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ABC's substitute anchor George Stephanopoulos decided to lead with a health story that was not even mentioned by either of the rival newscasts--although CBS' Wyatt Andrews mentioned it yesterday in passing in his story on hospital Websites. The federal government has run a statistical comparison of heart attack survival rates at 4,500 hospitals nationwide. It gave "detailed reports" on how each stacked up with its peers to the institutions themselves, Kate Snow (subscription required) stated, and posted summary information for patients online, with three grades--above, at or below average.
There was a pair of flaws with Snow's report. "Imagine being able to go online and shop for a hospital," she teased--but did not tell us what the address for the study is or even which bureaucracy of the federal government produced it. The only information we were given was to go to abcnews.com for more details. Second, Snow herself admitted that the "average category was overly broad," with only seven of the 4,500 institutions falling below it. In the absence of precise information, her promise of online hospital shopping is hollow.
Parkinson's Disease represented the health story chosen by CBS and NBC. The Lancet published results of a four-year experiment on a dozen patients at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center that implanted a gene in the brain in an attempt to block degeneration. Since there are so few patients in the clinical trial, both NBC's Robert Bazell and CBS' Michelle Miller profiled the same success story. See Nathan Klein back on his bicycle.
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