The News, Cancer, and a Counter-Intuitive Result

It's a given -- we learn a lot about disease and illness from the media, either in the news, or from those annoying pharmaceutical commercials, or in entertainment programs.  Me, I get all my medical knowledge (and behavioral modeling) from House.

Cancer in particular gets lots of media attention, as it should given the number of people who suffer and die from the disease every year.  But is it accurate media attention?

This study suggests not, at least when it comes to the news.  Only the abstract is available (I bet Gregory House gets access for free).  But what's really interesting is not that the news media isn't as accurate as it could be -- surprise -- but the direction of that inaccuracy.  Stay with me here.  It's kinda sorta fascinating.

The content analysis of cancer coverage by eight newspapers and five magazines reaches a counter-intuitive conclusion.  News reports often discuss aggressive treatment and survival, according to the study, but rarely touch on the bad news.  All that emphasis is mine because I love doing it.  Think about it.  How's this result for turning the traditional criticism of journalism on its ear?  We (the royal we, as in journalists) focus too much on the bad, or so goes the criticism by just about everyone on the planet who isn't a journalist, but according to this study, the news "may give patients an inappropriately optimistic view of cancer treatment, outcomes, and prognosis."

Wow.  Journalists optimistic?  Something's deeply wrong here.

Unfortunately we can't judge the quality of the research, given all we have a measly abstract.  And when non-media scholars attempt a content analysis, they often screw the pooch -- as in no inter-coder reliabilities, no cleanly drawn categories, no sense of the difficulties of analyzing a text or constructing units of measurement.  Sure, it's The Archives of Internal Medicine, a pretty damn good medical journal, but too often medical folks conduct really bad behavioral research.  For them, a media study can seem like slumming it.  That attitude often shows in the work.

But if we assume for the moment the study was done halfway well, then this result does surprise. Clearly someone in journalism is asleep at the switch.  Get back to that bad news!

What Catholics Know

From the NYTimes, a poll of Catholics finds:

• the majority of Catholics are critical of the pope's handling of the sex abuse scandal.
• but are confident the Vatican will figure it out and take care of matters correctly.
• and over half thinks the Vatican is "out of touch" with the needs of Catholics today
• so everyone dislikes bureaucracy, but they also think the news media have been unfair.
• and over half think sexual abuse is still happening in the church
• which makes you wonder what the hell they're complaining about, given without news media coverage none of this would have come out and the friggin church would have kept on doing what it did.  Oops, sorry for that editorial moment...
• and nearly two-thirds believe bishops covered all this up.

A complete look at the poll is here.  Disclaimer: I'm a practicing Catholic. And pissed about this.

Science, Framing, and the Media

An interesting blog post examines how important the "framing" of science is for public understanding. Social scientists are "critical friends" of other scientists, according to the post, and the "picture we present" to the public can influence perceptions. All in all, interesting stuff.

The idea of "framing" is an old one in the literature. What is framing? Whatever the hell you want it to be, since there are about a million definitions. Like porn, we know it when we see it, but in general framing sets the way we understand a story. Is a story framed as little guy versus big guy, or is it framed as a morality piece? An election framed as a vote on the economy can turn out very different than an election framed on the safety of a nation (see 1992 and 2008 U.S. presidential elections as examples).

And people don't need a lot of information, or any information, to form an opinion, especially about science. A good 2005 study, for example, found that people use heuristics, or shortcuts, to make sense of science stories about nanotechnology depending in part on how they are framed by the media or political elite.

A Polarized Public?

Is the American electorate politically polarized, or just the elites? These competing hypotheses have been analyzed, the data tortured, the essays and journal articles written, and still we don't know for sure. But we're getting close to a consensus, I believe. This does matter because a polarized public is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to compromise and legislation -- although there is some suggestion that the more polarized people are, the more they learn.

Anyway, this essay at Real Clear Politics gets at the topic and is worth the read. It gets into ideological and partisan "sorting" and all kinds of cool stuff. Highly recommended.

Near the end the author, Jay Cost, cites and agrees with a previous study that argues:

Contemporary American politics is probably best described as polarized on the elite level and increasingly well sorted in the electorate.

Yup. Which leads to all kinds of interesting media content (polarized since media tend to be at the elite level) and a depressed news audience (pissed at elite polarized content?). News networks play to the most polarized in their political coverage, in part because only the polarized are still paying attention to the news, but we get into a chicken-and-egg thing here that I want to explore more on a later post.

Bloody Brilliant

The news media apologize. Except not.