Seeing is Not Necessarily Believing

People trust television over what they read in print. Is that because they have the illusion of witnessing the event firsthand--as opposed to relying on someone else's description? And yet we know images can be manipulated just as much as words--and I'm not talking about faking here. Camera angles, music, production values and the like influence our perceptions as much as the adjectives, verbs and nouns used in traditional print media.

At first when I looked at this chart from the latest State of the News Media report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, I fixated on how much more believable consumers found television over print media (full disclosure: I used to work at TIME and am still a contributor for them). More people believed cable news over either magazines or newspapers. Ha, I thought. I know better.



Then I looked at the overall picture. The best any news outlet scored was 25% believability. That means at least 75% of viewers/readers say they don't believe all or most of what they see or hear on the news.

It reminded me of a time when I covered a large demonstration in midtown Manhattan and one of the writers back at TIME's headquarters told me that he knew it was a violent demonstration because he had seen it on television. I, however, who had been there for several hours, saw no sign of violence.

There was one point--when the TV news cameras showed up--that someone burned an effigy of a person. And that's what the writer had seen and why he concluded it was a violent demonstration. That two-minute piece of street theater was more real to him than my own eyewitness account.

What does this have to do with health? Just this: that health coverage is part of the larger environment of news coverage. I used to think health news was somewhat insulated from those larger forces but not anymore. I'll have more to say on that in future posts.

Source: The State of the News Media 2007 (Project for Excellence in Journalism, a program of the Pew Research Center), accessed March 14, 2007

Who Is Really Behind Your Health News?

It's official. Video news releases are now contaminating health news as well.

VNRs (also called "fake news spots" and no, we're not referring to Comedy Central's news spoofs) are pre-packaged videos that are made to look and sound like a television station's own news spots but that have been produced entirely by outside organizations like PR agencies, non-profit groups and other institutions.

Trudy Lieberman takes an in-depth look at some fake news spots that are being produced by the Cleveland Clinic, of all places, for local television stations across the U.S. The hospital boasts a brand new broadcast studio that employs a handful of journalists as part of its Cleveland Clinic News Service.

Now mind you, the Cleveland Clinic's reputation is sterling but that's not the point. These video spots provide a dollop of news in a very sophisticated advertising wrapper.

As Lieberman writes in the Columbia Journalism Review:

. . . Cleveland Clinic News Service stories almost always feature Cleveland Clinic doctors and patients touting some new surgical technique or medical breakthrough, like anti-aging proteins or a new sensor to measure spinal disc damage, or sometimes offering basic health tips, like flu shots or exercise. Stories occasionally mention research from another institution or a medical journal, but never a doctor from a rival hospital in Cleveland. . .

Real health reporting is expensive and lots of traditional news organizations are pulling back from it. (The same holds true for international news.) There's no question we're going to have to figure out new ways of financing news coverage. But VNRs are not the answer.

In the interests of transparency, these particular video spots should be more clearly labelled as promotion from the Cleveland Clinic.

And in case you're wondering about The Health Media Watch. No one's paying me to write this blog. It's a labor of love based on my 20-plus years covering health and medical topics. (And yes, I realize that's not a sustainable business model.)