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For news that received such fanfare, it was not clear what the cancer facts are. Introducing their stories, anchors Charles Gibson of ABC and Brian Williams of NBC headlined a falling death rate from the disease; on CBS, Katie Couric claimed a decline in the actual number of annual cancer deaths. It could be that both statistics are true, but since no network saw fit to offer an actual number of dead people, how could viewers know? As the population increases, a declining death rate need not mean decreasing deaths. They all cited the same number--a 2.1% annual reduction--yet such a tiny fraction is usually unworthy of headline status. To deserve such attention the newscasts needed to enumerate the thousands of people who are still alive that would have otherwise have died of cancer. Unless you can put a number on the story do not lead with it.
Anyway, whatever the facts of the story, ABC's Dan Harris stated that "this good news is not the result of miracle cures or anything like that." NBC's Tom Costello isolated a trio of factors: fewer cigarette smokers; post-menopausal women no longer taking Hormone Replacement Therapy; and increasing removal of pre-cancerous polyps in the colon. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook offered a hat tip to his colonoscopied anchor by running this soundbite about those polyps from the American Cancer Society's Harmon Eyre: "It began predominantly with the Katie Couric Effect but has been sustained with a lot of other efforts." Looking to the future, NBC's Costello warned that cancer could start killing more people again: "Doctors are seeing more liver and pancreatic cancer. They blame obesity and hepatitis."
Both ABC and CBS followed up with the Alzheimer's story: researchers are making progress in developing a diagnostic blood test, "identifying which patients with mild memory loss would go on to develop the disease within two to six years," as ABC's John McKenzie put it. Even in its earliest stages, he explained, a damaged Alzheimer's brain activates the immune system to attempt to repair it. That immune response leaves markers in the blood. At present there is no test even in the full-blown stages: "Only an autopsy can establish for sure that a patient had Alzheimer's," noted CBS' John Blackstone. "Brain scans and spinal taps are helpful but they are not certain."
Health-&-Medicine is an overcovered beat on the network nightly newscasts. In the story selection trade-off between covering topics of general interest and addressing the narrow concerns of their core demographic audience, the networks lean too far towards the latter. The core audience for the newscasts on broadcast television is older by far than the population at large. Older people tend to be more infirm--and so more personally involved in the medical-industrial complex. The skew of coverage towards their concerns, compounded by the plethora of pharmaceutical advertising that surrounds it, can only alienate younger, healthier viewers. This further narrows the newscasts' audience and distracts from their primary journalistic role, which is to deliver general interest news to the population at large.
In-house physician Timothy Johnson (no link), for example, stated that ABC News uses an e-mail panel of 12,000 healthcare experts, categorized into 200 specialties, to vet medical information for its newsworthiness. Both the cancer and the Alzheimer's story were subjected to that filter before they were selected for coverage. For how many other beats does ABC News rely on such extensive expertise? Does it have 12,000 economists, foreign affairs experts, sociologists, political scientists?
It turns out that for many medical stories, the nightly newscast is an inappropriate medium for journalism. For viewers, especially young healthy ones, who do not have a personal investment, a story on a particular malady lacks the general societal interest to warrant coverage; for those that the malady does affect, a nightly news report will be too superficial. ABC's Johnson himself recommended detailed reporting online instead: viewers should "go only to the sources where they know the names, major medical centers--Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Harvard, Johns Hopkins--to people that they know as reliable sources."
For all the fanfare about the Katie Couric Effect, the bar should be set much higher than it is for medical information to qualify for the nightly news: issues of public health, yes; for information of particular use to individual patients, go online, as Dr Tim suggests.
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