Study shows flaws in TV news health stories

Physicians can help improve medical coverage on television by forming relationships with local stations, experts say.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. April 3, 2006.

On local news programs, four TV stations aired stories that discussed how lemon juice might be useful in preventing the spread of HIV during sex.

Three of the reports failed to say that the research did not involve humans. One broadcast got the study wrong and said the juice may be a substitute for "costly HIV" medications.

It's the kind of TV health coverage that makes physicians cringe and exemplifies how poorly local newscasts report medical stories, researchers say.

That type of reporting happens frequently, according to a new study concluding that local TV stations do a poor job of providing useful information in health stories and sometimes make mistakes that give viewers potentially dangerous advice.

"It's very scary. Fortunately, the majority of the stories were not potentially harmful. They just weren't very useful," said lead study author James Pribble, MD, a lecturer in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, which conducted the study with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Researchers reviewed 2,795 news broadcasts that aired on 122 TV stations in the nation's top 50 media markets in October 2002. Newslab, a facility at UW-Madison that originally studied local TV coverage of political campaigns, compiled the newscasts. The study's findings appeared in the March issue of the American Journal of Managed Care.

Local television aired 1,799 health stories, which accounted for 11% of the news portion of late-evening newscasts. The median story airtime was 33 seconds. Breast cancer and West Nile virus were the two most common topics in health coverage, probably because October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and West Nile was a new topic at the time, the study said.