HH&S Director Sandra de Castro Buffington is interviewed on “TV Tackles Cancer,” a special report on CNN that aired Sept. 13, 2010 (her discussion begins at 01:50).
“Fifteen years ago there was a lot of stigma around cancer,” Buffington says in the report. “People did not talk about it the way it’s talked about today.”
An increase in cancer-themed storylines on TV shows, together with many celebrities going public about their own battles with the disease, has helped to raised its profile.
Buffington says the increase in scripted shows using cancer in their storylines is important. A TV monitoring project run by Hollywood, Health & Society, a program of the USC Annenberg School’s Norman Lear Center, shows that a majority of regular viewers report learning something new about a disease or how to prevent it.