Science journalism is having a moment. Data from Belga.press shows that in 2022, Flemish legacy news outlets published almost three times as many articles about research as five years earlier, in 2017. Even when accounting for the growing number of news articles overall, there appears to be more science news than ever. This trend seems to be staying even after the pandemic, since this year these media have already published more science news than in the peak year of 2021. How does all this research news find its way to the press? Here, I track back one article about a cancer study to its source to illustrate the dynamics of science news flows.
But first some context. In our research project about how science news travels to and circulates in Flanders, we’ve found that the road from lab to layperson via the press is often long and complex. Science news crosses multiple cultural, linguistic, and platform boundaries. This is intensified due to the growth of online news, which is produced quickly and tends to rely on indirect sources such as news agency copy or press releases. Furthermore, increasing market conglomeration allows news outlets to easily republish articles from sister outlets. Het Laatste Nieuws does this regularly with news from Algemeen Dagblad in the Netherlands, and De Morgen with articles from De Volkskrant.
Churnalism
Press releases in particular deserve special attention. While in some sectors, the press release is seen as an old-fashioned way of doing PR, these texts that mediate between the vastly different worlds of science and the media are still thriving in science communication. They offer a convenient filter for the whirlwind of new research that is published each day, as well as a lay translation of the academic jargon used in the original research, with the most newsworthy conclusions front and center. Moreover, their timing can be neatly aligned with the publication of a paper, providing that crucial ‘newness’ that is so important in journalism.
Originally, the purpose of press releases was to provide a starting point for journalists to do their own reporting. This is still how many specialized science reporters use them today. However, in many articles, especially in the case of online outlets or news written by generalist reporters, content from science press releases is copied verbatim, with little or no original reporting.[1] The risk is that any hype or other misrepresentations of the research will simply be copied – and research indicates that such misrepresentations are often indeed present in press releases.[2]
The phenomenon of recycling news content is sometimes called ‘churnalism’, a term that entered the public discourse with the publication of the book Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. Davies, an investigative journalist, reports on the strong influence of PR on the British media. Our digital society has made churnalism more widespread, given the pressures on news media to publish more content while also facing budget cuts.
Science journalism appears to be especially vulnerable to churnalism, and not just because of the widespread availability of press releases. In interviews we’ve conducted with non-specialist reporters in Flanders, who often base themselves on indirect sources, we’ve noticed that, in the absence of specialized knowledge, they put a lot of trust in the source of their materials, be it a university or a highly reputable outlet such as Reuters or the New York Times.
Along the way, news is selected (or not), translated, copied, edited, shortened, or expanded upon, and so on. And everyone who’s ever played the game telephone knows what can happen with a message when multiple intermediaries exist.
Back to the source
In the early days of our project, we stumbled on a Facebook post about a cancer trial that had cured all patients. Belgium’s largest and second-largest newspapers (Het Laatste Nieuws and Het Nieuwsblad, respectively) had shared the news, as well as Metro. The headline by Het Laatste Nieuws (hereafter HLN) read: ‘Unprecedented: experimental cancer drug shrinks tumors in each subject in small study’. The complementing caption on Facebook said: ‘“This is unprecedented. I think this is every oncologist’s dream”, reacts researcher Andrea Cercek. 👏❤️’ (these translations and the ones following are my own). It had been widely shared and commented upon.
From reading this headline, you might conclude that finally, we’ve got a cure for cancer. However, tracing back the source of this story paints a different story, revealing a lot about the dynamics of science news circulation. Let’s investigate.
Since we started with HLN, we’ll continue with their article, but this wasn’t the only outlet that covered it—more on that later.
The article credits a few sources, including an news story by the American site Science Alert titled “Every Single Patient in This Small Experimental Drug Trial Saw Their Cancer Disappear”. HLN translated this quite literally, but also sensationalized the already spectacular-sounding title by adding the word ‘breakthrough’. HLN’s article itself contains a quote originally published in the New York Times that we also find in Science Alert. This implies that HLN recycled a recycled quote. In fact, the entire article seems heavily based on the one in Science Alert. We spotted a few traces of verbatim translations, with the rest of the text extensively paraphrased. The HLN reporter did not add new information.
Unfortunately, we can’t tell for sure where Science Alert got their news from. The platform was founded as an ‘aggregator site’, which typically republishes press releases with minimal editing, though it is not clear to what extent churnalism is part of their daily practice today. In any case, the quotes are credited to the New York Times (NYT), so let’s head there for our next analysis.
The NYT’s headline reads: ‘A Cancer Trial’s Unexpected Result: Remission in Every Patient’, a very similar message to HLN and Science Alert . From these headlines, we conclude that a cancer drug has cured all patients who received it. But in the first paragraph of each of the articles, we see that the news only concerns rectal cancer. Quite an important difference, I would say.
Digging deeper into the communication chain, we find a press release issued by the researchers’ institute in parallel with a presentation at an academic conference and the publication of a research paper in The New England Journal of Medicine. The title of the press release: ‘100% Complete Response Rate in MMRd Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer Seen in Pivotal ‘Immunoablative’ Neoadjuvant Immunotherapy Clinical Trial’. The difference in style is striking, and fairly atypical for a text that targets journalists. There appears to be more detail, but it is quite unintelligible for a layperson. The rest of the press release shows that the institute clearly spent time and money on orchestrating a PR campaign for this study. There are images and a video of the study participants, seemingly selected to perfectly represent a diverse society. With big smiles, they posed alongside the leading researchers wearing lab coats, one of them giving the thumbs up. It comes across as very hopeful, heart-warming, and… American.
The press release also notes that the therapy was only tested in patients with a specific type of rectal cancer (mismatch-repair deficient or MMRd rectal cancer). It includes written quotes by two lead researchers and the participants themselves share their experience in the video. The first word of the press release is ‘breakthrough’.
Finally, let’s have a look at the study itself. The paper is titled ‘PD-1 Blockade in Mismatch Repair–Deficient, Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer’. Even if you try to understand each of those words, you don’t get any wiser about what the study entails (nor its results). We do learn some new information that helps us gauge its relevance. First, the paper notes that only five to ten percent of rectal cancers are MMRd. Rectal cancer itself only accounts for ten percent of all cancers worldwide, according to data by the World Health Organization, so less than one percent of all cancer patients. Moreover, while the press release and news reports mentioned that it concerned a small study, the paper explicitly mentions it was a phase II clinical trial. Such trials need to be repeated multiple times and at a much larger scale before we can know for sure how well a treatment works and for whom. Adding to that, the trial appears to be ongoing, and the results only report the twelve patients (out of a total of sixteen) who had been involved in the study for at least six months (the others joined the study at a later stage).
All in all, it seems that the results are indeed impressive, but only for a tiny subset of cancer sufferers, and it is too early to get excited. This brings forward the question of whether the study should have received media attention at all. Since we initially only spotted the news in so-called popular media outlets, we wondered how quality media in Flanders had covered it. Well… they didn’t. The science desks of De Standaard and VRT NWS told us that while they had indeed seen the news, they thought the study was too niche and too preliminary to report on.
There are many reasons why researchers and their institutions or publishers would want to seek media attention: informing people about publicly funded research or sharing relevant new findings, but also increasing their citation count and raising their chances of getting funded. Of course, we don’t know which motives were at play in this particular case. But this example does reveal how long the chain of events between scientific discovery and media coverage in Flanders can be, and how many pitfalls there are on the way. Is it okay to imply that a study with dramatic results may be relevant for a larger audience than it actually is? When can you responsibly use a term such as ‘breakthrough’? To what extent should reporters write with patient sensitivities in mind? And should the media refrain from covering phase II clinical trials altogether?
In any case, it is clear from the feedback we received that specialized science writers interpret research news very differently than generalist reporters, who often have to rely on the authority of academic institutions and reputable media outlets. Clear criteria for responsible science coverage, at each step of the communication chain, seem necessary to ensure that scientific findings are reported accurately and transparently.
References
[1] See for example: Heyl, Joubert & Guenther (2020) Churnalism and Hype in Science Communication: Comparing University Press Releases and Journalistic Articles in South Africa, Communicatio, 46:2, 126-145., or Schäfer (2020) Growing Influence of University PR on Science News Coverage? A Longitudinal Automated Content Analysis of University Media Releases and Newspaper Coverage in Switzerland, 2003‒2017. International Journal of Communication, 14, 3143-3164.
[2] Sumner et al. (2016). Exaggerations and caveats in press releases and health-related science news. PLoS ONE, 11(12), 1-15.
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