Cancer stories are seemingly ever-present in the UK’s media. Be it reducing your chances of getting it, new treatments and heart-wrenching stories of patients with the disease; cancer is rarely out of the public eye.
Henry Scowcroft, news and multimedia manager for Cancer Research UK, spoke to me about the coverage of cancer stories.
He has worked for the communications department of the UK’s largest cancer charity for seven years.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:09 — 3.8MB)
Interview Transcript
Lorna Powell: I’m joined today by Henry Scowcroft, news and multimedia manager for Cancer Research UK, who’s very kindly agreed to answer a few questions surrounding the way that the media reports cancer. So Henry, do you feel that the UK media generally reports cancer stories well?
Henry Scowcroft: It depends where you look; it’s a bit of a mixed bag. I think most of the science and health correspondents for the national newspapers do, generally, a very good job with a few exceptions here and there. But it’s when you get outside of the specialist health and science reporting that problems start to emerge.
LP: Do you have any examples of good reporting surrounding cancer stories?
HS: There’s a lot of good stuff out there. One thing that springs to mind is a piece that Mark Henderson wrote for Eureka (The Times’ science supplement) about a year ago now I think which he ended up winning an award for. It was a fantastic feature article looking at the way cancer treatments are becoming more personalised and it was illustrated with some excellent case studies but also some really good interviews with the scientists.
That’s an example of the good stuff that’s out there but there’s also the bad stuff. One that really springs to mind is a study that was reported a few weeks back with various headlines saying that cancer patients should have a glass of red wine before going for chemotherapy. And this was based on the results of a small laboratory study which showed that an experimental drug that’s never been approved for use in patients was made more effective by adding large quantities of a compound found in red wine.
But you’d have to drink quite a lot of red wine to get that amount into your body. Virtually none, well in fact none, of the media that covered it pointed out that it was an experimental cancer drug. So the implication was that patients here and now should be drinking red wine before they turn up for chemo which is dangerous, frankly.
LP: And obviously very, very misleading to a huge number of people.
HS: It’s worth pointing out though that it wasn’t just the journalists who were at fault there. The actually scientific paper it was drawn from, the discussion section of the paper contained the statement that, if proven in larger studies, then this would mean that drinking wine before chemo could be a good idea. And then the press release contained a quote from the scientists effectively repeating that. So although you can point the finger at journalists and say they should have checked you’ve got to be fair and say that the press release contained statements that were perhaps ill advised.
LP: Do you think the media has any responsibility to cover cancer stories with patients and their families in mind or at the end of the day are they are just a business?
HS: Well, I think you have to look at the realities of the media at the moment but you also have to think that we’re all people. Everyone can hold their hands up and say that upsetting cancer patients by writing irresponsible stories is not a good thing to do, but I think it’s a bit of both. The media has a duty to get the facts right first and foremost, that will sell more papers, if the journalism is good.
I think that to say that journalists have a duty towards cancer patients is possibly stepping outside the remit of a journalist. The journalist has a responsibility to get the story straight and I think going into ideas that journalists should have a wider role of communicating and explaining is stepping outside of what journalists do perhaps.
LP: Finally, how do you view the role of the media in policy formation surrounding cancer care?
HS: I think the media’s got a very big role to play but we shouldn’t underestimate the part that lobbying and talking to politicians directly plays. If you go and look at something like the ban of smoking in public places I think public option as mediated by the media played a huge role in that and I know our campaigns team spent a lot of time in parliament explaining and talking through the evidence with particular MPs. So I think, it’s a bit of a fudge of an answer, but I think the media plays a very important role but it’s sort of necessary but not sufficient to affect cancer policy.
Henry Scowcroft is a visiting lecturer at City University Journalism Department
Photograph provided by interviewee, front page image courtesy of reinvented
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