BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Health and science reporter Virginia Hughes takes the problems confronting health coverage personally. Take earlier this month, when she came across a news study about resveratrol, you know, that chemical in red wine that over the years has been both heralded as heart healing and dismissed as bogus? So she went back and reviewed earlier headlines about resveratrol in the New York Times. The first, August, 2003:  “Life-Extending Chemical is Found in Certain Red Wines.” But in the years since, the headlines have ranged from charges of fraud to new optimism, to inconclusive studies, to more skepticism and then more optimism. This head-spinning trajectory is the norm in such stories because science is a process. So what’s even the most conscientious health reporter to do? Hughes posted about the saga of resveratrol on her blog, Only Human, hosted by National Geographic Magazine, and she sparked a big debate among health journalists themselves about the perils of reporting the latest health news.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Science is iterative and often incremental, and the news is the news. And so, science journalism is molded into a heffalump of both, where every new study suddenly becomes a news peg. Every week we get the embargoed email from Nature with all the studies that are going to be out the following week, and the same for Science, and the same for the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We’re on this timeline, and it's kind of a forced arbitrary one because each paper has been in the works for months, if not years. So it’s, it's actually totally arbitrary, calling it news.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Now, unlike a lot of other beats, when you read an article about health it’s often personally relevant. So tell me, what are people looking for from health journalists?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Yeah, it’s really interesting for me because I often cover science, as well as health. I think people come to, say, a neuroscience story with a lot more open curiosity, I guess. They come to a health story looking for practical advice about how they can be healthier or live longer. They really want the bottom line. And I do too, as a consumer.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But to be absolutely true to the nature of science, you can't in your reporting imply a better way to behave, right?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Yeah. I mean, you're right, we shouldn't be. But, on the other hand, it's implicit, if you're covering something, the reason is because you think your reader is gonna glean something from it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Have you developed any behavior or attitude towards resveratrol, the drinking of red wine?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  I drink a lot of red wine. It has nothing to do with resveratrol, though.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS] And it never crosses your mind.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  No, it doesn't. But where I do get up is the dietary stuff of carbs or no carbs, or fat or no fat. And they constantly get overturned and debunked, and I really have gotten really cynical about dietary science, of just, screw this, I’m not listening to anything that you guys say. I’m just gonna eat in moderation and do what I want, you know? [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Sometimes the stakes are fairly small, but sometimes, as you've noted, they can be very high, like this confusion over cancer screening.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Yeah, absolutely. And especially something like cancer screening, the experts don't agree, so journalists are covering an active debate among scientists. And the good journalist will be honest and transparent about that debate and about the pros and cons. The bad ones or the time-strapped ones will present advice, you know, cloaked in a scientific brand and then leave it at that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Do you have a particularly sticky wicket of a study that you wrestled with for a while?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  I have a story about a post that I have come to regret a little bit. A couple of months ago, I covered a story about weed. There’s a rodent study showing that the rodents who were exposed to very high levels of THC, their children ended up having some kind of cognitive issue, I think. I mean, it was kind of basic biology, and there was nothing wrong with the study. And I fully reported it. I sought out second opinions. It’s totally legitimate funding. But my headline was, “Weed:  A Gateway Drug across Generations?” And the picture I used was a dude with like smoke surrounding him. And the comments were insane, I mean, hundreds of comments, and they were all really angry with me because the context that I had kind of missed, I think, partly because of my age and partly because I was just ignorant of it, is that the negative effects of weed have kind of been debunked over the last 30 years. I think I probably shouldn’t have covered it, or I could have been much more careful about it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You asked your readers within the health science journalism community to talk about what could be done to better cover health, and you came up with a bunch of solutions, right?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Yeah. One of them is explanatory journalism. The idea is that we don't necessarily need to follow the straight news pyramid, where the new stuff’s at the top and then there's a paragraph of background and then the implications are at the bottom, that you could actually have links and allow the reader to explore at their own interest level. Another was to report on a batch of studies at once, so instead of reporting on the latest resveratrol study, maybe take a look back and look at the previous ten studies or –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Do that with every new study?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  That’s hard. That takes a lot of work, and especially for blogs, you're not paid as much as you are for straight news reporting. Another was what if you told the story of how the science is done, you focused more on the methods and the design, rather than the results and the bottom lines? Those stories can be really fun. I think they’re just not as well received. People don't necessarily want to read that, as much they want to read, what should I do about drinking wine?

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  It sounds like what you're saying, in order to do the best possible job reporting on health science, you have to deny the reader what they most want.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  I don’t like the idea of denying readers. I’m supposed to be a slave to my readers, right? Maybe it’s about lowering their expectation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  How do you do that?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  By inserting debate and nuance and doubt. I hate stories that treat science as some holy seer that has the answers to everything, ‘cause it’s absolutely not, and being wrong is sort of built into the process of science.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You wrote in your blog post, “The science of health is so, so confusing, I almost wonder if it would be better for journalists to stop writing about health altogether.”

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Almost!

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

Ninety-some percent of all biomedical research in this country is funded by the public, and the public deserves to know what they're paying for. I just think we need to be a little bit more selective about what we cover and more honest and transparent with readers about what those studies are showing.

I think now I'm coming around. The only reason I would ever cover a study that I thought was subpar is if it's getting a crazy amount of attention on mainstream outlets, and I felt like I needed to counter that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Well, Virginia, thank you for fighting the good fight.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  [LAUGHS] Thanks for having me, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Virginia Hughes is a science journalist in New York. Her blog titled, Only Human, is hosted by National Geographic Magazine.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Health and science reporter Virginia Hughes takes the problems confronting health coverage personally. Take earlier this month, when she came across a news study about resveratrol, you know, that chemical in red wine that over the years has been both heralded as heart healing and dismissed as bogus? So she went back and reviewed earlier headlines about resveratrol in the New York Times. The first, August, 2003:  “Life-Extending Chemical is Found in Certain Red Wines.” But in the years since, the headlines have ranged from charges of fraud to new optimism, to inconclusive studies, to more skepticism and then more optimism. This head-spinning trajectory is the norm in such stories because science is a process. So what’s even the most conscientious health reporter to do? Hughes posted about the saga of resveratrol on her blog, Only Human, hosted by National Geographic Magazine, and she sparked a big debate among health journalists themselves about the perils of reporting the latest health news.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Science is iterative and often incremental, and the news is the news. And so, science journalism is molded into a heffalump of both, where every new study suddenly becomes a news peg. Every week we get the embargoed email from Nature with all the studies that are going to be out the following week, and the same for Science, and the same for the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We’re on this timeline, and it's kind of a forced arbitrary one because each paper has been in the works for months, if not years. So it’s, it's actually totally arbitrary, calling it news.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Now, unlike a lot of other beats, when you read an article about health it’s often personally relevant. So tell me, what are people looking for from health journalists?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Yeah, it’s really interesting for me because I often cover science, as well as health. I think people come to, say, a neuroscience story with a lot more open curiosity, I guess. They come to a health story looking for practical advice about how they can be healthier or live longer. They really want the bottom line. And I do too, as a consumer.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But to be absolutely true to the nature of science, you can't in your reporting imply a better way to behave, right?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Yeah. I mean, you're right, we shouldn't be. But, on the other hand, it's implicit, if you're covering something, the reason is because you think your reader is gonna glean something from it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Have you developed any behavior or attitude towards resveratrol, the drinking of red wine?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  I drink a lot of red wine. It has nothing to do with resveratrol, though.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS] And it never crosses your mind.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  No, it doesn't. But where I do get up is the dietary stuff of carbs or no carbs, or fat or no fat. And they constantly get overturned and debunked, and I really have gotten really cynical about dietary science, of just, screw this, I’m not listening to anything that you guys say. I’m just gonna eat in moderation and do what I want, you know? [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Sometimes the stakes are fairly small, but sometimes, as you've noted, they can be very high, like this confusion over cancer screening.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Yeah, absolutely. And especially something like cancer screening, the experts don't agree, so journalists are covering an active debate among scientists. And the good journalist will be honest and transparent about that debate and about the pros and cons. The bad ones or the time-strapped ones will present advice, you know, cloaked in a scientific brand and then leave it at that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Do you have a particularly sticky wicket of a study that you wrestled with for a while?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  I have a story about a post that I have come to regret a little bit. A couple of months ago, I covered a story about weed. There’s a rodent study showing that the rodents who were exposed to very high levels of THC, their children ended up having some kind of cognitive issue, I think. I mean, it was kind of basic biology, and there was nothing wrong with the study. And I fully reported it. I sought out second opinions. It’s totally legitimate funding. But my headline was, “Weed:  A Gateway Drug across Generations?” And the picture I used was a dude with like smoke surrounding him. And the comments were insane, I mean, hundreds of comments, and they were all really angry with me because the context that I had kind of missed, I think, partly because of my age and partly because I was just ignorant of it, is that the negative effects of weed have kind of been debunked over the last 30 years. I think I probably shouldn’t have covered it, or I could have been much more careful about it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You asked your readers within the health science journalism community to talk about what could be done to better cover health, and you came up with a bunch of solutions, right?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Yeah. One of them is explanatory journalism. The idea is that we don't necessarily need to follow the straight news pyramid, where the new stuff’s at the top and then there's a paragraph of background and then the implications are at the bottom, that you could actually have links and allow the reader to explore at their own interest level. Another was to report on a batch of studies at once, so instead of reporting on the latest resveratrol study, maybe take a look back and look at the previous ten studies or –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Do that with every new study?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  That’s hard. That takes a lot of work, and especially for blogs, you're not paid as much as you are for straight news reporting. Another was what if you told the story of how the science is done, you focused more on the methods and the design, rather than the results and the bottom lines? Those stories can be really fun. I think they’re just not as well received. People don't necessarily want to read that, as much they want to read, what should I do about drinking wine?

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  It sounds like what you're saying, in order to do the best possible job reporting on health science, you have to deny the reader what they most want.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  I don’t like the idea of denying readers. I’m supposed to be a slave to my readers, right? Maybe it’s about lowering their expectation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  How do you do that?

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  By inserting debate and nuance and doubt. I hate stories that treat science as some holy seer that has the answers to everything, ‘cause it’s absolutely not, and being wrong is sort of built into the process of science.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You wrote in your blog post, “The science of health is so, so confusing, I almost wonder if it would be better for journalists to stop writing about health altogether.”

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  Almost!

  [BROOKE LAUGHS]

Ninety-some percent of all biomedical research in this country is funded by the public, and the public deserves to know what they're paying for. I just think we need to be a little bit more selective about what we cover and more honest and transparent with readers about what those studies are showing.

I think now I'm coming around. The only reason I would ever cover a study that I thought was subpar is if it's getting a crazy amount of attention on mainstream outlets, and I felt like I needed to counter that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Well, Virginia, thank you for fighting the good fight.

VIRGINIA HUGHES:  [LAUGHS] Thanks for having me, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Virginia Hughes is a science journalist in New York. Her blog titled, Only Human, is hosted by National Geographic Magazine.