Context is key to a well-informed public: health specialists
A standard 500-word news article written in haste for a tight deadline could not possibly sum up all the challenges and nuggets of advice discussed by four well-known Canadian health journalists during the Medical Specialists virtual panel held Friday at the Journalism in the Time of Crisis Conference.
And that problem — the need for more time, more research and more context in reporting on a complex, rapidly shifting subject like the COVID-19 pandemic — was an underlying theme of the conversation moderated by Carleton University journalism professor and science journalist Sarah Everts.
The panelists were: Vik Adhopia, senior reporter with the CBC News health unit; Helen Branswell, senior writer, infectious disease with STAT News; Dr. Brian Goldman, host of the CBC Radio medical program White Coat Black Art; and Globe and Mail health reporter Carly Weeks.
They discussed topics ranging from the problems with public health messaging, vaccine trials, vaccine skepticism, the politicizing of the pandemic and misinformation.
Many of the questions posed didn’t have definite answers among the panelists. How do you balance original reporting with the debunking of myths? How do you cover the valid risks and concerns about vaccines without fueling the beliefs of conspiracy theorists?
These are difficult questions, but one theme that kept coming up, and which addresses many of these questions, is the idea of providing context.
For example, something as deceptively simple as COVID-19 case numbers require additional background.
“Case numbers can be very misleading when the testing isn’t targeted to populations at risk,” Goldman explained.
Branswell also brought up the fact that the public needs to be conditioned to the idea of information changing in such a fluid situation as a global pandemic.
“This is a new virus, and we don’t know everything about it at the beginning, and things will change,” she said.
She recalls having to take a similar stance during the SARS outbreak of 2003: “Something would change and you have to tell people, they didn’t make a mistake before, they didn’t know before. And now we know.”
“Something would change and you have to tell people, they didn’t make a mistake before, they didn’t know before. And now we know.”
She gave the example of U.S. President Donald Trump and his aides pointing to things Dr. Anthony Fauci — the top White House adviser on the coronavirus crisis — said early in the pandemic as proof that Fauci was wrong.
“Every time something changes in science, that’s not a sign that somebody was hiding information before,” said Branswell.
Adhopia pointed out the trend of the “breathless” reporting of clinical trials, and how the public and even some of the reporters covering them may not understand the nature of such trials.
“Not every clinical trial that gets launched needs news coverage,” he said. “If people knew how, in the ‘before times’, how few clinical trials actually lead to treatments, I think that would be a better sort of context for them,” he said.
The same goes for stories about the side effects of potential vaccines, Adhopia said. When the media reports on every time there’s a negative reaction in a trial, this can add to people’s fears and doubts about the safety of vaccines when they don’t understand the context of clinical trials.
“That’s normal,” he said. “When you do clinical trials, there’s always going to be these outliers.”
When news began to come out about cases of COVID-19 reinfections in which the second case was more severe than the first, this was another source of panic that needed additional context.
Weeks referenced reporting by Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times, who has explained to readers how exceptionally rare such reinfections are.
“Yes, there are four cases (of reinfection), but there’s only four confirmed cases out of 40 million people who’ve been infected. Everybody calm down,” Weeks said.
According to this group of health reporters, one key way for journalists to wade through the complexities of pandemic-era reporting is to give their audience the means to understand the context behind those complexities.
A video of the full panel discussion can be found here.
