One of the most attractive nuisances to television and newspaper editors is a ubiquitous health story. On just about any given night, a news editor can reach into a bag of wire-service stories and pull out a report on a new study that shows something thought to be bad for you is actually good, or vice versa.
Grab that little “talker” of a story and slap it into an eight-inch hole on the page with a catchy headline and you’ve satisfied your nightly demand to soften the mix of otherwise dreadfully dull stories about impending war, the staggering economy, the government budget crunch and other headlines that dominate the front page.
Only trouble is, many of the stories — especially the ones we think we can cram into eight readable inches — raise more questions than answers. In some cases they can be downright misleading without the proper amount of context. More than a few could be ignored altogether.
Two cases in point over the past week. On Jan. 4, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story — thankfully not on the front page — headlined “Study: Beer a day good for heart.” You could almost hear Homer Simpson’s tires squealing on his way to the Duff Beer factory.
Boiled down to its basic newsworthiness, this study — published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry (not one of those scientific journals that carries the word “prestigious” in front of it) — found that a beer a day seemed to produce a change in blood chemistry “associated” with a reduced risk of heart attack in the 48 men studied by Israeli researchers.
Four days later, a much larger study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (yes, in this case, it deserves the adjective) found essentially the same thing.
Only this time the study involved a huge cohort of participants (40,000 men), it looked at other alcoholic drinks beyond beer and the study’s authors were put through the rigorous peer-review process of a major scientific journal. (In other words their science was found to be scrupulously clean.)
Neither study could be termed groundbreaking news because health experts have known for years that moderate drinkers have a lower risk of heart attacks than heavy drinkers or those who never drink.
The real science was in what that “association” is between blood chemistry, moderate alcohol consumption and heart disease.
But how could you pass up a headline such as “Beer a day good for the heart”?
It is an age-old struggle between the incrementalism of scientific study and daily news. Journalists should be careful not to make too much of yet another finding on the risks of heart disease, cancer or any of the other major killers. Readers should be careful not to make too much of the reporting on these subjects.
Whenever you see them, ask these questions: Who did the study? (You want to know it is someone without a vested interest in the outcome.) How many people were involved? (The more the better.) And where was it published? (In a respected medical or scientific journal, preferably.)
If those questions aren’t answered, we’ve failed and you should ignore what you read.
What happened to Thomas Oliver and his politically incorrect “@ Wits’ End” column that has been running on Fridays in the @issue section? After a two-year sojourn, first as an editorial writer for the Journal and for the past year on the Journal-Constitution’s editorial board, Oliver has been promoted to a key position in the news department.
He’s taken on the challenge of running the Gwinnett County newsroom — the largest of the AJC’s suburban operations and the only one that produces a daily section.
It is a big job, but that’s nothing new for Oliver, who ran the news department’s business desk and was editor of the Olympics coverage for several years leading up to and including the 1996 Games.
