In the Era of Reality TV...
By Trent Loos

In the era of reality shows, I propose a “news reality” show. What if we actually put two people at a news desk and they presented information to the viewing public after it had been researched and verified for accuracy. Why would we do this instead of simply trying to beat the other stations to the punch on a “big” story. A perfect example happened just last week. Virtually every media outlet in the country reported a study that indicated the consumption of red and processed meats was associated with colorectal cancer. That is what today’s modern infomercial world reported anyway. So what would the “news reality” people have found if they had researched the source and studied the facts?

Before I go on, consider this. A recent analysis by Dr. Gary Schwitzer, University of Minnesota, found that television health news today is little more than commercials. Over 90% of TV stories are taken directly from a press releases and most are reported virtually unchanged and unresearched. In addition, a recent investigation by the International Food Information Council found the same problem among newspaper food and health writers. Fortunately for us, Steven Milloy falls into the 10% category of journalists that actually research the whole story rather than taking someone else’s spin on the issue.

Milloy is the first journalist that I know of to expose this red meat consumption study for the lack of creditability it actually has. He wrote a column that was posted on FoxNews with the following facts.

In 1982, 148,610 adults were questioned about there food consuming habits. The same people were questioned again in 1992 and monitored for health up until 2001. During that twenty-year span, 1667 cases of colorectal cancer were reported. The researchers actually reported no association between red meat consumption and overall colon cancer. But then they decided to break the study down based on the location of the cancer between the proximal colon, distal colon and the rectosigmoid and rectum. I suppose you could say if you look for a needle in a haystack long enough, you will find something that you could convince people could be a needle.

Of the original 148,610 people, the results that we heard proclaimed as gospel last week were from 79 people with distal cancer and 92 with rectal cancer. Now I am no scientist but I would be hard pressed to conclude that with a couple dozen people affected out of the original large group, it would be hard to claim a significant cause and effect.

Most of us don’t understand what is statistically significant or worthy of reporting, but here is what should be very obvious to everyone. In the year 1900, Americans lived an average of only 47.3 years. Yet only yesterday I heard about the death of a famous 85-year-old and they suggested that the “cause of death was not yet known”.

Today in the United States, the average life expectancy is 76.9 years (women 79.5 years) --- and despite our population aging as never before, we've been steadily getting healthier, too. Today, the main causes of death are from chronic illnesses associated with old age, but in the past 50 years even death rates from those have dropped significantly: heart disease is down 70%, strokes are down 80% and cancer deaths are down. When someone gets to be 85 years old, can’t they simply pass in their sleep and die of natural causes – like old age? Why does some disease have to claim each and every person that dies?

To say that the cancer study had to stretch to come up with it’s conclusions is an understatement but that didn’t stop every media outlet in the country from spreading the word. How many of those journalists actually read the full text of the study? Or did they choose to read the press release, probably formulated by the lead scientist, Dr. Rashmi Sinha, who several years ago claimed that eating overcooked meat caused cancer. Her stance on meat consumption is blatantly negative and her “research” is obviously slanted to make her results match her beliefs, whether the figures work in “real science” or not.

I urge you to get more information on this study and pass it on to every local media source that carried the story. Ask them to consider a corrected version, considering that the initial data was extensively manipulated to come up with the result that they all reported at 100% factual. We, as producers, are asked to be accountable for the products we deliver to consumers. So too should journalists be held accountable for reporting facts and not just stories that will draw the biggest audience.

 

 

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