Earlier this week, you may have seen this story on ABC News:
The Impact of Peter Jennings: Five Years Later
Lung cancer death rates have fallen since the anchor revealed his fatal illness.
As a former reporter and now lung cancer advocate, when I saw this story, I about fell out of my chair. It is grossly inaccurate on many levels.
First of all, from a journalism standpoint, the most recent comprehensive scientific lung cancer statistics available regarding death rates (and other statistics) are from 2005.
Peter Jennings
Unfortunately, Jennings died in 2005. So there is no way for anyone to know what impact Jennings may have had on lung cancer in any capacity.
From a scientific standpoint, the death rate for lung cancer is not “falling faster than for any other cancer,” as was stated in ABC’s report.
So “WTF?,” the Bonnie J Addario Lung Cancer Foundation and the Lung Cancer Alliance collaborated to reach ABC and set the record straight on the true state of lung cancer (see joint letter below).
Specifically:
The following is posted on the Bonnie J Addario Lung Cancer Foundation website, encouraging anyone to use the joint letter to help reach ABC News.
Dear ABC-Please Correct!
“If you tailor your news viewing so that you only get one point of view, well of course you’re going to think somebody else has got a different point of view, and it may be wrong.”
– Peter Jennings
In the past week, we, in the Lung Cancer Community, have been subjected to less than half truths, and a very strange break from the ideal of journalism, which is meant to inform the citizenry with the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help us all.
We have reached out to Diane Sawyer, and the executive team at ABC to dig deeper, to reveal the whole story of Lung Cancer with the journalistic integrity that Peter Jennings would have approached it.
We have not received a response. In other words, we have been ignored. We encourage you to contact ABC and all the other stations that have picked up this “story” and encourage all of them, including your local stations, to dig deeper. To tell the story as Peter would have.
Please feel free to use any and all elements below from our joint letter to ABC with the Lung Cancer Alliance.
Joint letter from the Bonnie J Addario Lung Cancer Foundation
and the Lung Cancer Alliance
APRIL 6, 2010
Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation and the Lung Cancer Alliance ask ABC News To Clarify Jennings Report
John Banner, Executive Producer
Tom Nagorski, Senior Broadcast Producer
World News with Diane Sawyer
47 West 66th St. 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10023
Dear Mr. Banner and Mr. Nagorski:
Peter Jennings did a great service in going public with his lung cancer diagnosis a few months before he died in 2005. But the professional reporter in Mr. Jennings would have taken a much harder look at lung cancer statistics for the memorial piece on his death from lung cancer five years ago. The rosy scenario you presented is not accurate. Lung cancer mortality has not dropped more than any other cancer and indeed it is rising in women.
The death rate for lung cancer is not “falling faster than for any other cancer,” as was stated in the report. Among men, the mortality rate for lung cancer has fallen by 11.7% since 1975, but even more for prostate cancer (24%) and colon cancer (37%). In women, the mortality rate for lung cancer has risen 128% since 1965, while the rate for breast cancer has fallen by 25% and colon cancer by 42%.
Over 800,000 people have died of lung cancer since his death in 2005.
According to prevalence figures for 2006 published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 60% of lung cancer patients are former – not current – smokers and another 20% never smoked at all.
Smoking rates have dropped and hopefully one day they will drop to zero. Nearly 50% of adult men smoked in the 50’s and that number is now down to 23%. Women peaked in the 1960’s at 33% and the prevalence among women now stands at 17.4%.
Despite the drop in smoking rates over the past 40 years, the 5-year survival rate is still only 15%. One in every three cancer deaths is due to lung cancer.
We respectfully request that a more comprehensive report be given to this deadly disease which has been so stigmatized and underfunded. Lung cancer is a public health epidemic that smoking cessation alone will not cure. Diane, we think what you were trying to say is, if Peter were still alive, he would have said, “Now do more.”
Sincerely,
Bonnie J. Addario
Founder & Chair, President
Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation
bonnie@lungcancerfoundation.org
650-333-6284
Laurie Fenton-Ambrose
President & CEO
Lung Cancer Alliance
Lfenton@lungcanceralliance.org
202-463-2080
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