Reflections on health media and Consumer Reports at the Spotlight Health 2015

I attended Aspen Ideas Festival Spotlight Health from Thursday 25 June – Sunday 28 June. It was educational, pleasant, and insightful for me.

The most striking characteristic of this conference to me was the frequent talk of entrepreneurship and market forces. In most of the conferences which I attend there is a lot of community participation, whereas the attendee roster for this conference was mostly innovators and policymakers. I was able to attend because Consumer Reports was a sponsor of the conference. I asked how we had the money for this, because sponsorship is expensive. Consumer Reports got a deal because it is a nonprofit organization with a nice reputation and expertise closely related to many of the talks of this year’s programming.

In the talks, speakers frequently referred to addressing social determinants of disease as a way to improve health. Providing health care to people who need treatment is expensive and complicated, but if certain social issues can be addressed, then fewer people will need health care and when they get it, they can have better outcomes. Some social determinants of a person’s health include poverty status, having access to whatever health information is necessary to make health decisions, and having whatever is necessary to encourage a person to eat a healthy diet and exercise. Consumer Reports frequently talks about these things and tries to empower layman consumers to recognize when they can make health care decisions with their doctors, and I was pleased to hear in several talks the speakers spoke the ideas which Consumer Reports promotes. Sometimes inside Consumer Reports I wonder how aligned we are with popular thought in the consumer, health care, government, and nonprofit sectors. It made me feel proud to come to this event where everyone was representing the ideas of whatever organization was backing them, and they were saying the things that Consumer Reports has been saying. I read as much as I can in health policy and education, and I know that Consumer Reports routinely adopts advocacy positions before they are popular. I like getting the feedback that Consumer Reports’ campaigns are at the start of social trends.

There was a panel called “Getting it Right: Health in the Media”. Participants in the panel were some popular health care journalists from respectable organizations. Everyone on the panel does terrific work in their media channels and ought to be praised. What surprised me is how fragile their legitimacy is. I supposed that the best health care journalists are well backed with resources for fact checking and access to expert views. Definitely everyone on the panel had access to a lot of resources, but I was struck to learn that they did not have as much support as I imagined. I imagined that leading health care writers did perfect work, and now that I think about it, of course they cannot. They have deadlines, they have big social networks but still not perfect connections to everyone, they have to prioritize their energy, and they rely a lot on their own journalistic instincts as all journalists do. Since moving to New York and meeting so many people in media I have gained a new respect for journalism as a profession, because journalists really can acquire the skill to do something magic to write about the heart of an issue even if they themselves are much less knowledgeable about the issue as the people engaged in it. These journalists are not doctors, but they interview doctors and somehow report the health issues in a better way than doctors could. Still – they talked about how sometimes they get their information from chance encounters or sometimes they get things wrong because it is the nature of journalists to consume information around them and report it as best they can, even if it is not perfect. This made me think about the health journalism process at Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports is in a privileged place in its reporting because I know now that we have much better access to fact checking, expert opinions, and the time to get things right before making our reports. Some of the people on this panel were backed by very big companies or organizations – I did not until now realize that Consumer Reports’ prioritization of accuracy is unusual and not the norm. It also makes me wonder if Consumer Reports ought to be spending extra resources for extra accuracy – to give example numbers, should we pay for expensive 98% accuracy when other media outlets seem to have happy audiences for their 80-90% accurate content which is less expensive. Do we really get that much extra accuracy from all the extra fact checking that we do, or is a good try from a health journalist enough to replace on-hand advice from actual physicians?

In any case, I was surprised to hear that many health journalists are not better supported with resources, and that Consumer Reports is actually very well equipped. Being at Consumer Reports and not knowing anything else, I had not realized how different we were. I could be mistaken about the actual difference in accuracy, but I think I am not, because they reported a difference in quality control. I will have to think about what they said.