A Case Study in How a Story Can Set Off a Frenzy
Increasingly in recent years, news organizations have published or broadcast stories not because editors and television news directors thought they were inherently newsworthy but because other news organizations have reported them and they are “out there,” generating buzz, difficult to ignore. That happened time and again during the saturation coverage of President Clinton’s relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky, but it also happens on stories of far greater consequence than those involving oral sex in the Oval Office.
On May 4, 1998, the New York Times triggered a feeding frenzy with a story about one of the most consequential of all subjects--a possible cure for cancer.
The story, written by medical reporter Gina Kolata, told of the discovery by a cancer researcher at Children’s Hospital in Boston of two new drugs, angiostatin and endostatin, that can “eradicate any type of cancer . . . in mice,” through a process known as angiogenesis--essentially cutting off the blood supply that tumors need to develop. The second paragraph of the story said: “Some cancer researchers say the drugs are the most exciting treatment that they have ever seen.”
Earlier Research
The story was not new. The research being done by Dr. Judah Folkman, the discoverer of angiostatin and endostatin, had been written about in a variety of publications dating back to September 1996. Another longtime New York Times science reporter, Nicholas Wade, had written about Folkman’s work twice in late 1997. But neither of Wade’s stories had been published on Page 1. Kolata’s story was not only on Page 1 but in the upper left-hand corner of Page 1 in the Sunday paper, the most widely read paper of the week. That prominent play in the nation’s most influential daily newspaper--and a quote relatively high in the story from a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Dr. James D. Watson, that “Judah is going to cure cancer in two years”--guaranteed that Kolata’s story would have a major impact.
No one--not even Kolata--realized just how great that impact would be.
Every cancer center in the country was flooded with telephone calls from cancer patients and their families and friends, all desperate to get “the drugs we read about in the New York Times”--drugs that had not yet been tested on a single human. The stock price for Entremed, the biotechnology firm that financed the research that produced the drugs, skyrocketed from $12.06 to $85 a share in less than a day.
“I spent the next five days doing media interviews,’ says Dr. Lee Rosen, director of the Cancer Therapy Development Program at UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center, where angiogenesis research had already been underway for nine months with human subjects. “My day was scheduled every 15 minutes with Argentine television and Korean radio and the ‘CBS Evening News’ and . . . “
The story led all three major TV networks that Sunday night. It made Page 1 of virtually every major paper in the country. It was a cover story in Time and Newsweek.
Not everyone did the story willingly.
“We had a huge fight that went on for an hour at the morning meeting because I just didn’t think we should be doing it,” says Philip Elmer-Dewitt, the assistant managing editor in charge of science, medicine and technology coverage at Time. But the magazine’s top editors insisted on a cover story. Why? The same reason that Newsweek did it. As Geoff Cowley, a Newsweek medical writer, put it, “Within hours of that [New York Times] story hitting the newsstands, it created such a furor that it was all anyone was talking about. . . . It creates an obligation for us to weigh in with whatever perspective we can bring to it.”
Elmer-Dewitt and Cowley insist their magazines’ coverage was ultimately not so much about Folkman’s discoveries but about the buzz generated by Kolata’s stories--”the story of this phenomenon, how an obscure piece of laboratory research suddenly became the craze of the day,” in Cowley’s words. To a considerable extent, that’s true. Although Time’s cover had the word “CANCER” with a big X through it, for example, the words beneath that said, “How to Tell the Hype From the Hope.”
Ironically, Kolata says she too was not writing about Folkman’s research, which she knew had been previously reported, but about the excitement it had engendered in the scientific community, as opposed to the media. The scientists she interviewed were “awe-struck” by Folkman’s work, she says. “I had people say they had never seen anything like it,” and she wanted to convey that sense of optimism and astonishment.
The caveats in Kolata’s story were clear and prominent. The headline on her story read “A Cautious Awe Greets Drugs That Eradicate Tumors in Mice.” Her third sentence noted that “the history of cancer treatments is full of high expectations followed by dashed hopes when drugs with remarkable effects in animals are tested in people.” Still, there was much more awe than caution in the story, and most of its 2,200 words were devoted to Folkman’s work.
As a result, much of the coverage of Kolata’s story was harshly critical of her--and that criticism mounted when it was learned that her agent had sent to New York publishers a book proposal based on her story. The Los Angeles Times published a Page 1 story on Kolata’s story, including a quote from one unnamed “publishing official,” who said, “It could be that [Kolata] knew she was breaking the story on Sunday and she prepared the proposal in advance of that.” This source was quoted as saying that some might be troubled by such an action “in this day of public wailing over media ethics.”
Kolata, still angry about this speculative quote from an unnamed source, says she didn’t write her proposal until after her agent saw her story in the paper and suggested she do so. Josh Getlin, The Times reporter who worked on that part of the story, says he tried repeatedly to reach Kolata at the time, but she didn’t return his phone calls. In any event, when Kolata’s editors told her that the paper’s policy prohibited reporters from writing books about subjects they are actively covering, she withdrew her proposal.
Other problems did not go away quite so easily. Both Watson and one of the “excited” scientists, Dr. Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute, said Kolata had misquoted them.
Kolata insisted her quotes were accurate, and many experienced reporters, knowing that Watson is “kind of a verbal loose cannon,” in the words of Dr. Timothy Johnson of ABC News, suspected that he probably had said Folkman would “cure cancer in two years.”
Indeed, that’s part of what troubled other journalists--that Watson is given to grandiose statements, often on narrow subjects like this one that are beyond his area of expertise.
“Sometimes researchers get carried away, and you have to be there to . . . put the story into some kind of balance,” says Ron Kotulak, a medical reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Reporters should resist the temptation to use a quote that’s “outlandish . . . misleading because you’re making some kind of promise that even in a crystal ball would be hard to find.”
Kolata, who says she was shocked by the negative reaction her story engendered, insists: “It’s not my job to say this [quote] is too strong.”
Others disagree. Indeed, the major criticism of Kolata’s story and especially of the Watson quote and her editors’ decision to play the story so prominently was that it gave false hope to countless cancer patients.
“This set off a storm of very difficult emotional roller coasters,” Klausner says, one that was “very painful to watch in people who were desperate, dying of cancers, who had loved ones dying of cancers, who thought there was this cure that was being withheld.”
‘Dangerous Judgments’
Kolata says her story was accurate and responsible, with all the proper caveats in place; it would be arrogant and patronizing, she says, for reporters not to write certain stories because they might give readers false hope. “It’s not for us to say what people are entitled to know.”
Cornelia Dean, the New York Times science editor, supports Kolata. “It would be very dangerous,” she says, “if we started making news judgments according to what we think the emotional capacity of our readers is.”
But Christine Gorman of Time magazine echoes many of her colleagues when she says medical writing is “different from traditional journalism . . . where you sort of go where the truth tells you to go and whatever happens, happens. You can raise people’s hopes even in writing an entirely accurate story, and . . . there is an element of cruelty in that.”
Last month, when Kolata again wrote about a new cancer drug--an aspirin-like compound known as a “selective cox-2 inhibitor”--she characterized it only as a promising candidate to prevent the disease. The story had no quotes predicting a cure for cancer within two years. The New York Times published it in the Science section on Tuesday, not Page 1 on Sunday. This time, there was no media feeding frenzy.
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Cancer Cure?
A story on Page 1 on the New York Times by Gina Kolata, quoted a prominent scientist as saying one researcher was going to “cure cancer in two years” and triggered a frenzy among cancer patients, their loved ones and the media.
