When Journals Work As Publicity Agents

Volume 46, Number 2, Fall 1998

WHEN JOURNALS WORK AS PUBLICITY AGENTS

by Mark Hagland

We’ve all picked up the daily paper and seen a superficial, one-source story labeled as science news, or an equally lightweight one-minute television segment. It’s especially disappointing when your knowledge of the field, or simply general scientific or clinical training, gives you cause to grumble over the parlous state of science reporting.

The journals themselves, ironically, may be part of the problem. Under deadline pressure, reporters in the mainstream media often rely on press releases from such prestigious publications as the Journal of the American Medical Association or Science. A third contender, the New England Journal of Medicine, due to its long-standing preeminence in the United States as the medical journal of record, appears to benefit from a presumption that at least one of its major articles each week is newsworthy by definition.

The end result can easily be incomplete and even misleading, as the New York Times Magazine noted in a June 28, 1998 feature, “The Hippocratic Wars.” Looking at the competition for news-making status between JAMA and NEJM, New York Times Magazine writer Ellen Ruppel Shell examined what happened when the American Medical Association’s press office deluged 2,500 media outlets around the world with press packets, e-mails, faxes, and, for broadcasters, tantalizing chunks of ready-to-air film footage trumpeting the findings of a study linking fish consumption and a reduction in sudden cardiac death. According to the Times, it seemed beside the point, even to the editors of JAMA, that the study had little real scientific substance.

Much to the dismay of many researchers, such studies often get credulous coverage, which can inure members of the public to the nuances of research. This is most apparent in broadcast media, where rapid-fire, two-minute features on the latest health findings are often regurgitated quickly and without deep analysis or reporting by broadcast reporters. And clarifications or corrections rarely get the same attention as initial reportage. For example, few mainstream journalists bothered to question JAMA’s fish story, despite the fact that (as the Times pointed out) because of its tiny, skewed study sample, the report may represent nothing more than a statistical fluke.

Even more interesting was the coverage given to an April 1 JAMA article on therapeutic touch (Rosa et al., 1998), which discussed a study that originated as a fourth-grade, school-science project. One of the co-authors of that study, which purported to debunk therapeutic touch, was a nurse and member of the National Council Against Health Fraud, a group sworn to discredit alternative health care practices—especially therapeutic touch. The other was the nurse’s 11-year-old daughter. Largely because of the girl’s involvement, the study received very wide coverage, some of which belonged in the human interest rather than the science news category. Some experts in the field have expressed shock that such a simplistic study had been published in such a prestigious journal.

Curiously, and too soon to have been responding to the criticism in the Times article, JAMA weighed in with some commentary of its own on the medical news process. In a special issue highlighting publication and medical news, the journal printed an article entitled “Press Releases of Science Journal Articles and Subsequent Newspaper Stories on the Same Topic.” Looking at newspapers from several countries, the researchers found that 84 percent of news stories that mentioned journal articles cited articles which had been mentioned in press releases. Do press releases set the agenda for science journalists publishing in the general press? the authors inquired.

Not infrequently, according to a recent survey funded by the Wellcome Trust. The survey inquired how often British journalists rely on press releases for science news—not merely press releases from journals, but press releases altogether. Among the journalists and writers surveyed, 74 percent said they use science-related press releases and reports at least once a month, and 28 percent of them more than once a week. The survey also revealed a noteworthy distillation of sources: Only 15 percent of British science organizations even issued press releases more than once a week, and barely half (51 percent) issued them once a month or more. If British journalism is any guide, a few publications may listen most to those who shout most loudly, and most publications give them credence at least some of the time.

“I don’t think we like to do nothing but translate the peer-reviewed journals; that’s certainly not enough,” says Carl Hall, a science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. “In fact, we all like to enterprise stories and to do our own research, talking to patients and clinicians whenever possible. On the other hand, Hall says, “a lot of important news does go through peer-reviewed journals, and all the credentialed media can get (advance information) on an embargoed business ahead of time…If there’s breaking science or medical news, often there’s not time in the daily press to do extensive independent reporting. I try to ask about the financial interest of the researchers,” he says. If there’s enough time, he’ll try to call additional sources. “But sometimes you see something in a journal that’s important, and it’s all you can do to get it in the paper and get it factual.”

“There is always that time pressure,” says Bob Cooke, veteran science reporter for Newsday, published on Long Island for the New York City metropolitan area. “But for my own work, I try to call the lead author for their comment on a journal article, and I make a practice of calling someone who isn’t involved in the work but knows about it; and I will even fax them the article, and try to capture as much of (the debate surrounding a topic) through interviews as possible.”

Experience Counts

"Part of the secret,” says Cooke, “is having veteran science reporters on staff. Cooke himself has written for 20 years on scientific stories for daily newspapers. When contacted for this article, he was working on two stories: one on research into sloth dung and the other the complete genetic sequence of the bacterium that causes syphilis. Both articles would be linked to information coming out in Science.

At the time of the interview, Cooke was busy trying to round out both stories. “You have to put these stories into context for the readers,” he says. “Why is it important to know about sloth dung? One reason, of course, is that if you know what animals were eating 11,000 years ago, you can make inferences about a number of environmental conditions, including, possibly, global warming.” Every journalist, he notes, will have his or her favorite areas, and that passion or interest will fuel the curiosity that will make stories in those areas especially full and interesting for readers.

Still, Cooke says, even experienced science and medical reporters cannot make up for daily news- papers’ management processes. “The big thing that’s missing is educated editors…The editors change chairs frequently, and lack the background to edit these specialized stories, and change things they shouldn’t…You can hardly break them in before they’ve moved on” to something else. A frequent result is bad or misleading headlines.

Magazine Journalism and the Luxury of Time

Magazine journalists have the luxury of time, and they appreciate it and make use of it. “I almost never write an article on the basis of a press release,” says David Sharp, a Portland, Oregon freelance writer who is a contributing editor for Health and Hippocrates (the latter of which goes to physicians), and writes health columns elsewhere.

“The articles that I write,” he says, “tend to be looking at issues relating to trends or tend to be service pieces, so you very seldom want to hang that on one study, which means that I’m usually looking at a larger body of information on a particular issue.” A study in a clinical journal might be “a nice springboard for looking at a broader issue. In that context, he says, “I see my job as trying to make sense of the knotty problem of conflicting evidence.”

“My pet theory,” Sharp says, “is that for every subject, there are essentially five or six gurus, and everybody else who’s an expert is basically a disciple of one of those. What’s more, those gurus never agree with each other; so if you can find those five or six and talk to them, you’ll get a well-rounded picture.”

In the end, says the Chronicle’s Hall, good science reporters in the press know that information coming out of scientific and medical journals isn’t “biblical utterings come from the hand of God; these are human beings who have their own foibles, emotions, and motivations.” Keeping a skeptical mindset is always important, he notes, as is avoiding “pack journalism.” Despite the challenge of trying to meet deadline pressure while informing a broad public about science, he concedes, he wouldn’t be doing anything else.

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