Part 3: Ethics and Reporting Practices for COVID-19

Racist narratives; decentering expertise; open communication

This week’s roundup looks at the xenophobic and racist narratives circulating that shift blame away from the United States, as well as encourages media outlets to make it easier for health workers to become sources. I also list what I believe to be crucial missing data sets. Read my previous roundups here and here.

White supremacist propaganda and misinformation, xenophobic hate speech, and incorrect geopolitical narratives continue to proliferate on social platforms, closed messaging apps, and in real-life conversations about COVID-19. There has also been a surge in hate crimes, bolstered by the words of the President. (Hate crime violence was already at a 16-year high in 2019). There are “reopen” protests flaunting public health guidelines in some American cities that may be funded by conservative donors . The need for accessible true information has never been more urgent.

Media organizations should be very careful about the way narratives are being spun, and stick to empirical evidence.

Last week, The New York Times published a complex investigative story about the administration’s failure to adequately prepare for the pandemic. In response, the Trump administration cancelled funding for the Word Health Organization and increased xenophobic rhetoric, casting doubt on the WHO and China’s handling of the virus. This also led to unscientific speculation about China’s reported number of deaths, which they revised last week.

Media organizations should be wary of amplifying a narrative that places the onus for the spread of COVID-19 on foreign states and foreigners, and should make careful editorial decisions, especially with headlines, when describing xenophobia. While reporting on the WHO, they should highlight structural issues within international organizations and implicated in donor funding models, as Zeynep Tufekci writes about in a recent piece for The Atlantic. They should also remind people of the many successes of international global health organizations and the WHO, while acknowledging past mistakes, and how these are not perfect governing bodies but organizations in flux, with mandates that shift within new geopolitical realities.

Speculation that China lied about data and deaths should not be allowed until we know more. I saw troubling tweets from journalists this week insisting that China must have lied because our numbers of COVID-19-positive individuals and COVID-related deaths are so high. This is bad logic. Our lack of adequate testing, coupled with a deeply dysfunctional healthcare system and a lack of public health infrastructure, has caused a situation of incomplete data determining public health policy — Alexis Madrigal eloquently explains the undercount in the U.S. for The Atlantic. Media organizations should be very careful about the way narratives are being spun, and stick to empirical evidence when reporting. They should clearly explain the spaces of ambiguity about responsibility, transparency, and data. When it comes to xenophobic narratives, there is both a subtler permutation of bias emanating from liberal outlets, as well as very visible xenophobia being propagated from conservative media organizations. Both are harmful and inaccurate.

As the narrative becomes increasingly garbled, journalists face difficult decisions about when to avoid amplifying racist misinformation, and when certain narratives should be debunked. Journalists should continue to report on hate crimes against Asian-Americans and other communities being falsely implicated in COVID-19 misinformation. Stories should focus on those impacted, instead of the misinformation itself.

Citizens can also play a part by countering misinformation on social platforms. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, an organization based in the United Kingdom, has a simple set of guidelines for citizens on “how to counter misinformation” about COVID-19.

Sources

One way to create more robust, complex narratives is through an expanded source network.

While I was a TA at a journalism school years ago, students approached me with confusion about how to source a story that they felt didn’t require an expert. The story was about a neighborhood that was undergoing gentrification. I recommended that the students speak to an urban sociologist on background to deepen their understanding of the forces that contribute to gentrification, but explained that experts don’t have to be professionals or academics. The beauty of journalism, and reporting in particular, is that you learn where information lives — how to craft a robust narrative, how to bolster an argument, how to explore investigations with different people who have lived strikingly different lives. In this case, an 80-year-old woman whom they had interviewed, and who had been living in the neighborhood for decades, was the expert they needed. Through oral history and local networks, she offered them a glimpse of the lived experience of gentrification. They then used professional sources to understand the economic and political forces contributing to the vast changes in her neighborhood and the daily rhythms in that built environment.

It is through the bridging of elite and non-elite forms of knowledge that a variegated, complex narrative can emerge.

There is possibility in journalism to decenter expertise and to understand the gaps in knowledge, the spaces between ideology and reality, and the ways certain ideals have not been translated into our structures at-large. The reason I love journalism is because it uses a strikingly different methodology than traditional academic research: it can shift notions of expertise and elite credibility by embracing more expansive, open attitudes towards sources, experts, and knowledge. Vulnerable communities are experts on the structural inequities they have been facing since before the pandemic, and matching reporting in these communities with information from academics and social scientists who can offer data, nuance, and historical and comparative perspectives can deepen stories, add rigor, and answer questions.

A story on the health of supply chains may be well-served by a wide variety of sources — economists, government sources, small business owners, farmers, factory workers, and those whose businesses rely on import/export or work transnationally to source products.

We need to hear from vulnerable communities, people who have had COVID-19, and people who are on the frontlines. This raw information is as valuable as disease models, epidemiological data, and virology. It is through the bridging of elite and non-elite forms of knowledge that a variegated, complex narrative can emerge.

We also need more reporting and data from parts of the country that may not be following social distancing guidelines. Rather than berate those who are putting themselves at risk to protest, it’s important to understand the underlying logic of arguments to re-open the country, including real personal economic concerns, whether federal government aid is sufficient for individuals, and what the consequences of public protesting may be on the spread of the virus. Because testing is limited in so much of the country, there’s an imperative for journalists, where possible, to report on underserved communities.

Media organizations should also place caveats on published graphics and chryons indicating number of cases and death rates, explaining that our data is incomplete, and that these numbers vastly undercount the reality.

Clear lines of communication

A doctor in New York City contacted me this week asking how to reach a particular journalist. She was concerned that a makeshift hospital at the Javits Center was asking for citizenship information of admitted patients during the intake process, which was not in accordance with typical policy in the many NYC hospitals she had worked in over the years. She was concerned about surveillance, ICE involvement, and potential misuse of that data. She had already contacted one journalist and been dismissed, and was frustrated by her inability to connect to the right resources. (Side note: Researchers should focus on collecting COVID-19 related racial data, socioeconomic data, and work to increase transparency about local city and state policies on vulnerable people: homeless individuals, undocumented folks, and non-citizens.)

Many health professionals still don’t know how to get in touch with journalists and have their stories heard.

I recommended that she use Twitter DMs or email to contact the journalists in question, and also pointed her to an intake form published on The New York Times website, soliciting stories from doctors on the frontlines in NYC. Media organizations should feature opportunities for healthcare workers to contact journalists prominently, and encourage those working around the country to share stories and become sources. As journalists become furloughed due to financial constraints, we risk hearing fewer stories from communities most impacted by the pandemic, the related infodemic, and the recession. Many health professionals may not have the background or complex understanding of journalism to determine what sort of reporting is necessary to pursue a story. Beyond their own anecdotes from the frontlines, they may see troubling institutional choices and be experiencing related trauma themselves.

It’s important to provide resources so healthcare workers and other frontline workers can understand when they should contact journalists, and what specific information they should relay in order to be heard. Journalists often need to hear a story from multiple sources before declaring it enough of an occurrence to merit a story—knowing this, healthcare workers can offer to connect journalists to other sources or colleagues.

Missing Data

Data & Society recently hosted an event to discuss strategies for demanding race-focused data. Data for Black Lives is an organization promoting the use of data to increase transparency on racial bias and is a superb resource at this moment to understand gaps in data around race, such as this tracker indicating which states are publicly reporting COVID-19 cases by race.

One striking takeaway of recent conversations was that communities of color should decide what specific data is needed, as the alternative is to risk mass data collection through surveillance technologies. Below are a few categories of missing data desperately needed to inform a public understanding of the impact of the pandemic:

• Data on racial, gender, and socioeconomic background of those testing positive for COVID-19 and those who have died from it
• Data on racial, gender, and socioeconomic background for those who have died at home and those who are admitted to hospitals
• Data on deaths of homeless citizens
• Data on deaths of undocumented individuals
• Data on deaths of incarcerated people, or those who have been released from prison because of COVID-19
• Data on deaths in nursing homes
• More nuanced data on pre-existing conditions and deaths affiliated with different health conditions
• Data on hate crimes since March 1, 2020, with increased granularity on location, gender, race, and form and level of violence, so we have a better sense of COVID-19-related hate crimes.

Suggested Resources

These global health experts are excellent sources for conceptual and comprehensive understandings of public health frameworks:

• Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Health at the University of Edinburgh
• Gregg Gonsalves, Professor of Epidemiology, Yale School of Medicine
• Nicholas A Kristakis, Professor of Social and Natural Science, Yale University
• Mark Lipsitch, Professor of Epidemiology and Immunology, Harvard University

Many of these professors work at elite institutions, and were chosen because their work is highly interdisciplinary. They are a few suggestions among many other academics and researchers who can offer insightful analysis on public health, legal theory, and economic frameworks.

Tauhid Chappell from The Philadelphia Inquirer made an excellent Twitter list of a diverse list of healthcare experts in Philadelphia. I encourage others to make similar lists of on-the-ground local experts in different cities and localities for journalists and media organizations.

Readings

• Joanna Naples-Mitchell writes for Just Security about bridging the disciplines of public health and law, explaining that there is no public health rationale to banning asylum seekers. These sorts of pieces, highlighting new structural inequities that are being introduced in the context of the pandemic, and explaining when they are not legitimate or necessary, should be picked up by national media organizations, and this sort of expertise should be amplified.
• Just Security is hosting this great online event series: Advancing Rights and Justice During a Pandemic: An Online Event Series.
• Nani Jansen Reventlow writes eloquently on our digital rights crisis on Medium.
• The Center for Countering Digital Hate, an organization based in the UK, has a simple efficacious set of guidelines on “how to counter misinformation” on COVID-19 when citizens encounter this information on social media. Media organizations could include similar guidelines in their COVID-19 resources, directly addressing the “infodemic” and giving citizens tools to know how to approach this information when they encounter it.
• In Andrew Liu’s op-ed, “Blaming China for coronavirus isn’t just dangerous. It misses the point” for The Guardian, he urges us to complicate the narrative about China, and examines structural and economic changes in China over decades that may have contributed to the origin of the virus.
• In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski shares her father’s experience of being rendered invisible by the medical system as he sought treatment before COVID-19, highlighting structural inequities and bias embedded in the American healthcare system before the pandemic.
• The Guardian US’s liveblog with timelines and concise updates is incredibly useful.
• Asian Americans Advancing Justice has published a comprehensive collection of resources on dealing with racism, reporting hate crimes, and offering various forms of legal assistance. Media organizations should link to these sorts of resources when covering racism and hate crimes related to COVID-19.

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.

Suggestions, comments, or noticed a resource we missed? E-mail smitha@datasociety.net.