How Do US Journalists Cover Treatments, Tests, Products, and Procedures? An Evaluation of 500 Stories

N ews stories about new treatments, tests, products, and procedures appear daily. Such reporting should ideally be accurate, balanced, and complete so that health care consumers are properly informed and ready to participate in decision making about their health care. If reporting is inaccurate, imbalanced, or incomplete, consumers may have unrealistic expectations and demand of their physicians care that would be of little value or even harmful. Is the news media doing a good job of reporting on new treatments, tests, products, and procedures? Ray Moynihan and colleagues analyzed how often news stories quantifi ed the costs, benefi ts, and harms of the interventions being discussed, and how often they reported potential confl icts of interest in story sources [1]. Of the 207 newspaper and television stories that they studied, 83 did not report the benefi ts of medications quantitatively, and of the 124 stories that did quantify the benefi ts of medications, only 18 presented both relative and absolute benefi ts. Of all the stories, 53% had no information about potential harms of the treatment, and 70% made no mention of treatment costs. Of 170 stories that cited an expert or a scientifi c study, 85 (50%) cited at least one with a fi nancial tie to the manufacturer of the drug, a tie that was disclosed in only 33 of the 85 stories. Moynihan and colleagues' work was one of the inspirations for the creation of the Australian Media Doctor Web site (http://www.mediadoctor.org.au/) in 2004. That project monitors the health news coverage of 13 Australian news organizations. The project concluded, after its fi rst six months experience, that " Australian lay news reporting of medical advances…is poor " [2]. In Canada, Alan Cassels and colleagues documented similar journalistic shortcomings [3]. Cassels heads a team that launched a Canadian Media Doctor Web site (http://www. mediadoctor.ca/) in 2005. That project evaluates health news coverage by 12 Canadian news organizations. These efforts helped inspire a project to evaluate United States health news coverage of claims made about treatments, tests, products, and procedures. HealthNewsReview.org started publishing evaluations of health news stories in April 2006. The sole support for the project is a grant from the 501c3 nonprofi t Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making Jack Wennberg and colleagues, with a mission of " assuring that people understand their choices and have the information they need to make sound decisions affecting their health …