Catch up on the latest news about AHCJ members
Members of AHCJ have been busy! Read about their latest accomplishments:
Ted Agres has become a senior editor at Health Affairs, overseeing the Policy Briefs.
Jeff Baillon, investigative reporter for KMSP-Minneapolis/St. Paul, received an upper Midwest regional Emmy award for an investigative project titled “Cover Your Assets.”
Antigone Barton received a Nieman Fellowship for Global Health Reporting. She will spend a year at Harvard, studying global health policy, and then she will spend four months in Africa, building collaborative reporting and accessible resources.
David Boddiger earned an Addiction Studies Program for Journalists 2010 Award for “Mexico Eager to Reduce Demand for Illicit Drugs,” published in The Lancet. The award is given by the Addiction Studies Program with The Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
Suzanne Bohan and Sandy Kleffman of the Bay Area News Group in Northern California won the 2010 White House Correspondents’ Association’s Edgar A. Poe Award for their four-part series “Shortened Lives: Where You Live Matters.” Read their account of how they reported the story.
NewsPro issue on AHCJ, health journalism (#ahcj2010)
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
NewsPro has once again turned the spotlight toward health journalism and AHCJ, just in time for Health Journalism 2010 in Chicago. Find a PDF of the full issue here, or go to the issue’s online index.
In addition to profiles of AHCJ award winners, highlights include:
- A preview of the main attractions at Health Journalism 2010.
- A “state of health care journalism in 2010” round-up that focuses on the double-edged sword of a reform debate that brought health to the forefront, yet carried with it partisanship and misinformation. The issue also includes a piece on reporters’ struggles to understand and communicate the debate’s issues.
- An argument that “In the arena of iPhone apps, there is perhaps no division attracting as much attention as health care.”
- An interview with Nancy Snyderman, the well-known doctor and television reporter.
- A lead story on how the Internet is passing television as “most essential medium in the lives of Americans.”
- An exploration of the ethical and practical dilemmas facing doctor-journalists in Haiti, and a companion survey of members of the National Association of Medical Communicators. The issue also includes profiles of a few prominent doctor-reporters.
- An attempt to address questions raised by the H1N1 epidemic.
Read our post on last year’s issue here.
Debate over M.D. reporters in Haiti continues
Discussion and debate continues about the ethics of reporters also serving as doctors in Haiti. [Earlier post]
The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi spoke to some network officials - including Paul Friedman, executive vice president of CBS News, who “says that competitive issues have factored in boosting [Dr. Jennifer] Ashton’s role since [CNN's Dr. Sanjay] Gupta became a star.”
In Baltimore, The Sun’s Kelly Brewington posted the question of whether doctors can also be reporters to readers in that paper’s “Picture of Health” blog.. Curtis Brainerd, on the Columbia Journalism Review’s Web site, wrote about the concerns being raised over the dual roles doctor/reporters are serving in.
Last week, the Society of Professional Journalists released a statement cautioning journalists to not become part of the story. When some people, including new media professor and blogger Jeff Jarvis, interpreted that to mean reporter/doctors should not treat patients, the discussion became more heated. Blogger Tyler Dukes took on Jarvis’ denigration of SPJ’s statement, saying that Jarvis “chose to argue his points with hyperbole and distortion.”
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation discussed the issue on the Jan. 21 edition of its “As it Happens” show. [Listen]
On Jan. 27, National Public Radio’s media correspondent David Folkenflik appeared on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth and talked about how much of a role should a reporter perform in the midst of a story.
Folkenflik, who has spoken to ABC’s Dr. Richard Besser and NBC’s Dr. Nancy Snyderman, says, “The real question is ‘Is it required for them to tell those stories through their own experiences? Are they somehow diverting attention from those who might need it most by focusing their camera and their aid on these, these people and are they in some ways subtley changing the nature of outcomes there?”
Folkenflik says, “Nobody’s saying these people shouldn’t help” but that “The question is ‘Is there any need to keep the camera rolling while they do it?’ I think that’s fundamentally the issue.”
NPR’s On the Media delved into the topic on Jan. 22, with Neal Shapiro, president of WNET Public Television in New York and former president of NBC News; AHCJ member Gary Schwitzer, of the University of Minnesota and publisher of Health News Review; Bob Steele, a journalism ethicist at DePaul University and member of the Poynter Institute’s faculty; and Dr. Bob Arnot, former chief medical correspondent for NBC News.
Arnot, who has intervened medically while on assignment - without the cameras rolling - pinpointed some of the concerns of performing medical procedures on camera:
DR. BOB ARNOT: Look, the real risk is here that your producer calls up and says, hey we just saw the other network’s doctor deliver a baby, could you do an amputation. There’s a real risk that doctors could be pushed into things they shouldn’t be doing because of the pressure of the suits or the producers, to just get better ratings.
BOB GARFIELD: Things they shouldn’t do, he says, such as treating somebody in the street who can just as easily and more safely be attended to at a clinic or hospital, and such as exploiting the pain of an earthquake victim, not to mention the emotions of the audience, for three minutes of drama, genuine or otherwise.
DR. BOB ARNOT: Absolutely, I mean, look-it. If this happened on the streets of New York, do you think you could do that with the current HIPAA regulations? So, sure, you’re potentially exploiting the patient, and you are becoming more of a showman than you are a medical doctor out there.
Doctor or journalist? Roles become blurred in Haiti
As aid flows to Haiti and the full scope of the disaster becomes clear, there is an interesting discussion happening among health journalists about the role of medical correspondents reporting from the scene of such disasters.
Physicians who work for television networks and have been sent to Haiti have been juggling their roles as doctors and reporters:
- CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta examined a 15-day-old baby on the air and did surgery on a girl with a skull fracture. After Belgian doctors dispatched to a field hospital later abandoned their post and patients, Gupta spent the night as the only physician stabilizing patients.
- NBC’s Dr. Nancy Snyderman operated on people in a makeshift clinic.
- ABC’s Dr. Richard Besser, recently acting director of the CDC, helped a woman who had gone into labor.
- Dr. Jennifer Ashton of CBS assisted in surgery on a girl after who had undergone an amputation.
Footage of all of those correspondents treating patients has aired on their networks and Web sites, raising the question of whether “news organizations at some point appear to be capitalizing for promotional reasons on the intervention by journalists,” according to Bob Steele, journalism values scholar at the Poynter Institute.
Matea Gold, of the Los Angeles Times, reported on the topic and has thoughts from Steele, Snyderman, Besser and CNN’s president about the issue.
Gary Schwitzer, of the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication and publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, asks “Who teaches journalism ethics to physician-reporters?” and has “An examination of the ethics of MD-reporter involvement in Haiti.”
In an online chat today, three readers asked Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz about the medical and journalistic ethics of treating patients on camera. Kurtz responded that he has “mixed feelings” about it. Interestingly, on Kurtz’s CNN show, “Reliable Sources,” that aired on Sunday, he used a clip of Gupta examining the 15-day-old baby as an example of how the media is focusing on Haiti’s children but did not comment on the ethical issue of physician-journalists treating patients.
Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., a doctor who regularly writes for Salon.com, writes about Gupta taking responsibility for the patients who were left alone by the Belgian medical team:
Cynics may sneer that Gupta’s decision to stay was a self-promotional act intended to boost ratings and his profile, that his nobility was inspired more by the eye of the camera than the Hippocratic oath. But don’t count me among those skeptics; I believe those lives were, literally, in Gupta’s hands, and he responded.
Update
The Washington Post now has an article about reporters who double as doctors in Haiti that includes comments from the president of CBS News, who says “that competitive issues have factored in boosting Ashton’s role since Gupta became a star,” and from the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin’s journalism school, who cautions that such coverage can become self-promotional.
Snyderman’s MSNBC show is canceled
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health journalism
In a little bit of news that may have gone unnoticed over the holidays, “Dr. Nancy,” a health program on MSNBC featuring Nancy Snyderman, M.D., has been canceled in the cable channel’s latest changes to its lineup.
The show launched on June 29, 2009. See earlier posts about Snyderman’s show.
Snyderman previously worked for ABC, which suspended her for a week after she made a radio commercial for Tylenol. She later left ABC to become vice president of medical affairs for Johnson & Johnson – maker of Tylenol.
Health journo goes it alone without insurance
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health care reform, Health journalism, Member news
Freelance health writer and AHCJ founding member Duncan Moore has gained national attention recently for his Los Angeles Times piece explaining his decision to go without health insurance at age 53. Moore quit his job and used a COBRA policy to tide him over until he found a new job. Then the economy tanked, newspapers retrenched, that new job never materialized, his 18 months of COBRA ran out and Moore was forced to ask some tough questions. The answer he found to his first question, “what insurance actually buys,” led him to rethink the entire system about which he’d been reporting for years.
After a quick self-assessment, Moore found he had a clean family history, good habits and almost no pre-existing conditions. That started him thinking.
So what does a guy like me need with health insurance? I’m the best risk in town, I thought to myself. Why shouldn’t I self-insure? In other words, why couldn’t I accept full responsibility for my own health expenses?
Moore writes that he’s ready to accept a certain amount of self-rationing when it comes to everyday care, and that, even if something catastrophic happens, he’ll likely be no worse off than he’d have been if he was insured, because “there are no guarantees that the insurance company would pay, that it wouldn’t try to weasel out of the obligation.”
Moore also made an appearance on Dr. Nancy Snyderman’s show on MSNBC on Tuesday to discuss his decision.
Blogger’s open letter criticizes Snyderman
Daily Kos contributor JDWolverton posts his critical open letter to Dr. Nancy Snyderman, the host of MSNBC’s new midday health show, and pleads for her to cover health care reform from the perspective of the average consumer.
Wolverton also says she does not “quote peer reviewed sources,” has not revealed to viewers that the frequently quoted Lewin Group is owned by United HealthCare, and has issues with how she describes the current U.S. health care system and the options for reform.
The 1,000-plus word letter ends with the request that Snyderman “Do a real health care oriented show that does more than fluff pieces” and has four specific ideas for improving the show.
Snyderman previously worked for ABC, which suspended her for a week after she made a radio commercial for Tylenol. She later left ABC to become vice president of medical affairs for Johnson & Johnson - maker of Tylenol.
NBC’s Snyderman to host daily health news show
Nancy Snyderman, M.D., chief medical editor for NBC News, will anchor a one-hour daily show about health news and issues that will air on MSNBC beginning June 29.
According to the press release, Snyderman “will tackle everything from health and wellness tips and medical breakthroughs to in-depth looks at health policy as it makes its way through Washington.”
“The abundance of medical and health information means that we have more news than newscasts at NBC. This program will give us a chance to integrate medical news with politics, health policy, and the health concerns of our consumers,” said Snyderman.
The show, which apparently doesn’t yet have a name, will air at noon on weekdays.
Snyderman previously worked for ABC, which suspended her for a week after she made a radio commercial for Tylenol. She later left ABC to become vice president of medical affairs for Johnson & Johnson - maker of Tylenol.
Just one review of her work is posted at HealthNewsReviews.org but it met only one of 10 criteria the site lays out for responsible health reporting. The piece was deemed to be “disease-mongering.”
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Spend a week at the CDC studying public health, meeting sources. Apply for the AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellowships today!
- Reporting on the intersection of health, environment
- Tip sheet: Covering cuts to Medicare reimbursements
- Briefing: Reporting on health reform between now and 2014
- Covering high-risk insurance pools: Tips for reporters
- Health care reform has passed: What's next?
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
