Presumably we all agree that journalists can have a considerable influence over consumers’ behaviour. They seem obsessed with alternative medicine – no, I don’t mean extraordinary specimen s of the journalist-tribe, like the one who pocketed money from five homeopathic manufacturers to defame me. I mean the middle of the road,journalist writing for middle of the road respectable papers. Hardly a day goes past without the subject attracting their attention. Such coverage is surely going to influence the usage of alternative medicine. But are there any hard data to back up this assumption?

In 2000, we conduced a study to determine the frequency and tone of reporting on medical topics in daily newspapers in the UK and Germany. Eight major daily newspapers (4 German and 4 British) were scanned for medical articles on eight randomly chosen working days in the summer of 1999. All articles relating to medical topics were extracted and categorised according to subject, length, and tone of article (critical, positive, or neutral).

A total of 256 newspaper articles were evaluated. We identified 80 articles in the German papers and 176 in the British; thus, the British reported on medical topics more than twice as often as German broadsheets. Articles in German papers were on average considerably longer and took a positive attitude more often than British ones. We identified 4 articles on alternative medicine in the German and 26 in the UK newspapers. The tone of the UK articles was unanimously positive (100%) whereas most 75% of the German articles on alternative medicine were critical.

This analysis, we concluded, suggested that, compared with German newspapers, British newspapers report more frequently on medical matters and generally have a more critical attitude. The proportion of articles on alternative medicine seems to be considerably larger in the UK (15% v 5%), and, in contrast to articles on medical matters in general, reporting on alternative medicine in the UK was overwhelmingly positive.

That was 13 years ago, and things may well have changed since then. My impression is that more critical coverage of alternative medicine has finally and thankfully begun to emerge. But, even if this is true, we still cannot be sure how misleading it is. In 2006, we therefore conducted another investigation aimed at assessing UK newspapers’ coverage of alternative medicine, this time specifically for cancer.