And now, a word from our sponsor
TV health segments might look like news, but many are paid for by hospitals
By Steph Greegor, The Other Paper
January 7, 2008
Andrea Cambern might be the most trusted news anchor in Columbus. For 16 years, she has cultivated a relationship with Columbus viewers as part of the 10TV news team.
Cambern has been honored with six Emmy awards and named Female Anchor of the Year by the National Association of Television Journalists. This fall, she was inducted into the Ohio Radio and Television Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
So she's believable when she appears in reports reinforcing the notion that the Ohio State University Medical Center is a fine facility. What those clips don't mention is that Ohio State paid Channel 10 for them.
Cambern and NBC4 anchor Amy Basista have become public faces of the OSU Medical Center. Cambern appears in Channel 10's "Breakthroughs in Medicine," for which Ohio State pays the station almost $100,000 annually. Basista hosts Channel 4's Med Breaks, for which the station rakes in almost $150,000 a year.
Cambern said she isn't paid extra for doing the spots, and she does the research and writing herself, though Ohio State reviews the segments before they run.
OhioHealth also pays Channel 10 for quarterly health segments hosted by Cambern.
Cambern's health pieces are treated differently by 10TV than anchor Heather Pick's "Pediatric HealthSource" features, which are sponsored by Nationwide Children's Hospital, McDonald's and Nationwide Insurance.
While Pick's stories feature interviews with experts from Children's, the hospital's VP for marketing and PR, Donna Teach, said that is mostly because Children's is the "only game in town" when it comes to inpatient pediatric care.
And the Children's stories are different from the OSU spots in a key way. "We have zero control over what gets aired," Teach said. "It runs like any other news story."
Mount Carmel Health markets itself on ABC6 and Fox 28 through "Strides in Medicine," which features freelance reporter Susan Burton talking to that hospital system's experts.
The practice of featuring journalists in health reports paid for and approved by hospitals is widespread not just in Columbus but nationally. It's a development that has prompted an accomplished health journalist to speak out.
"I believe people think they are getting different points of view -- that this person has gone out and read the literature and investigated whether this procedure is good," said Trudy Lieberman, the director of health and medicine reporting in the graduate school of journalism at City University of New York. Earlier this year, Lieberman wrote "The Epidemic," an article on hospital marketing ads posing as newscasts, for the Columbia Journalism Review.
"All procedures have downsides as well as positive effects, and I think the public expects to be told that," she said.
Rick Rogala, VP and general manager of NBC4, rejected criticism of health segments -- "They're not ads, they're vignettes," he said -- that air on his station.
"We do health stories every single day, and we cover all sides, all things that are out there," Rogala said. "Not every story we do has every piece of information that it can. It's about the depth and breadth of coverage over time.
"It's really important that people like Trudy are out there to champion ethical health coverage," he continued. "The reality is, a television station that maintains editorial control I don't believe is doing anything ethically wrong."
Sue Jablonski, chief communications officer at the OSU Medical Center, knows that anchor-hosted ads are uniquely valuable because of the faith viewers have in the TV reporters.
Health-care marketing is "very personal," she said. "It's very confidential. So having that trust relationship is very important."
TV news personalities, she said, "are probably already trusted as somebody who will present the facts."
Lieberman argues that while the ad information may be factual, it isn't "the whole story." A particular concern of hers is paid TV segments on the benefits of procedures that are "high tech, high cost."
She cited bariatric surgery, also called weight-loss surgery, as one example: "There's a lot of controversy surrounding this procedure and that this may not be a good intervention for someone."
Viewers didn't hear much about that debate from NBC4's Basista when she did a "Med Breaks" segment called "Bariatric Surgery Offers Hope."
During the opening, Basista noted that OSU doctors want you to know this is a "serious surgery." After that, it was all smiles as an OSU doctor spoke highly of the hospital's services and a woman who had a successful bariatric operation at OSU said there's "hope" for overweight individuals.
The segment doesn't mention the cost of bariatric surgery: $10,000 to $40,000. Also missing is the mortality rate, which, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, ranges from less than 3 percent for young patients up to nearly 7 percent for those 65 years of age and older, at 90 days post-operation.
Channel 4's Rogala doesn't believe those omissions in a single piece are a problem.
"The same thing could be said if we did a story on the mortality rate of bariatric surgery and someone could say, 'Hey what about the good things?'" Rogala said. "You would hope the consumer would never take one nugget and make a decision based on one nugget."
The problem, Lieberman said, is that the line between marketing and news is blurred.
"I believe journalists should be on the journalism side of it, not the marketing side of it," she said. "And consumers should be aware of what they're seeing."
The question then becomes whether the spots are clearly identified as advertising, both over the air and on the web.
The Radio-Television News Directors Association's Guidelines for Balancing Business Pressures and Journalism Values says that "a news operation's online product should clearly separate commercial and editorial content and maintain the same high journalistic and ethical standards as the on-air product."
"RTNDA's position is pretty clear," said Brian Trauring, an RTNDA board member and former chairman of its ethics committee. "We're always in favor of full disclosure."
NBC4 is the only Columbus station that labels its paid health spot as advertising on its Web site. None of the stations label the spots as paid advertisements in the on-air versions, though they do introduce the spots by referencing the OSU Medical Center.
"The spots are clearly labeled and messaged as being from the Ohio State University Medical Center. This is done purposely to communicate to the viewer that the information is sponsored by OSU," said Jablonski. "Part of our goal with these spots is to reach the public with critical health-care information. The ultimate goal, of course, is to save lives, and the paid segments are an important tool in helping us do that."
Jablonski said she is "very comfortable" with anchors delivering the information in the ads because it's presented in an "educational manner."
Rogala described each of his station's vignettes as "a short-form program that delivers information."
"It says 'advertisement' because there is a sponsorship to it, because some people might want to go on the site and not see an ad. I'm not saying it's an ad; it's a sponsorship," he said.
No matter what you call it, Lieberman said it's misleading.
"They do it deliberately so you don't really know what you're watching," said Lieberman. "Is there a way to more clearly label these things? I don't know that there is. What is the news station gonna say? 'This is really a news story but it's brought to you by Ohio State University'? You won't get the really honest, forthright disclosure that you need."
One way to help viewers understand that they're seeing advertising, said Lieberman, would be to stop airing medical commercials featuring news personalities during newscasts. "But," she added, "that would lessen the value of it."
The treatment of the spots by all three Columbus news operations includes graphics associating them with the stations. Channel 10 includes the phrase "10TV News HD" under Andrea Cambern's name, while NBC4 places "NBC 4 Health Reporter" under Amy Basista's name. ABC6/Fox 28 runs a banner that prominently displays its station's logo on the left-hand side. The graphics also include the OSU Medical Center logo.
"It's really disguised public relations coming in the guise of a newscast," said Lieberman.
And that's fine with the hospitals, whose job is to get their message out, not ponder journalistic purity.
"Whether you like it or not, we are a business," said Jablonski at OSU. "You don't know what we don't tell you. We have to market our services."
For a year of that marketing, Ohio State pays 10TV $99,400 and NBC4 $147,800, Jablonski said, adding, "The difference in price is related to the frequency in which the spots air on each station."
Cambern said she personally writes the script for each spot, completes the interviews and creates the final package. OSU reviews each segment before it airs, but Cambern said it's only to ensure the accuracy of the terminology and content.
Though NBC4's OSU spots are reviewed by the hospital, too, Rogala said you won't see a news personality associated with a message where the news station doesn't "bear the ultimate responsibility for the content.
"I know we have ultimate editorial control. OSU absolutely can't change the content unless it's for accuracy."
Jablonski and Cambern both argue that these spots, however they come about, are beneficial for Columbus viewers.
OSU is an educational facility where the paid segments are not "tied to business goals," said Jablonski. Cambern said she believes she's doing something that helps viewers.
"You know what?" Cambern said. "Anybody that questions the value of those things, I can show you the value every day. The reality is, to take up 30 seconds of time -- which you could have sold to some advertiser, you know, a Thighmaster or something -- you get this health news.
"We need sponsorships. They help us get these messages out."
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