National Post - Stop the presses: cancer news is getting positive

It’s an age-old complaint of many newspaper readers: the pages are filled with almost nothing but bad news. A just-published study from McGill University suggests that on one topic at least — cancer — print coverage has actually become more positive in the last 20 years.

That is not, though, an entirely good-news story,  say the researchers, also associated with Jewish General Hospital. The team led by Dr. Melissa Henry, a McGill psychologist, looked at cancer news in six newspapers across the country during three-month periods in 1988-89 and 2008. There was more coverage in 2008, but it also had a significantly more positive tone, the study concluded. That was a welcome change in some ways, giving patients a more hopeful spin on their disease, the authors said.