HOLLYWOOD, Fla., March 15, 2007 — News reporting prompts patient deaths when misleading “breakthroughs” are reported. Conversely, lack of media attention enables the all-but-silent shutdown of almost 100 clinical trials because of budget cuts at the National Institutes of Health. These two self-criticisms – and others – sprang up from a rare, candid look at how journalists cover cancer in a roundtable at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s 12th Annual Conference.
Sam Donaldson, moderating the journalists’ dialogue, personified the strict newsman applying rigorous standards to coverage. But Donaldson, ABC News veteran correspondent and anchor, is also a melanoma survivor. He illustrated the mindset of the patient hungry for word of the latest scientific advance. In terms of beating his own cancer, he said, “If someone said [it would help to] flap your bed sheet at the Aurora Borealis, I would do it!”
Even so, the dangers of over-hyping of the latest laboratory breakthrough are sadly apparent. “Many thousands of women were killed” after the introduction of high-dose chemotherapy with autologous bone marrow transplant (HDC/ABMT) for high-risk breast cancer, said chief science correspondent Bob Bazell of NBC News. Too few journalists were skeptical of the treatment, preferring instead to demonize the health-insurance industry for refusing to pay for the now-discredited procedure.
In contrast, a perhaps underreported story involves the state of federal funding for cancer research. Donaldson threw out the challenge, “There’s a resource we all know can help — money. How do we convene the administration to fund cancer research with all of the other budget demands?” Only 12 percent of peer-reviewed potential studies that scientists send to Washington, D.C., to compete for funding can currently be underwritten, Bazell said. The National Cancer Institute recently shut down some 93 clinical trials for lack of money, said Nancy Davenport-Ennis of the National Patient Advocate Foundation.
“The only way we are going to see change is if the patients themselves take to the streets,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Amy Dockser Marcus of The Wall Street Journal. “I want to see the cancer patients become like AIDS activists. I can write and write and write until my face turns blue, but I don’t think anything is going to change unless the community of survivors and the people who love them says, ‘We’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.’ ”
Other media observations included:
Consumers of news can evaluate a news story’s worth by looking for signposts of quality, Young advised. These include whether the reporter has identified whether the scientist or physician is profiting financially from the organization that commissioned the study; whether the headline is true to the story’s content or is a gross overstatement; and whether the story includes varying viewpoints and reactions that put the development in context.
“We have to keep prioritizing to people that health is important,” said Alvarez.