Health and science news

As with other kinds of news, newsworthiness is the essential element of health and science coverage. Along with the factors that generally influence newsworthiness, Boyce Rensberger, in A Field Guide for Science Writers, identifies four factors specific to science stories:

• Fascination value: “People love to be fascinated, to learn something, and think, ‘That’s amazing, I didn’t know that.’” This is particularly true of stories that might remind audiences of a childhood enthusiasm, or that parents might share with their children – dinosaurs, for example, are newsworthy by default.
• Size of the natural audience: The number of people to whom the story will be directly relevant. For example, a discovery relating to a rare disease is less newsworthy than one about a more common disease.
• Importance: The likely impact of the story on the audience’s lives.
• Reliability of the results: Science journalists generally rely on the peer review in science to determine whether or not a finding is reliable, and responsible ones do not platform fringe views.[1]

These factors, of course, may sometimes be in conflict with one another. Findings relating to nutrition, which is one of the fields with the lowest standards of reliability, are often reported on because they’re seen as relevant and important to many people (particularly if they’re counter-intuitive).

As a result, new findings or those that challenge the scientific consensus are more likely to be covered than those that reinforce the consensus or produce null results (for instance, results that don’t show a health impact of a particular substance)[2] – even though these are just as important in science - and because poorer quality research is "more likely to yield surprising and newsworthy results.” This tendency is compounded by the fact that statistically null results are generally "not newsworthy."[3]

This can also produce an impression that there’s less of a consensus on some issues than there actually is, because findings that challenge the consensus on a politically charged issue, such as climate change, are generally more newsworthy than those that support it.[4]

Perhaps because of these factors, research has found that newspapers are actually more likely to cover medical research with fewer citations,[5] as well as studies with male authors[6] and ones for which a press release had been issued.[7]

[1] Rensberger, B. (1997). Covering science for newspapers. A field guide for science writers, 7-16.

[2] Zhang, Y., Willis, E., Paul, M. J., Elhadad, N., & Wallace, B. C. (2016). Characterizing the (perceived) newsworthiness of health science articles: A data-driven approach. JMIR medical informatics, 4(3), e5353.

[3] Dempster, G., Sutherland, G., & Keogh, L. (2022). Scientific research in news media: a case study of misrepresentation, sensationalism and harmful recommendations. Journal of Science Communication, 21(1), A06.

[4] Petersen, A. M., Vincent, E. M., & Westerling, A. L. (2019). Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians. Nature communications, 10(1), 3502.

[5] O'Connor, E. M., Nason, G. J., O'Kelly, F., Manecksha, R. P., & Loeb, S. (2017). Newsworthiness vs scientific impact: are the most highly cited urology papers the most widely disseminated in the media?. BJU international, 120(3), 441-454.

[6] Amberg, A., & Saunders, D. N. (2020). Cancer in the news: Bias and quality in media reporting of cancer research. PLoS One, 15(11), e0242133.

[7] Haneef, R., Ravaud, P., Baron, G., Ghosn, L., & Boutron, I. (2017). Factors associated with online media attention to research: a cohort study of articles evaluating cancer treatments. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 2, 1-8.