Media's Under-Coverage of Disease

On October 5 The Wall Street Journal devoted its Saturday Essay to cancer The essay by Columbia University professor Azra Raza PhD was adapted from her book The First Cell and the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last which was published on October 15Dr Raza began by soberly observing that the survival rates of many types of cancer have barely improved at all since the 1970s Despite the skyrocketing costs of cancer treatments and their nearuniversal unpleasantness for patients these treatments are not significantly improving outcomes Dr Raza concluded her essay with the argument that the focus amp8212 when it comes to fighting cancer amp8212 needs to move towards identifying the first cells of the disease rather than seeking to treat it once it39s much further alongPerhaps due to the number of diagnoses each year cancer is one of the more frequently discussed ailments But what about other diseases ailments and common causes of deathIn May Oxford University39s Our World in Data published an overview of a study conducted by students at the University of California San Diego seeking to quantify the degree to which media coverage of types of death reflected their actual number The study compared quotmentions of causes of deathsquot in The New York Times and The Guardian in 2016 as compared to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC statistics on actual causes of death in the United States The common hypothesis that the news media prefers to feature violent deaths instead of far more prevalent killers is proven overwhelmingly correct by the dataIn the United States the leading causes of deaths according to the CDC are amp8212 in descending order amp8212 heart disease 302 percent cancer 295 percent road incidents falls and accidents 76 percent lower respiratory disease 74 percent and Alzheimer39s disease 56 percent Judging by the news however one would likely never suspect it During the period of study nearly 36 percent of New York Times stories that mentioned a cause of death discussed death due to terrorism The next 334 percent of stories discussing death covered victims of homicide and suicide As a share of the overall American deaths terrorism accounted for less than 001 percent homicide 09 percent and suicide 18 percent The breakdown was similar at The Guardian with an overemphasis on deaths by violenceMost grossly underrepresented in both publications was heart disease registering approximately 2 percent of news stories followed closely by Alzheimer39s disease and kidney disease neither of which cracked more than 1 percent of stories In both papers however cancer remained relatively wellcovered and strokes responsible for 49 percent of American deaths remained mostly in proportion with roughly 5 percent of coverage at both papersOf course deaths likely shouldn39t be reported in direct proportion to their frequency given that rarer causes of death tend to be more newsworthy But the degree of underrepresentation of disease coverage remains strikingThere are some news outlets that cover disease with some success The Well section of The New York Times certainly engages with many common health conditions however it does so more from a selfhelp perspective as opposed to an objective rendering of the current state of research or policy The Hill is the publication that arguably does best in covering illness particularly in its opinion section which offers a platform to many medical researchers For instance The Hill is one of the few places in the news space to routinely cover tropical diseases With the exception of the exhaustive coverage of the 2013amp82112016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa comparatively little attention is paid to prevalent killers in much of the developing world such as malariaCloser to home one would think that news outlets would offer even a fraction of the attention regularly given to political theater to discussing diseaserelated news Recently there has been President Trump39s July executive order aimed at lowering the rate of quotendstage kidney disease by 25 percent by 2030quot the Autism CARES Act signed into law by the president on September 30 and new potential developments in Alzheimer39s treatment announced last week Sure there might be broad coverage of healthcare policy from quotMedicare for allquot to quotRepeal and Replace Obamacarequot but when it comes to covering the details of disease and its research news media falls overwhelming shortPerhaps some recent projects in the legal and criminal justice news space might serve as a blueprint for how news media can better cover disease The Marshall Project has gained considerable notice for its efforts to closely examine criminal justice topics just as blogs such as The Volokh Conspiracy previously housed by The Washington Post and SCOTUSblog have done in popularizing legal news that might previously have been lost in the fine print amp8212 or in the back pages of a newspaper Although medical schools do of course publicly release findings they are too often lost in the noise of the news spaceAs the news media devotes endless coverage to every twist and turn of the drama between the White House and House Democrats one would think that at least a fraction of that coverage might go to chronicling the state of medical research National Institutes of Health NIH budgets amp160or the pharmaceutical industry amp8212 all of which have the potential to be much more relevant to many of our lives Amid the neverending squabbles of partisan politics the news media would be wise to build on The New York Times and The Hill39s start and give health conditions the place they deserve in our collective attentionPhoto credit Unsplash UrineDrugTestamp160 Click the social buttons to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of 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Media's Under-Coverage of Disease

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Erich J. Prince

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Media's Under-Coverage of Disease

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Erich J. Prince

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