This week the NBC Today Show offers a series the likes of which makes my skin crawl. With 45-million uninsured Americans, the Today Show reports on "Saving Your Life: Modern Medical Miracles." If a miracle were available but nobody could afford it or access it, would it still be a miracle?

Riding the appeal of reporter involvement, the Today Show had Matt Lauer get a 64-slice cardiac CT scan. The MSNBC website explains that the machine is made by GE. The website says: "GE Healthcare's LightSpeed VCT is the world's first machine that enables physicians to capture images of a human heart in just five heartbeats — something no other CT system can offer." The website does not remind viewers that GE owns NBC. But why bother with disclosure when we're talking about miracles? And why bother with a discussion of the arguments against using such scans in healthy people?

Then, in a segment entitled "Magic Pill Scans Your Insides," Katie Couric swallowed a camera-in-a-pill to show us more of her insides that you may have missed from her last colonoscopy on the air. There was only scant discussion of costs and insurance coverage and no meaningful discussion of why we needed such a camera-in-a-pill in our growing medical armamentarium.

Please bring back Dave Garroway and the chimp.

A journalist bemoans the lack of skepticism in news coverage of Tamiflu in last week's edition of the BMJ.

"From a bit of a dud to the world's most sought after drug in the space of six months" is the way the writer describes Tamiflu's recent fate. "Despite a silly name and a lack of convincing evidence that it will have any real impact on an influenza pandemic, sales and recognition of the drug frequently dubbed 'our best hope against bird flu' have leapt through the roof."

He describes a British researcher who "routinely provides the media with positive comments about Tamiflu and has even appeared in promotional videos for the drug." Yet the man's ties to Tamiflu's manufacturer are rarely mentioned in the news. Another British researcher observes, "Perhaps the media should speak to more than one person when it's looking for comments or information. Somehow the mainstream media needs to think more on what it's going to do about this."

Former WFLA-TV Tampa news director Forrest Carr wrote me a long e-mail criticizing my BMJ article of last week, in which I reported my analysis of 3 top TV stations' performance in covering (or not covering) health care reform or health policy issues in the 2004 election year.

It was an exhaustive analysis, in which I studied 326 hours of newscasts -- the stations' showcase late newscasts. But Carr wrote:

"Your conclusion that the local TV news media "don't want to cover" health policy stories based on a study of this one time period is not sound. WFLA-TV, for instance, does 5 hours of news each weekday. To make a broad conclusion about the station's overall journalistic efforts on any topic based on a study of that one unique 11 p.m. half-hour program is like studying the metro section of your morning newspaper to the exclusion of all else, then concluding on that basis that the newspaper doesn't cover national news. It just doesn't hold up. To claim that WFLA-TV covered "only three stories in ten months on Medicare, totaling less than 2.5 minutes" is flat wrong."

No one in TV news would dispute that their late newscasts are their showcases -- their money-makers. They want to put their best product on the air in those newscasts. Yet very little news about health policy or health care reform appeared in 10 months of these newscasts during an election year. The data don't lie, mislead or distort.

Carr also wrote: "...as long as we fund TV news the way we fund it now -- through advertising dollars awarded in proportion to the size of the audience attracted -- you're going to get what we've got, specifically, newscasts that balance public service against the business needs to grow ratings, with business needs usually taking priority. Even if you do manage to somehow force changes in the program to present more of the kind of content you and a thousand and one other special interest constituencies want and demand, unless you somehow manage to find a way to tie people to their chairs, you still can't make the public sit through it -- at least not in large numbers."

TV viewership has declined in most analyses. Maybe it would rise again if news departments -- and the corporations to whom they answer -- addressed vital citizen issues instead of some of the pablum they now put on the table.

I respect Forrest Carr as one of the good guys in TV news. He is smart and he cares. But it is the job of journalists to mirror and address the needs of the population. And health care reform is one of the biggest such needs. I don't represent any special interest constituency. But there are 40-million Americans without health insurance and millions others lost in a tsunami of confusion over Medicare and prescription drug testing/marketing/pricing issues. They deserve more serious journalism in the newscasts which TV stations hold up as their best.

TV stations don't own the airwaves. They've been granted a license to serve the audience. On this issue -- one of the most important facing the nation -- my analysis showed a failure to earn the license.

There's been too much hype about the antiviral drug Tamiflu as an answer to stopping an avian flu pandemic. U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt reminded Congress last week that Tamiflu has not yet been proven as a treatment for avian flu, adding, "Any sense that Tamiflu is synonymous with preparedness is wrong."

See my article in the BMJ this week about the shameful performance of three leading local television stations as they failed to cover health policy issues in any meaningful way in the 2004 election year –- on the local, state, or federal level.

I analyzed 10 months or 326 hours of late newscasts on award-winning stations in Seattle, Chicago and Tampa.

KIRO/Seattle had only three stories in ten months, totaling 79 seconds, on any aspect of the George W. Bush or John Kerry health proposals in the 2004 presidential campaign.

WMAQ/Chicago had nine stories, totaling less than four minutes, on presidential candidates’ health plans. WMAQ had almost twice that many stories (16) on low-carb diet stories, including commercial-like promotions for new low-carb products offered by Wendy’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks, and Jack Daniels.

WFLA/Tampa devoted only 84 seconds to Bush-Kerry health platforms in six stories. Serving the senior-heavy Florida Gulf Coast, WFLA managed only three stories in ten months on Medicare, totaling less than 2.5 minutes.

With 40-million-plus Americans uninsured, in 10 months these three award-winning stations reported only one story on the uninsured. It was about an uninsured man with melanoma who won a state lottery.

There are many in this country who now accuse the President of shifting the focus from bad news to better news. I submit that public officials are able to do that only to the extent that journalists let them. And these TV journalists let important health policy issues fall off the radar screen.