Video News Releases: Proceed With Caution   

The proliferation of press and video news releases from health and trade associations and the pharmaceutical industry can provide useful information, but it also warrants scrutiny. George Strait of ABC News cautions journalists to be "as questioning about these things as they would about any speech made by a politician. Let me see the data. Let me review the data."

Another key question that should be asked, he emphasizes, is who funded the research. Strait recalls one incident in which journalists were "snookered" by a study in a scholarly journal about the amazing results of a treatment for aging skin. It turned out to be wrong, and undisclosed was the fact that a manufacturer marketing the treatment also funded the university's study.

Brian McDonough, M.D., is medical correspondent for Fox television and KYW radio station in Philadelphia. He says he is particularly careful in evaluating the stream of press releases and video news releases (VNRs) that come in each day. Also president of the National Association of Physician Broadcasters, a Chicago-based group with a membership of about 200, McDonough says that reporters at local TV stations without solid health backgrounds can often be misled by overblown releases. "You need somebody there to be of quality control – to say 'Hey wait a minute, this hasn't been shown by studies or anything else to be true,' " says McDonough. He points to the hype over a new thigh cream that was said to reduce fat if used regularly. "It became a big thing. And there was one study of a small number of people. But it got picked up because it was kind of a trendy thing."

In general, the major networks avoid VNRs. They may take an occasional B-roll from the tapes, for example a shot of a new drug being produced in a factory or of a laboratory mouse being tested. But McDonough, for one, sends out his own crews and does original interviews.

For budget-strapped local TV stations, however, it is another matter. Daniel Maier, director of news and information at the American Medical Association in Chicago, says the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) transmits weekly VNRs, produced by its own crew and assembled in a news format, that focus on selected JAMA articles.

The releases are sent by satellite nationwide, and a signal embedded in the tape allows a monitoring service to measure the tape's use. Maier estimates that between 100 to 400 stations use all or part of the releases, depending on the nature of the story.

CNN's Dan Rutz, head of the network's health unit, says it may be "tempting for local stations on a tight budget to see a slickly packaged free piece they can slip into their fringe newscasts – their five o'clock or their noon show – and try to put a local spin on it. Or they will take it apart. The bigger cities will try to do that, and use it."

One negative aspect of this practice, he says, is that reporters may not review the entire range of story ideas, but rather are guided by the health-issue-of-the-week as promoted by VNRs, making for lazy reporting. At ABC, Strait is hopeful that the local stations fully identify the sources of the VNRs, but fears they sometimes do not. Another concern is that VNRs give control of the point of view, the editing and selection to the outside groups providing them. Strait calls for more "vigilance, given the exigencies of money and time."

Dr. Bob Arnot of CBS says that JAMA, by transmitting the VNRs to the smaller TV stations, at least provides a source of peer-reviewed material from the magazine, rather than questionable material generated from less reputable sources. But he too worries about the consequences of a flood of VNRs spilling onto the screen.

While it is extremely rare that CBS would ever use any VNR footage, he says, the real risk at local TV stations is that "the VNRs might go unedited into a local news broadcast. That certainly has happened."