How many people have to die from a disease or condition before it merits a news story on the BBC? The answer, says a new report published this week, is 0.33 people from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) but 8571 people from smoking. The numbers of alcohol and obesity related deaths necessary to warrant news coverage are equally high—at 4714 and 7500 respectively.
The report, by think-tank the King's Fund, claims that news values are distorting health priorities. Although the deaths-per-news-story analysis is meant as no more than a crude measure designed to provoke debate about media health coverage, it gives some idea of how news reports on relatively small or unproven risks—such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine—vastly outweigh reports on “major killers,” such as obesity.
This deaths-per-news-story analysis reveals a similar pattern in newspaper news. It takes 4444 deaths from smoking, 846 from alcohol, and 2538 from obesity to merit a story in a newspaper, compared with 0.375 deaths from measles, 1.5 from vCJD, and 22.5 from AIDS. However, in newspaper features pages it takes 173 alcohol related and 468 obesity related deaths to merit a story, compared with 0.12 deaths from measles, 0.38 from vCJD, and 6.16 from AIDS.
Health in the News: Risk, Reporting and Media Influence is based on an analysis of health related stories in three BBC programmes—BBC News at Ten O'Clock, News-night, and BBC Radio 5 Live—and three newspapers—the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, and the Guardian. It sought to ask three questions: to what extent did news coverage of health related issues reflect mortality risks shown in health data? If the balance of health news coverage was seriously out of proportion with actual risks to health, how much did that matter? And could and should anything be done about it?
The study looked at the BBC's health coverage from 10 September 2000 to 10 September 2001 and at the newspapers' health coverage from October to December 2002. (The researchers say that time and resources available governed the scale of the survey and that they selected a more recent time frame for the newspaper analysis “to provide a counterpoint to the BBC period.”) The study found a preponderance of two kinds of stories—stories about NHS crises, such as growing waiting times or an increase in negligence cases, and health scares, which often involved little empirical impact on rates of illness and premature death.
Figure 1.
The researchers also interviewed health experts and policy makers, and found that they were almost universally dissatisfied with how the news media covered health related matters. Interviewees felt that issues that posed minimal risks, such as the alleged link between MMR and autism, received too much prominence over proven health risks. While they broadly agreed that there could be no correlation between what conditions caused the most deaths and what received the most coverage, they felt that there should be more careful consideration on all sides about the balance of news reporting of health issues.
The report's authors, BBC radio correspondent Roger Harrabin, King's Fund health policy director Anna Coote, and free-lance researcher Jessica Allen, say: “We are not interested simply in accusing the media of exaggeration or misrepresentation. Nor do we wish to suggest any simple causal link between patterns of reporting on the one hand and policy decisions and personal behaviour on the other.”
Mr Harrabin, who carried out research for the report while on sabbatical from the BBC Today programme, says: “As journalists we need to give our audiences new news, not old news—but we shouldn't forget that policy makers are often influenced by what they see in the media. The public may also alter their behaviour in ways that affect their health because of information and advice they get from the media.”
In the foreword to the report, Professor Siân Griffiths, president of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine, calls for more media coverage of the obesity epidemic or damage to health from alcohol or tobacco. “If the biggest risks to public health are scarcely mentioned in the news while stories about NHS waiting times or health scares such as the recent SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] virus—where health risks to UK health are minimal—regularly make the headlines, it is fair to ask whether the public interest is well served by the media.”
Health in the News: Risk, Reporting and Media Influence is available priced £8 from the King's Fund at www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications.
Next week's BMJ will be a special issue on how doctors communicate risk to patients