The reality varies by place, time, medium, and institution, but in general there is obviously something to this charge. And there’s reason to worry that sensationalism will get worse as the proliferation of information sources continues to fracture the media audience into smaller and smaller segments. Evening news broadcasts in the United States fell from more than 50 million viewers in 1980 to 27 million in 2005, with the audience departing first to cable TV and then the Internet. Cable news audiences have started to slip. Newspapers are in the most trouble—particularly in the United States, where readership has fallen from 70 percent of Americans in 1972 to one-third in 2006. Things aren’t so grim in other countries, but everywhere the trend to fewer readers and smaller audiences is the same. The business of news is suffering badly and it’s not clear how, or even if, it will recover. As the ships sink, it is to be expected that ethical qualms will be pitched overboard.
But still it is wrong to say, as many do, that the drive for readers and ratings is the sole cause of the exaggeration and hysteria so often seen in the news.
For one thing, that overlooks a subtler effect of the media’s business woes, one that is—again—particularly advanced in the United States. “In some cities, the numbers alone tell the story,” wrote the authors of The State of the News Media 2006, published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “There are roughly half as many reporters covering metropolitan Philadelphia, for instance, as in 1980. . . . As recently as 1990, the Philadelphia Inquirer had 46 reporters covering the city. Today it has 24.” At the same time that the number of reporters is declining, the channels of communication are multiplying and the sheer volume of information being pumped out by the media is growing rapidly. How is this possible? In one sense, fewer people are doing more: The reporter who puts a story on the Web site at 11 A.M. also does a video spot at 3 P.M. and files a story for the next day’s newspaper at 6 P.M. But reporters are also doing much less—less time out of the office, less investigation, less verification of numbers, less reading of reports. In this environment, there is a growing temptation to simply take a scary press release at face value, rewrite it, and move on. With countless corporate marketers, politicians, officials, and activists seeking to use the media to market fear, that has profound implications. Reporters are a filter between the public and those who would manipulate them, and that filter is wearing thin.
In 2003, the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline launched a “public awareness” campaign on behalf of restless legs syndrome, an uncomfortable urge to move the legs that worsens when the legs are at rest, particularly at night. First came a study that showed one of GlaxoSmithKline’s existing drugs also worked on restless legs. This was immediately followed by a press release announcing a survey that was said to reveal that a “common yet under-recognized disorder—restless legs syndrome—is keeping Americans awake at night.” Then came the ad blitz. In 2006, Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of the Dartmouth Medical School examined thirty-three articles about the syndrome published in major American newspapers between 2003 and 2005. What they found was “disturbing,” they wrote.
There are four standard criteria for diagnosing restless legs syndrome, but almost every article the researchers found cited a survey that asked for only one symptom—and came up with the amazing conclusion that one in ten Americans was afflicted by the syndrome. The likelier prevalence of the syndrome, the authors wrote, is less than 3 percent. Worse, almost half the articles illustrated the syndrome with only an anecdote or two and almost all of those involved people with unusually severe symptoms, including suicidal thoughts. Not one story provided an anecdote of someone who experienced the symptoms but didn’t find them terribly troubling—which is actually common. Half the stories mentioned GlaxoSmithKline’s drug by name (ropinirole), and about half of those illustrated the drug’s curative powers by telling the story of someone who took the drug and got better. Only one story actually quantified the benefits of the drug, which Woloshin and Schwartz rightly describe as “modest” (in a clinical trial, 73 percent of those who took the drug got at least some relief from their symptoms, compared to 57 percent who were given a placebo). Two-thirds of the articles that discussed ropinirole did not mention the drug’s potential side effects, and only one quantified that risk. One-fifth of the articles referred readers to the “nonprofit” Restless Legs Foundation, but none reported that the foundation’s biggest donor by far is GlaxoSmithKline. “The media seemed to have been co-opted,” Woloshin and Schwartz concluded.
But there is another, more fundamental problem with blaming the if-it-bleeds-it-leads mentality entirely on the pursuit of profit. The reader got a sense of it reading the awful story of Shelby Gagne at the start of this chapter. As painful as it was, the reporter’s description of the family’s struggle and the little girl’s suffering was absorbing and moving. Anyone with a heart and a conscience would be affected—and that includes reporters.
For the most part, reporters, editors, and producers do not misrepresent and exaggerate risks because they calculate that this is the best way to boost revenues and please their corporate masters. They do it because information that grabs and holds readers grabs and holds reporters. They do it because they are human.
“Human beings have an innate desire to be told and to tell dramatic stories,” wrote Sean Collins, a senior producer with National Public Radio News in a letter to the Western Journal of Medicine. Collins was responding to the study of television news in Los Angeles County, which included some tough criticism by David McArthur and his colleagues. “I am at a loss to name a single operatic work that treats coronary artery disease as its subject but I can name several where murder, incest, and assassination play a key part in the story. Check your own instinct for storytelling by asking yourself this: If, driving home from work, you passed a burning building, would you wait to tell your spouse about it until you first explained the number of people who died that day from some form of neoplastic disease?”
Pamphlets peddled on the streets of Elizabethan England were filled with tales of murder, witchcraft, and sexual misbehavior of the most appalling sort. By the early nineteenth century, recognizably modern newspapers were flourishing in London, and in 1820 came the first example of what a later age would call a media circus. The story that occasioned this momentous event was not a war, revolution, or scientific triumph. It was the unpopular King George IV’s attempt to divorce his wife by having her tried for adultery—which turned the queen’s sex life into a matter of public record and a source of endless fascination for every Englishman who could read or knew someone who could. In journalism schools today, students are told there is a list of qualities that make a story newsworthy, a list that varies from teacher to teacher, but that always includes novelty, conflict, impact, and that beguiling and amorphous stuff known as human interest. A royal sex scandal scores on all counts, then and now. “Journalism is not run by a scientific formula,” wrote Collins. “Decisions about a story being newsworthy come from the head, the heart and the gut.”
From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that stories about breast cancer routinely feature young women, even though most women with breast cancer are old. It’s a simple reflection of our feelings: It may be sad when an eighty-five-year-old woman loses her life to cancer, but it is tragic when the same happens to a young woman. Whether these contrasting valuations are philosophically defensible is irrelevant. This is how we feel, all of us. That includes the reporters, who find themselves moved by the mother of young children dying of breast cancer or the man consigned to a wheelchair by West Nile virus, and are convinced by what they feel that this is a great story that should be the focus of the report. The statistics may say these cases are wildly unrepresentative, but given a choice between a powerful personal story and some numbers on a chart, reporters will go with the story. They’re only human.