News media are often accused of reporting too often on scandal, crime and death and not enough on “good news stories.”  But it seems that when it comes to reporting on cancer, journalists prefer the good over the bad.

A report in the Archives of Internal Medicine, entitled “Cancer and media: How does the news report on treatment and outcomes?" contends that most news stories about cancer ignore the hard reality of the disease.

That hard reality includes this sobering fact: about one in two men, and one in three women, will be diagnosed with some form of cancer in their lifetime. And about half of those diagnosed patients will die of cancer, or one of its related complications.

That’s not the message coming through in most media coverage of cancer, the report asserts.

To analyze media reporting about cancer, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia conducted searches of all news reports on cancer between 2005 and 2007. They looked at eight large U.S. newspapers and five national magazines. (Why they ignored Web news outlets beats me.)

They found 2,228 cancer-related articles on cancer, and narrowed it down to a random sample of 436 -- 312 from newspapers and 124 from magazines. They then had trained coders determine the proportion of articles devoted to various cancer-related topics.

They noticed that 35.1 per cent of articles focused on breast cancer, 14.9 per cent looked at prostate cancer, while 20 per cent discussed cancer in general.

That huge focus on breast cancer alone is interesting. Yes, breast cancer is still one of the most common cancers among Canadian women. But there are certainly more cases of non-melanoma skin cancer diagnosed in Canada every year. And lung cancer is still the leading cause of cancer death for both women and men.

In any case, it was the tone that all of these cancer stories took that struck the researchers. Almost a third, or 32.1 per cent, focused on individuals surviving or being cured of cancer, while only 7.6 per cent focused on one or more patients who were dying or had died of cancer. Ten articles, or 2.3 per cent, focused on both survival and death.

Of the more than 200 individual patients described in the articles studied, about 80 per cent were reported to have survived.

"It is surprising that few articles discuss death and dying considering that half of all patients diagnosed as having cancer will not survive,” the article authors write.

Their survey also found few articles (just 13.1 per cent) reported that aggressive cancer treatments can fail either to extend life or to cure disease, or that some cancers are incurable, such as multiple myeloma.

Less than one-third of the articles (30 per cent) mentioned the difficult side effects that come cancer treatments, such as nausea, pain or hair loss.

In fact, most articles (57.1 per cent) discussed aggressive treatments exclusively. Almost none (0.5 per cent) focused on end-of-life care, and only 2.5 per cent discussed both.

Dr. David Casarett, one of the report’s authors who studies end-of-life care and geriatrics, say it’s unfortunate that so few articles focused on palliative and hospice care. In an article for the Huffington Post, he suggests those omissions give readers the misconception that the pain and other symptoms of the final stages of cancer can't be managed.

“But that's simply not true,” he writes. “Although cancer may be impossible to cure, pain can always be treated. That's what I tell my patients, and that's what these articles should be telling the public, but they're not.”

As Casarett writes, it’s not altogether surprising that news stories about cancer focus on progress being made and on people surviving the disease: that’s what readers would rather read about.

“We're all scared of getting cancer, and of course we're scared of dying. So these articles play to this fear by reassuring us that there are treatments that work, and that there are cures that are effective."

It's unlikely that message is going to change any time soon, he adds.

“People want hope, and newspapers and magazines need to give their readers what they want. That's particularly true today, in this era of shrinking circulations and online competition. So we shouldn't expect a more honest portrayal of cancer anytime soon.”

What do you think? Do you agree with Casarett’s assessment? What are the kinds of stories you gravitate toward? What cancer stories do you think the news media ignore? Let us know in the comments section below.