Part 4: Ethics and Reporting Practices for COVID-19
Call a lie a lie; pen careful headlines; do not mimic legitimate scientific inquiry
For the second-to-last week of April 2020, I cover the critical practice of responsible headline writing, the dangerous consequences of “bothsidesisms” when representing scientific fact, and new reports on the information landscape. Read my previous round-ups here, here, and here.
I was alarmed to see mainstream news outlets amplifying “misinformation” this past week by broadcasting the White House press briefings. Broadcasting these, then asking medical experts to debunk Trump’s statements sets up a “both-sides” approach that is deeply asymmetrical: the potential for public harm is too great. Trump is not a scientist.
Both-sides journalism does this quite frequently: it poses a question in the guise of good-natured curiosity or in the tradition of syllogism, when the question itself is offensive or abridges the fundamental rights of a community.
The role of an independent press is to stand independent of institutions of power, and media organizations are not obligated to cover the White House, or give legitimacy to an individual’s words just because they occupy an office of legitimacy. The mandate of an independent press is to firmly stand up to abuse of power. In an editorial for the British Medical Journal that every journalist should read, public health experts Gregg Gonslaves and Gavin Yarney place blame for the spread of the global pandemic squarely on the Trump administration’s “anaemic response” with a timeline of the administration’s precipitous failures to respond to the pandemic appropriately against the guidance of public health experts, the WHO, and in contrast to almost every other country in the world. This is accountability work that media organizations should be doing themselves, as well as platforming and amplifying.
Several major media outlets included misinformation in headlines about Trump’s statements:
Possible alternate headlines that neutralize the information further could be:
- Trump speculates widely about virus
- Trump amplifies false statements to a wary and desperate public
- Trump misleads public with meandering thoughts
- Trump puts citizens at risk by speculating in press conference
- Trump broadcasts unproven theories that may kill people
Saying that Trump “pinned his hopes” is a strange editorializing of behavior that we don’t really understand — we don’t know what his intentions are, or his understanding of science (though we can speculate that it is pretty minimal).
Moreover, The New York Times placed the story about Trump’s suggestions adjacent to a story titled “Could the Power of the Sun Slow the Coronavirus?” which is deeply irresponsible as it links his inane comments to a line of questioning that mimics legitimate scientific inquiry:
Don’t ask a question or open up a space of rupture when the answer is clearly no. Both-sides journalism does this quite frequently: it poses a question in the guise of good-natured curiosity or in the tradition of syllogism, when the question itself is offensive or abridges the fundamental rights of a community. The headline itself is misleading. Particularly at this moment of confusion and polarization, media outlets should be as straightforward as possible.
There is a way to edit that does not amplify plainly incorrect information, and I urge media organizations to take the time and care to do this. I also urge media organizations, at this moment, to rethink the epistemological organization of the newsroom, and prioritize headline writing, which is often a low-priority role, to minimize misinformation. Studies show that a majority of people share articles without reading them, based on headlines.
Furthermore, The New York Times included a “both sides” line that has been widely disparaged by scientists and researchers, and since been altered:
In an even more troubling series of decisions, Twitter has determined that Trump’s statements do not comprise misinformation and should not be removed from the platform, as the reporter Davey Alba reports:
Meanwhile, outlets like Breitbart published factually inaccurate stories denying that Trump has made these statements at all:
Science should not be politicized. Journalists should focus on explaining the complexity of science to citizens with care and nuance, instead of amplifying incorrect information. The real dangers of a both-sides approach to science journalism should and can be translated back into how we approach our coverage of politics, debates about removal of hate speech, coverage of race, civil liberties, national security, and other contentious beats. Journalists can create narratives that suture polarization by creating inclusive narratives that acknowledge differences in opinion, when valid, but also clearly prioritize fact and dismantle ideology that feigns as fact.
New reports from the field:
Now that we’ve had time to understand and document various forms of misinformation that have been circulating around COVID-19, a number of new reports were released this past week mapping the changing information environment:
- Access Now published: “Fighting Misinformation and Defending Free Expression During COVID-19: recommendations for states.”
- The Reuters Institute at Oxford published: “Navigating the ‘infodemic’: how people in six countries access and rate news and information about coronavirus.”
- Graphika published: “The COVID-19 ‘Infodemic’: A Preliminary Analysis of the Online Conversation Surrounding the Coronavirus Pandemic.”
- David Kaye, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, released a new report, “Disease Pandemics and the Freedom of Opinion and Expression.”
- UNESCO published: “Combating the disinfodemic: Working for truth in the time of Covid-19.”
Epistemology of the Newsroom
Newsrooms are organizational structures with limitations, incentives, and outputs. The division of beat reporting in a newsroom reifies certain divisions of disciplines (Foucault, Order of Things) that don’t align with the interdisciplinary world we live in today. If many of the misinformation narratives around COVID-19 are cohesive, even if untrue, those narratives have to be dismantled and replaced with equally cohesive true narratives that connect the dots between events and historical phenomena.
At the heart of journalistic practice are abstract concepts determining what is worthy of being covered — “newsworthiness”; what is in the public interest; which narratives fit into a preexisting sphere of knowledge — enough to elicit engagement from an audience. This last piece — the “news peg” — is the most interesting to me, where current research into cognition, narrative, and perception is not yet ready to help us understand how we internalize narratives around us, how structures and ideas are linked, and how we as individuals are embodied by knowledge.
The division of beat reporting in a newsroom reifies certain divisions of disciplines…that don’t align with the interdisciplinary world we live in today.
But, philosophy, theory, and the humanities give us clues to the way speech is perceived, and narrative is shaped, that can be useful at this pivotal moment. In a complex world, what kind of reporting would be required to communicate the systemic interactions that we are living in, and the contingency of our information ecosystem? How can citizens understand the information ecosystem without being burdened by the task of knowledge production or fact-checking themselves?
As I look at the story produced by Breitbart — an evidence collage of sorts — I can’t help but feel that it’s the form of reporting and editing, the methodology of news production, that is failing us. There is so much subjectivity embedded in the processes of news production, and yet there’s also a deep mismatch in the level of expertise, and the depth required to understand the world we are living in. I’m not sure if journalism can be held responsible for deep, structural polarization that exists despite its existence, instead of because of it. But, journalism can create a narrative that encompasses these deep fissures, and explains them without sacrificing fact or empiricism, without lending itself to false equivalence, or peddling untruths simply to satisfy a portion of the audience, or keep ratings and reads up. In order to do this effectively, journalism has to be less reactive and more historically rooted; it has to situate itself not just in the current moment, but also in how we got here. Journalism has to hold people accountable, no matter how irresponsible they may seem, even when they are evading responsibility, even when all the structural mechanisms for accountability have failed us.
And journalism must dismantle illusions of American exceptionalism and tell the truth about our society, something that has never happened. It must explain the many structures that have been failing citizens for a long time, that preceded the current administration, and also explain how the current administration has exacerbated and added new dimensions to this deep dysfunction. It must explain the fault lines in science, the way science has always been politicized. For example, HIV/AIDS research faced significant delays in the early years as a result of policies by the Reagan administration, budget cuts to the NIH and CDC, and social conservatism because the disease was associated with gay men. It took a significant political movement to push politicians to heed and fund scientists in order to find a cure, and to pay attention to a community that became vulnerable because of institutional neglect. Journalism played a crucial role in informing the public and putting pressure on governments to pay attention to this problem, and journalism was necessary to diagnose the multifaceted problem that was not just about an incurable disease, but also about inequality, economics, a lacking public health infrastructure, stigma, and public awareness.
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.
