Care must be taken when reporting news

Care must be taken when reporting news

Editorial

Curing cancer.It’s the proverbial holy grail of medical research, the yardstick by which all other medical science breakthroughs are measured. The idea has become lodged in our national consciousness as a synonym for achievement, registered in our collective pop culture lexicon as an accomplishment so utterly fantastic that all others pale in comparison: “Boy, electrical engineering/movie making/investment banking/(insert professional field)… must really be tough.” “Sure, but it’s not like we’re trying to cure cancer here.”And although there have been astounding breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of the many varied forms of the dreaded disease in recent years, the unifying link which might realistically allow doctors to eradicate it once and for all has been relegated to the trash heaps of medical fiction.Or so we thought.Earlier this month the Sunday New York Times broke a story which, to most Americans, seemed too good to be true. The front page article told the story of OSU alumnus Judah Folkman and his team of researchers at the Children’s Hospital in Boston and the progress they had made in eradicating cancerous tumours in mice. By injecting two drugs, endostatin and angiostatin, they were able to successfully shrink tumours in the mice by cutting off the tumours’ blood supply. With the mice experiencing little or no side effects and the initial effectiveness of the treatment confirmed, the procedure felt like an exciting advance in the ongoing battle against cancer.Because of the prominence given the story (it was the day’s sublead, ostensibly the second-most important story in the paper) reader’s across the nation were led to believe that this was breaking news. And a quote attributed to one of the researchers, (“We’ll cure cancer within two years…”) lent further credence to everyone’s feeling that medical research’s holy grail had been attained.Within hours news organizations across the country had picked up the story. Monday’s nightly newscasts had Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather each touting their own versions of the story to millions of Americans. The phone lines at the National Cancer Institute were overwhelmed with calls from desperate cancer sufferers and their families. Entremed Inc., the company which had developed the two drugs used in Folkman’s treatment, saw its stock soar from $12 the day the story hit the papers to $85 just two days later. Too bad the story was far from what it had been turned into.Once it became clear that Folkman’s treatment was not a radical advancement – their study had already been reported in the medical community some six months ago – doctors across the nation were faced with the difficult task of dashing their patients’ hopes with the difficult truth. Although the rationale for the therapy researchers have been developing has been called “exciting” and “promising,” the leap between curing cancer in mice and duplicating the feat in humans is enormous. And this should be made clear.The fault is not with the doctors quoted in the story, but with the New York Times and other media outlets that picked it up and touted it as something it simply was not.When dealing with an issue as emotionally-charged as, say, life and death, the media must take extra care to tell the whole truth and not simply those facts which make a good story.Of course, that should be self-evident. After all, we’re practicing journalism, not curing cancer.