Coverage of common causes of death in the UK media

Is there a correlation between the diseases you read about in the news and what is actually likely to kill you?

Williamson, Skinner and Hocken (2011) studied the 10 most daily read newspapers in the UK s (The Sun, Daily Mail, The Mirror, The Telegraph, The Times, Daily Express, Daily Star, The Guardian, The Independent and the Financial Times) for a year, in order to see whether there's a correlation between the media reporting of illness and death and actual statistics.

Most common causes of death in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics (table from the paper)

They searched each paper's site and recognized 18,482 articles covering the most common causes of death in the UK. They used 'media friendly' terms when it was necessary (for example: 'heart attack' instead of ‘ischaemic heart disease’).

The most common conditions reported were the Flu/pneumonia (6525 articles, 35.2%), ischaemic heart disease (3849 articles, 20.8%) and dementia (2577 articles, 13.9%). The least reported conditions were obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (95 articles, 0.5% of total) and heart failure (547 articles, 3%).

Pneumonia: third most common cause of death in the UK

In comparison with the number of deaths they cause every year, the Flu ⁄ pneumonia, prostate cancer, dementia and breast cancer have been mentioned extensively in the media. On the other hand, Cerebrovascular accidents (CVAs) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are very underrepresented in the media.

The study suffers from several flaws: for one, the researchers don't know in which context their search terms appeared in the media; why were these diseases reported? They hypothesize, for example, that "prostate cancer" could have been reported because of the coverage of the Libyan Lockerbie bomber, Al-Meghari, or that the search term 'flu' could actually been 'swine flu' but they can't be sure.

There is, in my opinion, a large difference between a story mentioning prostate cancer as the reason for Al-Meghari's release from prison and a story about prostate cancer from the medical point of view. The Swine Flu has been indeed covered intensively lately, but that doesn't mean that the 'regular' flu has been covered, even though it's a common cause of death. The Swine Flu falls under 'health scare' while the regular flu doesn't, and treating both as 'flu' kind of misses the point. This study is more about "how many times diseases' names appear in the press" than about "the media and representations of common diseases".

Swine Flu: sexier than the regular flu

Williamson, J.M., Skinner, C. I., & Hocken, D.B. (2011). Death and illness as depicted in the media International journal of clinical practice, 65 (5) : 21489079

Cancer coverage and its sources

The average person acquires most of hers or his health knowledge from the media. The question is, where do the media acquire that knowledge?

Moriarty et al. (2010) tried to answer this question by studying the 2003 cancer coverage in 44 major American newspapers (they started with 50, but had difficulties obtaining full-text coverage for six of them). Their final sample included 3,656 in-depth cancer articles that were coded for topics, aspects of cancer continuum (prevention, treatment, etc.), sources and clinical trials.

The most frequently cited sources were research institutions (29.73%), followed by medical journals (12.30%), ACS (9.57%) and NCI (4.54%).

Ten most cited sources:

1. New England Journal of Medicine
2. Journal of the National Cancer Institute
3. Journal of the American Medical Association
4. Johns Hopkins University
5. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
6. Genentech
7. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
8. Harvard University
9. H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center
10. Science

Sources and story type

The most popular subjects were personal profiles of people with cancer, cancer research and cancer fundraisers/benefits. Research institutions were the most popular sources in almost every story type. In comparison, medical journals were mostly cited in cancer research stories. Pharmaceutical companies were rarely cited, and when they were, it was mostly in reports of cancer research and stocks.

Sources and the cancer continuum

Treatment was the most mentioned aspect of the cancer continuum (in nearly 75% of the articles). Detection was mentioned in about half of the articles. Of all aspects, prevention was the least likely to appear in stories.

Clinical trials and their tone

Out of the 317 stories about clinical trials, more than half (53.6%) cited a research institution. Medical journals were also cited frequently. The general tone of clinical trials coverage was optimistic (more than half the stories) with most of the other stories having a neutral or balanced tone. Articles that cited medical journals or pharmaceutical companies were significally more likely to be optimistic.

Overall, sources in cancer coverage change according to the type of the story. The ACS, for example, was frequently cited in awareness/education stories. Research articles frequently cited medical journals. The most interesting finding is that pharmaceutical companies aren't a main source for cancer stories (it could be, however, that those companies funded the research reported. The paper didn't look into funding sources). The authors mention that it's possible the reason for the large amounts of research institutions mentions is that the reporters rely on said institutions press releases.

Moriarty, C., Jensen, J., & Stryker, J. (2009). Frequently cited sources in cancer news coverage: a content analysis examining the relationship between cancer news content and source citation Cancer Causes & Control, 21 (1), 41-49 DOI: 10.1007/s10552-009-9432-x