Health Care/Joan Retsinas

Harmful to Your Health: The Dying Newspaper

The daily newspaper has shrunk, from 7 days to 4 days a week, occasionally to never. Ditto for the number of pages , as well as the print. Although a few giants, notably the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have withstood the battering internet, the local presses are vanishing.

Those presses paid for the reporters who forced the machinations of government into the sanitizing sunlight that Brandeis called essential to democracy. We have Politico, NPR and other on-line news outlets, but they do not focus on Small City, Small Town USA. As for the glut of online information, much of it is unedited, unvetted. To date we have no funding mechanism to pay for the bulk of investigative reporters.

This hurts hurts our health. We have national on-line sources for health policy, like Stat, from the Boston Globe, and Kaiser Health News; but we still need local reporters.

Consider a few of instances when reporters told a story that spurred politicians to act.

The opiate epidemic started as a statistical finding, collated and broadcast by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the story behind the statistics emerged in small towns, when addicts showed up in emergency rooms, police stations and morgues. Reporters uncovered a constellation of bogeys, from over-prescribing physicians to colluding pharmacists to greedy manufacturers. And the patients in pain, psychic and physical, were almost all unaware that the miracle drug would kill them, destroy their families. As reporters across the country covered the misery in all its complicated depth, the local catastrophe segued into a national crisis. Today, attorneys general as well as Congress are trying to come up with solutions that will stem the epidemic, treat the addicts, punish the egregious miscreants. Without the press to publicize the spreading addiction, would we have known?

Flint, Michigan’s toxic water captured national attention. Today, Newark, N.J, has its own tale. Thanks to the New York Times, we know the plot: the city changed treatment chemicals; the water tested high for lead; the city distributed filters that didn’t work (many didn’t fit on faucets anyway); the city then distributed expired bottles of water. So long as the Times keeps reporting on the clumsy efforts to remediate water in the poorest neighborhoods of Newark, presumably the state will keep trying. Without continued media coverage, it would be easy for politicians to bump solutions into another fiscal year. Crucially, Newark may not be unique; but without investigative journalists, we probably won’t know whether old water systems are spewing forth lead into other cities.

Measles, an illness that statisticians once upon a time sought to label as virtually extinct, first surfaced in small pockets in this country. We have no sure-fire treatment; and the effects can range beyond the temporary rash to blindness, even death. Local newspapers described some of those pockets. For example, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, part of USA Today, reported on the outbreak in New York State; the Long-Times reported on it in Boulder. The San Luis Obispo News (California) told parents of low vaccination rates. Thanks in part to scores of newspapers, we know about an epidemic that might have been hidden.

Insulin prices have spiked, leading to complaints, leading to media stories. Check the Steamboat Pilot to read about Colorado’s action to cap the price of insulin or read the thoughtful analysis in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Thanks again to the media, that outrage prompted Congress to hold hearings.

Finally, the news — the facts — can be a brake on politically-motivated decisions that make us sicker. Consider vaccinations for the HPV virus. Twelve years ago Texas and Australia took divergent paths. The latter offered free vaccinations to young girls. Texas, spurred by ideological objections, backed away from supporting the vaccine. The Texas Tribune reported the results. Cervical cancer has all but vanished in Australia, while in Texas rates have risen.

Subscribe to your local paper. Pay for on-line access. We need a free press, inquisitive and iconoclastic, not just for our body politick, but for our bodies.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net. See links to the articles with the online version of this column.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2019

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