Essay: Newspaper coverage of global health in the UK

Abstract

I’m sorry to say that newspapers can live without stories on global health. There are a handful of exceptions, of which SARS and avian infl uenza are the most immediately obvious, but beyond the terrain of “deadly new plague about to strike the UK”, or “British citizen [preferably female and young] struck down by horrible disease in foreign parts”, I would suggest there’s a complete lack of interest from most of the press, most of the time. That, in turn, is a sad refl ection on the British newspaper-reading public. For all that our critics like to accuse us of setting the wrong agendas, I’m afraid it’s a two-way process. Not for nothing is one of our bestselling tabloids called The Mirror. Newspapers run stories about issues they think will interest their readers. They want to sell papers. Desk editors do not believe that stories about leishmaniasis and deaths in childbirth in Africa will do anything for their circulation. But could they be wrong? Are there ways to interest the UK’s bank clerks, businessmen, and bus drivers in the good and bad health of people they will never meet, half way round the world? I think so. You might expect that I would, since I work for the Guardian. It might reasonably be supposed that my paper is more enlightened than most about the health problems of countries more deprived than our own. If that is the case, it has not always been so and even now—although to a lesser degree—I face the same sort of problems in getting my stories accepted that colleagues do on other papers. I carried out a salutary and somewhat shaming exercise the other day. I looked through the cuttings books that the paper used to keep for each of us in the days before computers became offi ce gods and keepers of all our archives. In the 12 months from June, 1998, not long after I became health correspondent, I discovered I had written only fi ve stories that had some bearing on global health (panel overleaf). Those fi ve pieces were my total contribution to raising awareness of global health issues among Guardian readers that year, and all of them were fi rmly anchored in the UK. If things changed, it was because I saw what treatable disease was really doing to individuals in places I had never visited before. I date my real commitment from the Durban AIDS conference in 2000, which was an epiphanic experience for me and for others. There was heat, music, passion, and scientists attempting to stay scientifi c in the middle of emotive battles over access to life-saving medicines. There was President Thabo Mbeki, in denial, and Nelson Mandela, off ering solutions and inspiration. There was a small boy with HIV, called Nkosi Johnson, who spoke to thousands from the platform and is now dead. Judge Edwin Cameron courageously told the world he too was infected with the stigmatising virus. There was no shortage of newspaper copy at Durban. We ran about ten stories, the last of which, on Mandela’s closing speech, led the front page. But apart from the pharmaceuticals’ correspondent of the Financial Times, I was the only journalist there from a British national newspaper. You could argue that Durban was a political story rather than a health story. Perhaps, but politics underlies most global health stories. The Lancet’s series on child mortality calculated the costs of the most useful interventions in the hope that politicians would get them adopted. Our chances of dealing with avian fl u depend on cooperation between countries, whether the European Union or China and Taiwan. Political argument is the meat and drink of newspapers like mine. Even so, such stories can battle for space. To have them published in even the heavyweight papers entails overcoming the selfi sh gene. First the reporter then the news editor have to be persuaded that what is happening to people many hundreds of miles away, in a country where life is not remotely like ours, is something to worry about. British newspapers are notoriously insular, Sarah Boseley has been health editor of the Guardian newspaper since 1998. She was formerly a general news journalist and has also worked on education and European aff airs during 20 years on the paper. She has won a number of awards for her reporting on HIV/AIDS in the developing world.