Documenting Risk - Tom Hanks has diabetes, suddenly we care.
We're spending a lot of time thinking about story structure at the moment, and the way in which we're aiming to re-orient our audiences' thinking about risk from big, dramatic events to the everyday - it's a crucial opening part of the documentary. A really good example of some of the points wer'e trying to get across presented itself in the publicity that has surrounded the release of Paul Greengrass's new film, Captain Phillips. Greengrass has a background in journalism and television documentary, and his fiction films have often dramatised real world events, such as Bloody Sunday and United 93.
Greengrass has been giving interviews about the film, along with the film's star, Tom Hanks. Hanks could have been forgiven for assuming that most media coverage would focus on the challenges of playing a real life ‘average Joe’ captured by Somali Pirates. But the tale of high risk on the high seas was somewhat eclipsed by Hanks' admission to suffering from Type 2 diabetes, with the actor reportedly somewhat embarrassed not by the revelation itself, but by the fuss it had caused. Here, it seems, was the realstory - a world famous movie star afflicted by the same hum drum medical condition as an estimated 26 million other largely non-famous non-Oscar winning Americans. Suddenly, 'everyday' risk, amassed one-donut-at-a-time, seemed more fascinating than the acute, one-in-billion, trapped in a tiny lifeboat with a pirate's gun at your head variety.
As any medical practitioner will attest, diabetes is a serious, wide-spread health risk. According to the US department of health it was the seventh leading cause of death in America in 2007. Here in the UK, NHS reports indicate that 15-16% of the 460,000 deaths that occur annually in England are caused by the condition, around 70,000 people. By contrast, the number of people killed annually in the UK from taking ecstasy is typically less than fifty, and often far fewer. Yet as research into drug fatality reporting in the Scottish press has demonstrated, such statistically negligible figures command disproportionate space in the headlines, in a rather stark demonstration of 'news values.' We've been talking to David Nutt, Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology and former Government chief advisor on drug policies, controversially dismissed by the then Home Secretary Jackie Smith for a 2009 research paper comparing the risks of horse riding and taking ectasy ('Equasy'), about this example, and others, for our documentary.
Experts researching public attitudes towards potential risks of all kinds have long recognized that unusual risks attract more media attention than things that are common, as do those that kill or injure many people at once, rather than cumulatively over a longer period. Strong visual images, clear-cut events, and personal stories are also prized elements for potential coverage. If there’s a celebrity affected, all the more gripping. Consider the respective attention afforded a commercial plane crash or a car accident. The risk of death on the roads is much higher, but while we readily accept a fear of flying, fear of car journeys seems downright odd. Would the situation be the same if every road fatality received intensive media coverage, with on-the-scene reporting, eye witness accounts, and dramatic reconstructions? In 2012 there were 1, 754 people killed on the roads in the UK, the lowest number since records began. But if the television news devoted itself to exhaustive coverage of the average five deaths per day that occurred, would we be likely to adjust our perception?
For health campaigners struggling to attract the public's attention to a growing, wide-spread, serious but preventable health risk such as Type 2 diabetes, which is resolutely unsexy, undramatic, and difficult to imagine - what does suffering from diabetes look and feel like? - Tom Hanks' public admission, personally discomfiting as it might have been, was, at least temporarily, like having the Oscar spotlight unexpectedly shining on you. Lacking the dramatic preventative surgical masks of Bird Flu, less exotic-sounding than West Nile virus, finally, we had, if not quite the ‘face of diabetes,’ then a famous diabetic face (did he look different?), around which a discussion of the illness could at least be focused. For a moment, at least, the illness was interesting. ‘Sweetness in Seattle,’ anyone? The headline virtually wrote itself.
