalism is not run by a scientific formula. There is no “treatment algorithm” to guide decision making in the newsroom. Decisions about a story being newsworthy come from the head, the heart, and the gut. The notion that the results of that decision making should parallel morbidity and mortality statistics in the area is a peculiar one. We report on the newsworthy death of a patient with the West Nile virus south of the Mason-Dixon line, but according to McArthur and colleagues' logic, we should instead be reporting on the ravages of diabetes because so many more people succumb to the latter than to the former. Similarly, journalism will likely focus on the “story” of 4 particular hijackings, the collapse of the World Trade Center, and an attack on the Pentagon far out of proportion to the relative weight of the 7,000 deaths. Why? Because sometimes we have to tell stories that resonate someplace other than the epidemiologist's spreadsheet. There is much in McArthur and associates' study for newspeople to take away and consider. Chief among the lessons is the criticism of television's penchant for telling stories that are sometimes only visually compelling over stories that are important for their content alone. It is a hard lesson for television to learn. And it calls the managers of television newsrooms to be genuine leaders. The audience is prepared to listen to a story of importance—even in the absence of dramatic video; indeed, many millions of people get their news from their radios each day. The authors rightly point to the matter of the public's poor medical literacy and to the issue of who is responsible for improving it. Journalists, I believe, have a role in communicating medical information to the public, but the responsibility for this education rests squarely on the shoulders of the medical community. Physicians and other health care professionals should be talking to journalists about issues of importance, becoming their sources of medical information. They should invite news directors (and their deputies) to seminars. Raise these issues with them. The medical professions are the ones who can educate the media about the importance of sound medical reporting.