The wonder drug that can transform a story

The press's fascination with health scares and miracle cures is enough to make you feel queasy

Bank holiday Monday: not a great day for news, as a look at the headlines on the news stands confirmed. One stood out by being very different, The Daily Telegraph. In that newspaper's judgement the most important story that day, selected as its front-page lead, carried the headline "Wonder pill cuts obesity and smoking".

Bank holiday Monday: not a great day for news, as a look at the headlines on the news stands confirmed. One stood out by being very different, The Daily Telegraph. In that newspaper's judgement the most important story that day, selected as its front-page lead, carried the headline "Wonder pill cuts obesity and smoking".

The Telegraph's medical editor, reporting from Munich where the European Society of Cardiology was meeting, told how a year-long study of the effects of the drug, called Acomplia, found it would combat those enemies of the healthy heart, fatness and smoking, and could (sic) be available within two years. For those of a scientific inclination she explained that "the drug blocks receptors in the endocannabinoid system, working both on cells in the brain and on fat cells". Space and ignorance prevent me putting that in layman's terms.

The next day the Daily Mail, which has an addiction to health stories probably resistant to treatment by Acomplia, gave its leader page to a follow-up feature on "Whatever happened to will power?", suggesting that this was more appropriate than the wonder drug. However, later in the same edition it filled a page of its 10-page (yes, 10-page) weekly Good Health section with a series of questions and answers: "Everything you need to know" about the "wonder pill" (the Mail using the same description as the Telegraph).

That day's Mail provided two pages on lowering blood pressure, a page on beating prostate problems, a page on a nasal spray to beat memory loss and acupuncture to beat hay fever, a page on "me and my haemorrhoid operation", two pages on the story of a midwife sacked for allowing a woman to have her baby at home, a page on a new diet, "better than Atkins - and safer", and a page on schizophrenia treatment.

All these pages carry virtually no advertising, so the justification for providing almost as much health coverage as sport or news can only be that readers lap it up. The Mail tends to be good at such judgements, but it paints a gloomy picture of its audience, thousands of readers needing treatment for hypochondria and desperate for miracle cures for diseases most of them won't have.

The Mail is an extreme case, but it is not alone. Health journalism is booming as never before, easily eclipsing the environment on the news agenda. Health journalism is related to, but not the same as, medical journalism. Health, presented on dedicated pages of newspapers such as the Mail, is essentially "lifestyle" journalism, features based on individual experiences, prevention of disease by both conventional and alternative means, new diets, new remedies, new forms of behaviour aimed at reducing the likelihood of illnesses.

Medical journalism is a branch of news journalism, living in the world of government policy and advice, of health care and treatment, of research and development. It is here that two cultures collide. Research into new drugs and forms of treatment is a slow and on-going process of hypothesis, experiment, testing and, sometimes, breakthroughs. It is incremental. Journalism is about events, outcomes, results, news. How often do we see the words "miracle cure" in popular newspapers, or "breakthroughs", or "new hope for"? How often do we read about any number of "dangers" in food and drink, the air we breathe, the activities we undertake? Is it surprising that the reaction of the non-experts (most of us) ranges from advanced hypochondria to a weary ignoring of all advice on the basis that everything is risky?

Many doctors and medical researchers despair of misrepresentation in the media. It extends into the coverage of science in general, with some researchers reluctant to communicate at all for fear of the reporter getting it wrong. Yet there can be few areas where there is more public interest than in health and medicine. We want to know. We have a right to know. And journalism is the bridge between the experts and the rest of us. In the main, medical journalists are not doctors. Their expertise is in finding out and explaining to a general audience.

Often the basis of their stories will be the specialist journals, such as The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, where research is published. Kamran Abbasi, acting editor of the BMJ, is a doctor, but is sympathetic to the mainstream journalists who report medical research. He says there can be faults on both sides: a lack of understanding on the part of journalists that the process of peer group review of research articles does not ensure that a finding will be true; the reasons for the research being carried out in the first place; the claims made for the quality of the research by some of those who undertake it; the judgement of the journal on the prominence to be given to the reporting of specific research.

Abbasi also understands that there is not always trust in medical research. There have been issues such as BSE where public, and journalistic, scepticism of medical research has justifiably developed. And that has led to the MMR and now five-in-one vaccine controversies, compounded by distrust in the politicians as well as the medical researchers.

There are some good medical correspondents around, who understand that medical research never produces final answers but bricks in the wall, steps on the way. That is difficult for journalists to put across; news editors dislike caveats. But medical reporting requires journalistic basics like other forms of reporting. That means evaluating the information, relying on proven informed sources to help with that evaluation, and not making exaggerated claims for a new discovery or a new drug. The latter, of course, applies to the researchers and the drugs manufacturers as much as to the journalists. In the real world there are no miracle cures.

The extraordinary revelations about Conrad Black's spending of corporate money maintaining his and his wife's ludicrous lifestyle brought back memories of my own time dealing with Barbara Amiel, later Lady Black. I was editing her column for The Sunday Times and it was not easy. She would combine simpering charm with audacious name-dropping, portraying herself as both vulnerable and a member of a social élite to which most of the rest of us could never aspire. I simply wanted her to deliver a good column. She had other priorities. She delighted in attending those mutually self-supporting international conferences of the world's leading intellectuals, such as the annual think-in in Davos.

She would phone me on a Friday night, when I was anxiously awaiting her words, to provide that week's excuse as to why the column would be very late. My favourite was when she rang to say that she had had a call from "Henry" who had insisted he met her for a drink at the Savoy. I was meant to deduce for myself that it was Henry Kissinger to whom she was referring. Of course it was.

Peter Cole is professor of journalism at the University of Sheffield

DIARY

Marr's blue period

In his memoir of his time as editor of The Independent, serialised in The Telegraph, the BBC's political editor Andrew Marr paints a noble picture of himself as a lone, sane voice in the insane regime of David Montgomery and his Mirror Group lieutenants. Yet staff recall that at the time there was madness of Marr's own making. One of his first front pages carried a big picture of a whale. A vast expanse of blue, the picture was apparently liked by a hastily convened focus group at - of all places - Hammersmith Tube station. So the Marr decree went out: that was the colour he wanted in his front-page pictures. Perhaps an even battier idea was his "Let's be nice to the Germans" issue. The idea was that on every page there would be an item that reflected well on Germany.

Steady on, Piers

Wild exaggeration might have played its part in the downfall of Piers Morgan, but in Va Va Voom - his book about following his beloved Arsenal through the 2003-04 season - the former editor of the Daily Mirror shows that a sense of proportion remains beyond him. "I've been fired as editor of the Mirror," he writes. "But still, worry about that next week. There's a massive game tomorrow." The game in question was against already relegated Leicester City, and Arsenal had already won the Premiership. Meanwhile, might Renault - whose "va va voom" slogan was made famous by the Arsenal striker Thierry Henry - have something to say about Morgan appropriating it for his title?

Conrad's heart of darkness

The Daily Telegraph seems to be rather enjoying its post-Conrad Black freedoms, not stinting in its coverage last week of a new investigation into the murky finances of its former owner. Over on the op-ed pages, a dig at Black's home country appeared in Janet Daley's column. Of US protesters in the 1960s, she wrote that while some of them risked imprisonment, others "had to live in exile in Canada for years - a truly awesome punishment - as the price of their youthful conscience". Would anyone have dared pen such anti-Canuck sentiments when Black was in charge?