Obesity is grabbing more headlines, but not necessarily crowding out media coverage of the dangers of tobacco use, according to a new study sponsored by a drug company. However obesity made more news while tobacco got less attention, based on an analysis of eight years of medical stories in the media.

“It seems clear to us that there were shifts in coverage,” said lead study author Saul Shiffman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Using databases, Shiffman and colleagues gauged how often major media outlets published or aired stories about obesity and tobacco. They report their findings in the July-August issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior.

The authors found no correlation existed between the number of stories about the topics. “It’s not that when one goes up, the other goes down,” Shiffman said. But the number of stories about tobacco did drop over time after a peak in 1996-1997, with the average number of monthly broadcast stories falling by 85 percent from 1995 to 2003. Meanwhile, obesity stories steadily grew in number between 1995, the earliest year in the study, and 2003.

“It’s a shame that we would take our eye off the ball on tobacco when that is such an important issue,” Shiffman said. “There’s no lack of news, but maybe the media thinks this is old hat and old news.”

Gary Schwitzer, director of the health journalism graduate program at the University of Minnesota, said the study is flawed because the researchers didn’t analyze the content of news stories. As a result, the findings don’t provide “some sense of how much true news was occurring in one issue or the other,” said Schwitzer, publisher of a Web site that rates the quality of news stories about health and medical topics.

Schwitzer added that the study authors may have an interest in promoting more coverage of both obesity and tobacco control since several of them work in those fields. The study was funded by pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, which manufactures a drug designed to help people quit smoking and is developing one to fight obesity.

Shiffman S, et al. Tobacco cessation and weight loss: trends in media coverage. Am J H Behav 30(4), 2006.

Health Behavior News Service