Pandemic Narratives
Bodies of empirical knowledge on misinformation, reporting standards, and public health can join forces now
To go directly to the author’s evolving collection of COVID-19 reporting resources, tip sheets, and guidance, click here.
I recently started working at Data & Society as Newsroom Outreach Lead, only to find myself at the exact nexus of two intellectual threads I inhabit: journalism and medicine. I was formerly at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, and before that, a medical student at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where I focused on HIV/AIDS. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, I offer my initial collection of reporting standards on this, and other public health crises. The list will be updated weekly; please send in anything I’ve missed.
I went to medical school hoping to be a doctor for vulnerable populations, and found myself noticing gaps in the information ecosystem within the structures of medicine, research, and care-taking. The medical school I attended in New York City sits on two adjacent ZIP codes with the highest income disparity of any two adjacent zip codes in America. I was stunned by the discrepancies in access to care and left feeling that the hierarchies of medicine were antiquated. Seeing that patients needed more access to information at different levels of expertise and literacy, I switched to journalism school, deeply moved by the role of narrative and reporting to change public opinion, push public policy forward, and reframe interdisciplinary arguments.
My own work at the moment is to help journalists in their reporting practice, and to take research from Data & Society and other scholars and find ways for it to be actionable within the epistemological structure of the newsroom. This is the moment for combining public health best practice with empirical research on misinformation, and to explore new ways to create public health messaging that is compelling, persuasive, and effective. It is also a moment of unprecedented mismanagement and misinformation being disseminated from the highest levels of government, and the problem requires a radically different approach to save lives and minimize harm. We’re already far into this pandemic.
It is a moment of unprecedented mismanagement and misinformation being disseminated from the highest levels of government, and the problem requires a radically different approach to save lives and minimize harm.
A close friend and former medical school roommate who is an ER doctor at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens texted me this week, in response to my check-in, writing, “Feels like the sky is falling.” We owe all of the medical staff and journalists on the frontlines of this pandemic, who have been designated essential workers in New York State, a thorough address of the parallel “infodemic,” as the Director-General of the World Health Organization called it. Social platforms and digital journalism have changed the gatekeepers of knowledge production and dissemination, and in a networked world, we are all citizen reporters, potential purveyors of misinformation, and actors in this evolving information ecosystem.
In the past three years, the Media Manipulation team at Data & Society — led first by Alice Marwick and then, Joan Donovan—pioneered analysis of the tactics used by media manipulators and the ways vulnerabilities in new technologies have been exploited to both spread hate and propaganda, and put vulnerable communities at risk. They researched and promoted rapid-response advice for journalists working in newsrooms who are dealing with seismic changes in our information ecosystem: the ascendance of social platforms; a tense debate between free speech norms and content removal practices that has left many First Amendment legal thinkers and activists in a stand-off, enabling the social platforms and tech giants to garner even more power; and media organizations that are dealing with unprecedented financial impediments, especially in local newsrooms, coupled with a loss of trust in the institutions of journalism.
In a networked world, we are all citizen reporters, potential purveyors of misinformation, and actors in this evolving information ecosystem.
In recent weeks, the challenges that journalists face have only heightened as they scramble to mobilize in an unprecedented situation with limited resources and mass layoffs. (BuzzFeed, upstart digital darling just a few years ago, announced salary cuts across the newsroom yesterday.)
The insufficiencies of our information ecosystem and the failures of our economic structures are deeply intertwined, and this is the moment to address them, to support journalists and researchers, build out bridges between disciplines, and create factual reported narratives that offer citizens the information they need, in their local communities, and at-scale to protect lives and minimize harm.
Smitha Khorana is the Newsroom Outreach Lead at Data & Society. She’s written for The Guardian, The Intercept, Columbia Journalism Review, and co-edited a book on the Snowden leaks and the surveillance state.
