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Preparing
Health, Medical and Science Journalists for the Future |
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2005 | 2004 | 2003
| 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 | 1995
| 1994 |
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The Wealth of Experience: Story Priorities of Health, Medical
and Science Journalists
Christine Gorman, associate editor for the Science section at
Time magazine, has reported on major science news,
many times writing science cover stories for the magazine. She
has addressed topics ranging from children and crack cocaine,
to the risks of aging nuclear power plants, to the dangers of
misleading food labels, and has reported extensively on AIDS.
She met with students in the program each of the last three
years, including during a field visit to Time magazine.
For Gorman, who was a high school science teacher before completing
graduate science writing studies at Johns Hopkins, and who worked
for the National Science Foundation before joining Time
in 1984, life evolves at the margins-where the oceans meet the
beaches. In her own case, her merging ecosystems consist of
the biological sciences and quality writing learned from her
devotion to great literature. She favors getting as much science
background as possible but keeping the technical jargon out
of the reporting, and reading classical literature to nurture
good writing-"the ideas, the images, the metaphors-all those
things that you have to keep constantly nourished within yourself
in order to marry the two together."
"Content is important. You have to know how to write well and
coherently, and you have to recognize news. The thing is to
get a lot of experience, which generally means working in the
smaller markets first and then building from there," she advises.
As a science writer, she knows she must work harder to define
terms, make the content understandable and coax the general
audience into reading her reports because of the often inadequate
science background many Americans bring to the encounter. She
favors a news story structure with a beginning, middle and end,
and builds in "narrative arrows" pointing the readers through
the story so that they will understand and stay with it in the
face of other competing news. This means it is important to
know your audience and at what level the science story can be
pitched.
Just as in good literature, conflict or controversy often drive
science stories. This can stir legitimate interest in the reader
and in the general news editors who may not have good science
backgrounds but can understand controversy and conflict. But
Gorman also sees a need for the news media to resist "science
hype or talk show science," which she sees proliferating in
the last decade with a growing appetite for breaking science
news stories that are controversial or sensational.
As an example, she cited a Massachussets research hospital that
announced it may have found the "Achilles Heel" in the AIDS
virus, whipped up a media storm with "blast faxes" to the news
media and created an avalanche of "breakthrough" cure stories.
Gorman was more skeptical and cautious because it was a preliminary
test tube finding that might not actually pan out. By digging
and checking further, she found it was far from a major breakthrough
and Time presented a more reasoned and realistic story
in perspective.
She advises would-be science writers that they must strive harder
to be objective amidst a growing national mood of "anti-science"
today-that journalists must decipher the strong, often politicized
opinions that permeate everything from creationism vs. evolutionism,
the root causes of mental illness to controversial opinions
on the causes and treatments of AIDS.
Journalists also are not "educators" in the sense that public
health advocates might want them to be, she says, but should
be objective, neutral and disengaged, picking stories for news
value and public importance. But her reporting can still have
an educational impact, and she proudly cites stories done for
Time magazine in which public misconceptions and fears
regarding AIDS were dispelled by solid reporting to correct
misinformation.
Jerry Bishop, retired Deputy News Editor of The Wall
Street Journal, is a seasoned newspaper specialist in science,
health and medical reporting, a book author and Vice President
of the Council for Advanced Science Writers. He met with the
seminar participants in each of the last three years, including
during a field visit he arranged at his newspaper in New York
City, and a keynote address at our awards dinner.
Bishop is an ardent supporter of science reporting driven by
news values, with education being a byproduct but not the primary
reason for printing science stories in the paper. He wants to
see science news compete head-to-head with other news in the
paper and adds, "The thing that worries me is that so many people,
many science journalists now, particularly if they have a dedicated
space to fill, will fill it with `well, isn't this interesting,
let me explain it to you.'"
Bishop tries to write in a way simple enough that his father,
a high school graduate without a special interest in science,
would understand the subject. News should propel the article
and by at least the third graph the reader should know why the
story is important enough to bother reading, he urges.
Wanting to educate the reader seems to be an unfortunate propensity
of the science writer, he says, while sports or business reporters,
for example, have no such hubris. If people get bored with a
story, if they feel they are being lectured at, they will not
read it and the news media will have a more difficult time surviving
profitably, he cautions.
"Why do we suddenly get on the side of the scientist? I think
we get brainwashed by the scientists," Bishop contends. "The
scientists say that you have to educate the public about science
and I think that some of us succumb to that. The scientists
mean that you have to educate the public about science so that
`you can make our business a little easier and we get more money.'
That's kind of sarcastically putting it."
Science has an increasing effect on our daily lives, Bishop
feels, with biotechnology, genetic engineering and managed health
care among the front burner issues people want to know about
as affecting their daily lives.
Business and science often are intertwined, and he urges journalists
to understand how scientific announcements may be tied to attempts
to sell stocks on Wall Street: "If you are not conscious of
that, you can get taken for a ride because they are out there,
not all of them are above board, and they are out there pushing
their stock prices like mad in time to get the publicity so
they can talk to some rich widow and get her to put a few million
dollars into the company."
At a minimum, he urges reporters to check the Securities and
Exchange Commission for information on legal actions against
such companies, or pending court suits for at least the publicly
owned companies, though this will not help with privately held
ventures.
Bishop said he is constantly getting calls from people seeking
publicity on some breakthrough health product. There is nothing
wrong with their seeking publicity, he says, but he tells them
when the products have been researched properly and the results
published in respected, peer-reviewed journals, he will consider
them. At conferences reporting scientific results, he checks
carefully to be sure the panels are not stacked with panelists
in favor of a product or procedure, but have sufficient counter-positions
if the topic is in dispute.
During a luncheon discussion at The Wall Street Journal
with Bishop, Michael Waldholz, a science/health specialist
at the paper, and host F. James Pensiero, Assistant Managing
Editor, the journalists traced the evolution of stories such
as gene research, and the need to tell complex stories through
people and families who can dramatically personalize what all
this means to the individual-a reporting trend that other print
and broadcast journalists also endorse.
The stories have to be relevant and important to readers, and
not just to scientists or the science journals that heavily
promote them. Waldholz advised the seminar visitors to ask,
"So what? Does the story matter? Who cares? Even it if it important
to the scientist or the institution, does it have a broader
importance to our readers-just beyond the fact that there are
a lot of things, different things, going on there?"
Pensiero says his fax machine and e-mail are busy each day with
a deluge of press releases and that much of the agenda for covering
science and health/medical stories is driven by the wire services,
national papers like The Wall Street Journal or the New
York Times or by stories that appear in regional papers
across the nation. Pensiero said he and Bishop were working
hard to counter such trends so that his staff is ahead of the
curve, looking at the research and other factors going into
a possible story well in advance and deciding its news value
on its scientific merits-not on the avalanche of stories in
competing media that often force papers or stations to run stories
simply because their competitors are doing so.
Waldholz describes how health coverage, while always important,
has grown to a subject of major dimension since he joined The
Wall Street Journal in 1980, and how the pressure has increased
by his editors to do enterprise stories and beat the other print
and broadcast competition. In actions by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, for example, he says it is important for his
paper to be out in front on these stories and report research
developments and trends before a new drug is approved and the
stock market is affected.
Dr. Bob Arnot, M.D, former Health Correspondent for the
"CBS Evening News," also reported on health and medical issues
for "CBS This Morning." He covered major health stories worldwide
and has a special interest in health and refugee issues in the
developing nations of Africa and other continents.
He had extensive experience in sports medicine and emergency
medical treatment services before joining CBS as a full-time
correspondent. Arnot gave presentations at each of the first
three years of our program, including the inaugural keynote
and two of the seminars at CBS Network world headquarters in
New York where he was joined by his colleagues including Lane
Venardos, Vice President for Hard News and Special Projects,
who has met with the program participants the last two years.
Arnot passionately describes several themes driving his health
reporting: a) the need for more informed reports by health specialists
on human rights violations around the world, and b) the importance
of health/science reporters with specialized knowledge resisting
"spin" by narrow interests seeking to manipulate medical and
health news. "Much of the disease and disability you see around
the world is generated by human rights abuses and we in medical
(journalism) should be reporting on human rights abuses rather
than the political or war correspondent," he says.
Arnot recounted his experiences covering the huge refugee problems
in Rwanda and Somalia, or reporting on the exploitation of young
women in brothels in Thailand where the spread of virulent strains
of the AIDS virus is rampant, to show why the human rights aspects
running through these stories need reporting and analysis by
a health specialist.
"Those of us in medicine should be doing humanitarian reporting,
which is to have a rich enough texture in terms of the culture,
the goals of society, their daily sort of living habits-that
is an interesting long-term story," he explains.
When Arnot was with a television crew in Rwanda he came upon
the body of a little boy. Cars were running over the child's
arm, presuming he was dead, but the sound man saw the child's
chest move. Arnot checked his pulse, gave him water, cleaned
feces and blood from the boy's face, and got him to a camp for
medical treatment. Two days later the boy had recovered, later
released from a camp where 2,500 bodies littered the nearby
roads and 200 would die each night, daily creating fifty new
orphans. In Somalia, Arnot watched a doctor desperately hook
an IV into her own arm to give a dying child an emergency blood
transfusion.
"There is a wonderful world out there of the heroism that I
have seen in medicine and medical journalism," Arnot tells the
seminar participants.
This translates into more informed stories of how, for instance,
oral rehydration methods can save thousands of lives in remote
villages, or how young teenage girls can be saved from prostitution
while the spread of AIDS in Thailand is also slowed_the human
rights and medical reporting are thus intertwined.
This reporting from Sudan or Bangladesh, he says, creates public
pressure for change and relief aid: "You need that traumatic
backdrop. Once people see these poor children dying in such
an acute setting like that, then they get much more in learning
about these tools in the developing world and (understand what)
can save them."
Arnot supports more aggressive health reporting to resist the
"spin" that he sees emerging from every sector today-government,
research institutes, the universities, pharmaceutical and health
products companies, public interest groups or even the science/medical
journals seeking to put their stories in the best conceivable
light. "You really have to know the statistics, the methodology,"
he says. "There are a few good souls out there, but everybody
has their spin."
He urged the students to ask tough questions and identify special
interests that might taint the source of information with a
self-promoting interest or bias. He wants health coverage to
avoid "silly stories" that some editors in the news media see
"as filler or something cute to throw in," citing America's
obsession with food and diet or health fads that a counterpart
in TV medical reporting characterizes as "entertainment for
hypochondriacs."
Avoid the "new hope or no hope" syndrome of unsubstantiated,
careless medical reporting, or the quest for the "magic bullet"
story, the supposed breakthrough, he advises. In his seminars
with our participants, Arnot carefully reviews the painstaking
steps needed to do solid, enterprising reporting-monitoring
over sixty medical and science research journals, but not depending
solely on them or the deluge of daily press releases.
He visits with the heads of research in nutrition or diabetes
for new ideas and story leads, for example. He calls the Internet
his "most valuable tool" and uses "Profnet" on the Internet
to reach out to specialists at thousands of universities and
research institutions; obtaining the full text of their research
papers, putting out general queries on stories and getting a
host of leads. It is knowledge engineering, he explains_ creating
useful knowledge for his viewers out of a sea of facts, and
providing something of long lasting value.
He said the public is confused and fed up with contradictory
news reports over the pros and cons of food fads, and with news
about unproven curatives. At the same time they do need solid,
research-supported guidance on preventive health action, and
an understanding that many medical advances come in slower,
incremental steps, rarely as sudden breakthroughs.
"Where journalism goes awry is when it says that this is spectacular,
and it is the best, and you should get it-and it really isn't,"
Arnot says. "But, I do think journalism provides a tremendous
service in terms of letting people know what's out there."
Arnot, like other medical journalists who meet with the seminar
participants, identifies managed health care as a major story
that needs continued press attention. He has done a series examining
the expenses and high salaries of some managers of Health Maintenance
Organizations, or the dangers of doctors being rewarded for
reducing medical treatment, which may endanger the patients.
This "macro" approach to an overall look at systemic issues,
and a "micro" look at individual human experiences of patients
and families, is one he favors.
Lane Venardos, CBS Vice President for Hard News and Special
Projects, says major network resources are devoted to health
reporting because "you can't fool with the facts when it comes
to something as important as people's health we take extra care
with the medical stories to make sure that we represent all
sides."
"There is a voice that says `this is too early to be a serious
development, there needs to be another ten years of research
on this.' There is a voice that says `this is too expensive,
it shouldn't be made available to everybody because the system
can't afford it,'" Venardos says of the need for informed health
reporting specialists.
Venardos told the seminar students, "I think the most important
thing that you need to be able to do is to write effectively.
Simple declarative sentences. Getting ideas, concepts, thoughts,
emotions across without emotionally involving yourself. I think
writing is the most underrated thing, but the most important
thing. Not too far behind that is your ability to communicate
on camera, your voice, so that one is not off-putting. So that
the viewer is drawn to your words and is paying attention to
what you are saying."
Dan Rutz, Managing Editor, Health/Medical News, at CNN
(Cable News Network) in Atlanta, gave both a workshop and the
keynote address at the 1996 awards dinner. Rutz oversaw a department
of twenty-five health/medical specialists in Atlanta, his base,
and Washington. He was managing editor/correspondent for CNN's
"News From Medicine," airing several times a day, and also co-anchored
"Health Works," a half-hour weekly review of major medical stories.
He previously worked as a news management executive at several
radio stations and was at CNN for fifteen of its sixteen years.
Rutz told the scholarship winners of the importance of covering
such major stories as AIDS or the spread of TB viruses resistant
to current drugs, and the excitement of launching an international
platform such as CNN on which to do it.
"Why are you interested in journalism anyway?" he challenged
them. "Isn't part of it an idealistic vein that runs through
you, an interest in maybe making a difference? That it isn't
just a matter of talking about things for the sake of being
heard, but possibly seeing that information is powerful, and
that it can affect change for the better? I guess it's not too
naive to think that television has that capacity, and international
television especially does."
At the workshop, he showed the students examples of the pipeline
of information he monitors even while on the road, from research
reports to press releases on cancer or AIDS topics.
He did the anatomy of a story, tracing a major one-hour special
he oversaw for CNN on the "right-to-die," from the story concept
through budgeting, interviewing, staffing, production and airing.
CNN got immediate feedback on the program with viewers talking
instantly online through CompuServe with a medical ethicist.
He identified important journalistic attributes: a reporter's
ability to present an open mind and lively curiosity, to be
able to construct a logical interview with one good question
following on the next, and to identify where information gaps
must be filled. He discussed with the participants the boundaries
of informed speculation, balancing all sides, being cautious
and not extending the reporting beyond the facts. Take notes
even during a taped interview, he says, and doublecheck facts
with other sources that may not ring true. Build television
stories around people as an effective way to tell even complex
subjects.
Rutz said he is not embarrassed to have strong personal feelings
about a story: "I think it is important as journalists for us
to remember that we are people first and that we are living
in society too, and we can't put ourselves up on a pedestal
and pretend that we don't have opinions or are not influenced
by what we learn."
"By the same token," he adds, "that doesn't mean that we should
abuse our positions and use our jobs in a way just to advance
our personal set of beliefs. You have to admit it is there,
and maybe try harder than ever to be fair under those circumstances,
especially if it is something you really feel strongly about." |
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