Media Doctor Australia News

'Bad' medical reporting - a history of shooting the�messenger?

This story published recently by The Conversation discusses the quality of reporting health news in a changing media landscape.

Some media outlets do better than others when it comes to health news

2012 has started as a great year for health news reporting, according to the Media Doctor Australia ratings.

We've seen some really impressive reporting with some very high scoring ratings for stories in The Australian including a study of a 4-hour treatment target in emergency departments and stem cell treatment for�dry macular degeneration.

Another high scoring story from the SMH discussed a vaccine to treat bacterial meningitis.�

Most of the other stories we've rated this year also scored well with only two exceptions: a really horrible story from the Herald Sun about a midwife who cooks up placentas and sells them back to the mothers as a health pill �and an overly optimistic story from the SMH that was confusingly light on detail about a psychosis treatment.

This mostly impressive reporting of health news correlates well with our overall ratings of health stories in the Australian media.

We've been rating individual news outlets for close to 8 years and in that time we've seen the average score of items rated satisfactory rise from 40% in April 2004 to nearly 80% in October 2011.

The 80% score is the average scores from all stories for in a short�time period (Oct 2011). The average score for the whole of 2011 was much�lower at 56%.� However, there is an upward trend in the scores and the�latest spike is encouraging.

Some news outlets, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Age and news.com.au score relatively well (54-65%).

Others, including Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, and ABC's Health and Wellbeing score below 50% (42-47%).

The outstanding performers are the ABC's News in Science (72%) and The World Today (82%), while the poorest scores belong to the TV current affairs shows of Today Tonight (32%) and A Current Affair (33%).� We have stopped rating these programs' stories since they stopped providing transcripts online around a year ago.� But we think these ratings speak for themselves.

You can view the individual outlets' score and comparative graphs at http://mediadoctor.org.au/content/media.jsp.

Media Doctor puts out call for help

At Media Doctor Australia funding has always been tight.

For this reason, we can only look on with envy at our American counterpart, www.healthnewsreview.org, which has developed in both coverage, functionality and influence thanks, in part, to funding sources of the sort that have so far eluded Media Doctor Australia.

This is despite our two organisations doing very similar work.

In fact, HealthNewsReview was inspired by Media Doctor Australia, and uses the rating instruments and scoring mechanisms developed by us. It is one of 6 international Media Doctor sites that have come into being since Media Doctor Australia was launched, including Media Doctor Canada, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and soon to be Media Doctor Sweden.

HealthNewsReview's funding is described in the previous post. In summary, the initiative is funded by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, which pays for Schwitzer's time, the freelance journalists that he hires, the reviewers, and for the website developments.

By contrast, Media Doctor Australia funds one project manager who is employed casually a few hours a week, and web hosting costing around $2000 a year. All reviewing, posting, blogging, tweeting and most administration is carried out voluntarily by our stable of 15 or so reviewers.

Media Doctor Australia started in 2004 with project funding from NSW Health to build the web site and undertake some pilot work. In 2005, founder David Henry and I were awarded the Australian Museum Eureka prize for Critical Thinking for our work on MDA, an honour and also a financial boon as the prize money of $10,000 paid for website hosting for several years.

For the past 7 years much of my research work has involved Media Doctor Australia in some way (primarily producing a PhD). Findings from the website have been published in high impact medical journals, including PLoS Medicine, PLoS One and the Medical Journal of Australia.

It has been this research, rather than Media Doctor Australia itself that has attracted a few small grants from the Hunter Medical Research Institute, and the University of Newcastle. These have allowed us to develop the site and its research tools.� Over the years we've applied, without success, for NHMRC and ARC funding.

Due to the low running costs of the site, we have enough money to see us to the end of 2012. But the volunteer effort in a time-short world is starting to take its toll, and Media Doctor Australia may fold unless suitable funding can be found.

One big difference between funding in Australia and the United States is the degree of philanthropic support available in America.

As the previous post shows, Health News Review has been able to avail itself of this through the not for profit Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, but similar money in Australia is very hard to find, let alone win.

It is understandable that Australian research organisations are reluctant to commit scarce funds to Media Doctor Australia. But unlike the USA, we have been unable to find alternative support.

The Americans are highly focused on evidence-based outcomes and it's clear that the US funding sources supporting HealthNewsReview clearly believe their money is being spent wisely.

Until now, Media Doctor Australia has restricted its funding requests to formal research channels but the successes of HealthNewsReview are an indication that we need to explore alternative sources of support.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

There's too much early research

An ongoing issue/problem with Media Doctor Australia is the lag-time between stories appearing in the news and our reviews of them being posted on the site. This is primarily due to the fact that our reviewers work in a voluntary capacity.

It's a feast and famine existence, and the past month has provided a glut of 20 stories that has taken a while to work through, while at the beginning of August there are none that fit our inclusion criteria - new health interventions for human use.

The top rated stories (4-5 stars) included research into a form of muscular dystrophy, an eye test to detect Alzheimer's Disease, a surgical intervention to prevention HIV in Africa, a warning on surgical mesh used in prolapse repairs. This last story was covered by The Australian and is a big story about very nasty complications, which didn't appear to be picked up by other media outlets.

The general theme of the past month's stories rated on Media Doctor was 'early research' - some of it positively foetal including conference presentations, a review of case studies on a treatment for serious poisoning, as well as some 'bench top' research. Early research usually interests a small minority of people, mainly other researchers in the area.

Read more below

Media Doctor's Amazing Journey to the Twittersphere

Media Doctor Australia (MDA), a website that monitors the quality of health news reporting in Australia, has come of age with its recent launch onto social media networks Twitter and Facebook.

We've previously described MDA on Croakey but briefly, the website was established in 2004 by a group of University of Newcastle health researchers and clinicians with an interest in assessing and (in the long term) improving the quality of news content of health stories in the Australian media.

Read more at Croakey below

Some good news, and some that is not-so-good

Eight health stories have been reviewed on www.mediadoctor.org.au this month. Their subjects included milk allergy, zinc for colds, a vaccine for type 1 diabetes, the best diet, scans to detect early stage Alzheimer's disease, a test for age-related macular degeneration (ADM), a new melanoma drug, and a preventative treatment for women at risk of developing breast cancer.

We're a resource for journalists, the public and health professionals

Media Doctor Australia (MDA) is a web site that critiques health news stories on how well they cover certain aspects, such as the benefits, harms and costs, of new medical interventions.

Deconstructing cancer: what makes a good-quality news story?

Cancer reporting in the media is generally of low quality. However, many of the poorer aspects of the content are directly attributable to the researchers, according to a study published in the Medical Journal of Australia (.MJA 2010; 193 (11/12): 702-706).

1323 stories about new treatments and procedures published in the Australian media and reviewed on Media Doctor, were identified. Of these, 272 were cancer related. Cancer was the primary focus of around 20 per cent of all stories about new drugs and 40 per cent for all stories about diagnostic tests. Most cancer stories identified the source of their information, with the predominant source being the researcher or doctor who had tested or administered the intervention.

Dr Amanda Wilson, Research Academic from the University of Newcastle and reviewer for Media Doctor, said that reporting of cancer in the mainstream media continued to be of poor quality.

"Individual narrative or testimonial is a device widely used in the media and seen to add the human dimension of a story. However, it provides anecdotal information, which is the lowest form of evidence, and this can be misleading if it is not balanced by strong evidence," Amanda said.

One hundred and eleven of the 269 reports (41 per cent) contained overly emotive language in a direct quote from a source. Most of these (54 per cent) were attributed to researchers talking about their work.

The Medical Journal of Australia is a publication of the Australian Medical Association.

Evidence that Specialist Health Journalists Provide Best Quality Health News

The public and health professionals alike depend on media coverage for accurate and reliable information about new health treatments. According to new research published in PLoS Medicine the value of dedicated and experienced health journalists is paramount.

"Because the issues are often complex, experienced health journalists do a substantially better job than general assignment reporters and have an important role in providing accurate information to patients," says Dr. David Henry, co-author and founder of Media Doctor (President and CEO of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES)).

With the rapid changes taking place in media companies in Australia, Canada and the U.S., there is a real risk that experienced health journalists will be lost and this is a threat to health literacy in the public.

The study of 1,337 medical news stories published by the Australian mainstream media between 2004 and 2009 looked at and found:

The media can influence health literacy and health seeking behaviours, but few studies have looked at the quality of news stories.

This report examined whether experienced specialist health reporters write better stories than other categories of journalists.

The report found that it does matter who writes news stories that cover the benefits and harms of health care interventions. Stories written by specialist health journalists working for a single media outlet scored more highly than those written by less experienced writers.

The findings are important because this source of health literacy is currently under pressure as falling revenues threaten the future of the traditional media.

Citation: Wilson A, Robertson J, McElduff P, Jones A, Henry D (2010) Does It Matter Who Writes Medical News Stories? PLoS Med 7(9): e1000323. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000323