Analysis of health stories in daily newspapers in the UK

Abstract

Objectives: To assess what makes a good piece of medical reporting in newspapers, to quantify what is being reported on in the major British newspapers, to identify the sources of the news threads, and to assess how these are reported.

Study design: Development and validation of a tool to assess the quality of reporting of health-related articles, and assessment of the quality of these articles in British newspapers.

Methods: Eight national daily newspapers from the UK were reviewed for 20 days over a 2-month period. All articles reporting newly emerging research pertaining to health in humans were included and reviewed independently by two raters. A descriptive analysis was performed. Subsequently, a quality assessment tool for use by a non-expert was developed and validated to objectively assess the quality of a newspaper article on a health-related topic.

Results: The quality assessment tool was found to have good internal consistency and inter-rater reliability. The Daily Mail published almost twice as many articles as its nearest rival, The Daily Express, and over eight times as many articles as The Guardian. Articles in The Times were, on average, more than twice as long as those in The Sun and The Daily Telegraph. The highest quality articles were in The Times and The Independent, with the lowest quality articles in The Sun. The quality scores of anonymous articles were significantly lower than those attributed to named journalists.

Conclusions: There are significant differences in the quality of reporting within and between major daily UK newspapers, with anonymous articles being the poorest quality, and widespread reliance on press releases from the major UK scientific journals.

Fig. 1

Comparison of the top five ICD-10 categories by mortality (percentage of all deaths) and morbidity (percentage of total prevalence) with newspaper coverage (percentage of total column inches) in the UK. Based on data from the office of national statistics, quality outcomes framework (QOF) and the health survey for England 2001.

Fig. 2

Total number of times each journal was cited in the 161 newspaper articles. The 14 most-cited journals out of 42 are displayed.

Fig. 3

Boxplot showing the mean and range of scores, derived from the novel scoring instrument, for each newspaper.