At a conference yesterday, Scott Hensley of the Wall Street Journal Health blog showed off a story I had missed. Since it's the last day of March and basketball's Final Four is now set, the time is just right to look at it. See the Journal's “Our March Madness: The Drug Company CEO Bracket�.

They explain:

Restless shareholders, listless labs and a tidal wave of generic competition confront the top executives at drug makers around the globe. Big Biotech has plenty of problems of its own. Did we mention pushback on prices?

So we wonder who among the leaders of the current executive pack will win the test of endurance to remain the last CEO standing? Take a look at our second annual bracket by clicking on the image at the right. Feel free to start your own office pool.

The posting is fun. It's interactive. You can vote on the poll. And the user comments are worth reading. One wrote: "A more relevant question is - which CEO has the most integrity?"

The Association of Health Care Journalists is celebrating its 10th birthday. AHCJ has become a leader in quality improvement in health journalism - and a leader in the entire journalism industry.

That effort - and many others - like our University of Minnesota health journalism MA program - are striving to improve the flow of meaningful health and medical news information to the public.

Lord knows we need it.

Reviews of network TV health news stories on HealthNewsReview.org so far in March would suggest it’s more like Halloween season than Easter. The stories have been so bad, it’s scary. Examples & excerpts:

Medical breakthrough? New procedure fights tumors
ABC's Good Morning America
March 18, 2008
Rating: 1 star

Excerpt of our summary: “This short story presents little in the way of useful information to the consumer. It does not adequately describe the availability of the treatment, the strength of the available evidence to support its use, or any harms of the procedure. The story does not quantify the benefits of the treatment nor does it adequately describe the advantages and disadvantages of the alternatives.

Furthermore, by using such terms as "breakthrough", "great success" and "promising", the story exaggerates what is and isn't known about the procedure and glosses over the fact that the studies have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.��?

Special candy fights cavities
ABC's Good Morning America
March 14, 2008
Rating: 1 star

Excerpt of our summary: “This was a 3-minute ad - not a piece of journalism. So much good can be done with 3 minutes of network TV time.

But this story failed to:

* discuss costs
* discuss evidence - of harms or benefits
* present any independent expert's opinion

It even featured the two co-anchors sucking lollipops at the very end. Wow.��?

Decoding your DNA
NBC Today show
March 14, 2008
Rating: 1 star

Excerpt of our summary: “This is one example where even a low "one- star" ratings score is deceptively high. This story was lacking in many significant ways… News? Or advertising? If the former, it failed badly. If the latter, it was a steal - free, long, and unchallenged on network TV. We don't like using harsh terms in our reviews. We try to be constructive. At times like this it feels impossible.��?

Breast Cancer Drug Good Later Than Thought
CBS The Early Show
March 11, 2008
Rating: 2 stars

Excerpt of our summary: “(The reporter did not) talk with oncologists who could put the study results in context. We are not told how results could alter clinical practice guidelines for women with early-stage breast cancer who have taken tamoxifen for 5 years. The cost of the drug is also not mentioned. Cost is an important consideration for women considering an additional multi-year therapy.��?

A man's eye-opening surgery
March 4, 2008
NBC Today Show
Rating: 0 stars

Excerpt of our summary: “Its use of a dramatic stunt--a surgery done in real time with interviews before and after the procedure--implies the surgery is fast, uncomplicated and complete in a single session. This is not an accurate portrayal of the full treatment.

It uses a single surgery--done on an employee of the same TV network by a surgeon with a commercial interest in selling the device and procedure--to explain the procedure.

Whether the employee paid for this service or whether he received it free or at a discount is not known. If the patient has not paid full price as an independent consumer, his comments should not be considered objective. If he did pay full price, the network should have avoided even the perception of a conflict of interest by finding someone else to profile.

By creating a dramatic demonstration of a medical procedure and implying its success--without context, independent comment or reporting of potential harms and research findings--this segment violates almost every important principle behind responsible medical reporting.��?

You can do a good job in covering health news on TV. These were not examples of that possibility.

I've blogged in the past about TV news operations accepting sponsored news deals with local medical centers. In these deals, oftentimes the news only includes perspectives from that sponsoring hospital.

Now, in the first instance I'm aware of, the trend has come to newspapers. The HometownAnnapolis.com website of The Capital newspaper yesterday announced:

Partnership should improve health coverage

Published March 16, 2008
By TOM MARQUARDT

In today's editions we are experimenting with a new concept that could alarm some readers: Anne Arundel Medical Center, or AAMC, has paid us to provide content for our Health & Fitness page once a month.

Newspapers don't normally sell access to news pages, and certainly we would not give away content privileges on any other news page. I'm sure County Executive John Leopold would love to have his staff write the stories for the front page, but that's not going to happen for any price.

But partnering with the hospital on the Health page seemed to make sense. We don't have a health reporter to write about medical issues and often use stories from syndicated services that quote doctors from other cities.

The local hospital is giving us stories about local physicians and programs it has to offer - in their words, without an effort to balance the copy with comments from other hospitals or from doctors who don't practice at AAMC.

The stories are written in newspaper style and the hospital staff is responsible for the page's design. To be open and transparent about the partnership, a disclaimer is clearly displayed at the top of the page.

I'm not entirely comfortable with the arrangement, purely for journalistic reasons. But in the end I think the reader benefits - and that's my goal.

Instead of generic stories originating from another city, the reader will have local news featuring people they recognize, doctors they use and services that are available to them. The hospital staff is getting to the stories we are not able to write because of other priorities.

Is the page more readable now? You tell me.

Wow. "Partnering" - or being paid by a hospital to provide their news? Actually, he calls it content, not news. Whew. Because we used to call that advertising.

Also a relief - "the stories are written in newspaper style and the hospital staff is responsible for the page's design." So they'll look professional! Just like, or maybe even better than, real news.

And who cares if we give readers only one side of a story? Maybe a side that is so incomplete it can hurt them? And so what if we don't disclose the financial conflicts of interest of the doctors who might appear in the stories written and designed by the hospital itself? And so what if there are other opinions or other approaches from other doctors on the other side of town that don't get covered?

The main thing is: "Is the page more readable now?"

If you survived the last TV ratings period and DIDN’T see a story about the horrible epidemic of bedbugs right in your town - maybe right in your own bed - then just stay tuned until the next sweeps period.

David Segal of the Washington Post was on NPR’s “On the Media��? program talking about the hyperbolic news coverage of the bedbug panic.

A physician who teaches evidence-based medicine, and who is also a freelance health journalist, has been reading my thoughts about journalists advocating screening tests in the absence of evidence.

She wrote me: "Here's one of the more annoying recent examples, one that I actually used in class to illustrate the issue of patients coming in and requesting specific tests based on what they read in the newspaper."

So I'm adding Parade Magazine to my list of offenders.

Don't let the special interest campaign catch you napping!

Dozens upon dozens of stories about Americans lacking sleep are popping up from news organizations all over the country this week, driven by another of the National Sleep Awareness Week campaigns of the National Sleep Foundation.

Few - if any - of these stories will tell you that it is industry special interests - sleeping pill makers, sleep labs, mattress makers - who are paying for this campaign. They do it every year. And news organizations fall into line like sheep and report the "new" findings every year.

Examples:

USA Today reports:

U.S. workers are silently suffering from a dramatic lack of sleep, costing companies billions of dollars in lost productivity, says a study out Monday.

Nearly three in 10 workers have become very sleepy, or even fallen asleep, at work in the past month, according to a first-ever study on sleep and the workplace by the non-profit National Sleep Foundation. The late-2007 survey was based on a random sample of 1,000 workers.

AP reports:

Hey you! Dozing at your desk! Wake up, go home and get more sleep! That could be the message from a survey released Monday by the National Sleep Foundation. The survey of 1,000 people found participants average six hours and 40 minutes of sleep a night on weeknights, even though they estimated they'd need roughly another 40 minutes of sleep to be at their best.

CNN, WebMD, UPI, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and many, many more news organizations are reporting the same stuff - handed to them by the industry-funded campaign.

Yawn.

Wake me when the next disease-mongering campaign comes around.