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The media and medicinal reporting

More than a year ago, cell biologist Judah Folkman was booked to speak at the September 1998 colon and rectal surgery conference in Minneapolis. Knowing that Folkman's work was of interest to researchers, the University's Cancer Center staff arranged to telecast his conference remarks to the U's Mayo Auditorium where more U faculty and staff could hear them. By the time Folkman actually addressed the conference, U staff reasons for attending had become even more compelling: their patients know about his work.

Folkman, who is also a surgeon at Boston's Children's Hospital, has become a public figure in the past year. Much of the publicity was generated by a May 3 New York Times front page story reporting on his discovery that a combination of drugs called angiostatin and endostatin eradicated lung tumors in mice by cutting off the tumors' blood supply. The treatment worked for more than five months--the equivalent of 10 human years.

The treatment's potential was underscored when the Times story quoted Nobel laureate James Watson as saying that Folkman "is going to cure cancer in two years," and that he would be "remembered along with scientists like Darwin as someone who permanently altered civilization."

That kind of reported endorsement can overshadow the more mundane fact that Folkman's subjects were mice; human trials are years away. It is a situation that highlights the often conflicting needs generated by the public's demand for health information, the plodding reality of scientific investigation, and the media's thirst for breaking news.

David Rothenberger, director of colon and rectal surgery at the U, has experienced the situation firsthand.

"It happens most often with news reports on very specific diseases," Rothenberger says. "When a Crohn's disease treatment made the news, the number of people we heard from was unbelievable. But was this treatment available? No. The hype got way ahead of the reality."

He says that Folkman's research did not generate as much interest among his patients, partly because it was not disease-specific, and partly because Folkman himself "has not hyped his research, making it necessary for the lay press...to be more reticent."

"It's a fine line," Rothenberger says. "Researchers have an obligation to be careful and not oversell their findings. You want credit for all your hard work, but if you're not careful, you can create the illusion you're much further along than you are."

John Finnegan, an associate professor in the School of Public Health's division of epidemiology, is a former journalist who teaches courses in mass communication. He sees the issue as the "collision of two work cultures."

"The culture of the media is immediacy, novelty, news value," Finnegan says. "The work culture of the scientist, on the other hand, is incremental, slow, and methodical. No matter how often the media report breakthroughs, there really are very few; one scientist builds on work that comes before. The result is that you often end up with science being reported as episodic. One study will demonstrate that coffee is not very good for you; another reports that coffee doesn't make any difference to your health. From a scientific perspective, you can cut through it. But because media report it as episodic, it's confusing.

"News by definition is anomalous activity," Finnegan continues. "We don't report the 500 planes that landed safely; we report the one that didn't. Take that same news value and look at science: A study that gets the front page is the one saying a cholesterol treatment is bad for you. Even though most say it's good, the one that shows something is different is the one that's newsworthy."

There are other factors driving the problem, Finnegan says. "Drug companies are out there pushing studies where their drugs show beneficial results. That's their role. I have some qualms about that kind of activity because I think it confuses people. If journalists are confused, the public will be too. You have to look carefully at what commercial influences are driving reported results."

The culture collision has an enormous impact. Finnegan recalls the media report of an Edmonton, Alberta study showing a cancer cluster surrounding a particular plant. Newspapers ran the story, but the story was wrong; the numbers were incorrect. The impact? Property values around the plant plummeted. "When science makes a mistake, and it's reported, the results are bad," Finnegan says.

There are plenty of other examples. New York Times columnist Jane Brody recently wrote about the American Council on Science and Health's "Fact Versus Fears" report, which looks at the greatest unfounded health scares of the last five decades. Among them: the chemical Alar, the apple-ripening chemical purported to cause childhood cancer--but which doesn't--and a Harvard study that linked pancreatic cancer to coffee, but which subsequently could not be confirmed.

So how do we untangle the collision?

"There must be education of people on both sides," says Finnegan. "Journalists need to ask critical questions about the studies they're covering. Who funded the research? Was it a controlled study? The basic scientific questions.

"On the other side, scientists need better training in media and media relations, from the standpoint of understanding what the media culture is all about. Reporters have to do the story now, and scientists need to respond as rapidly as they can. Otherwise, the scientist's understanding about limits won't be reported."

Consumers, too, need to become educated about how science works. Rothenberger believes that's beginning to happen, even though "most patients are not scientists," and may not "understand that what's in lay press may not represent their case." Still, he says, "the lay public is beginning to understand that cancer is not cancer. It's a very complicated field."

Even so, there remains the intangible of human emotion.

"Every time there's news about a new cancer treatment," says Cancer Center communications director Colleen Southwell, "the phones tend to light up. Patients call to ask, 'Can you give me what you're giving the mice?'"

--Mary Shafer