What we should learn from the two best reporters covering COVID
Helen Branswell and Ed Yong are the two best reporters covering Covid-19, and I don’t think it’s particularly close.
Branswell writes for STAT news and has written piece after piece on every hot Covid topic you can think of.
Shes’s written about all of the major issues of the day - vaccines, testing, pediatric Covid complications, data collection, and the governmental response - better than basically everyone writing for any major newspaper in the country.
Yong writes for the Atlantic, and his articles tend to cover more in-depth topics including our complicated immune systems, how to prepare in case we have a second pandemic, and how the pandemic might “end” in America.
If you only read articles from these two and ignored everything else that was written about the pandemic, you’d be more informed with less disinformation running through your head than most Americans.
What makes them so much better than almost everyone else writing about Covid? The answer is a window into where the mainstream media gets coverage about so many topics - from politics to economics to Covid - so wrong even when their facts are correct.
In my view, the biggest problem with the media is that too much emphasis is placed on reporting new information and not enough emphasis is placed on contextualizing that information.
Without context, new information is useless
We all know that context is necessary. After all, cliches like missing the forest for the trees and cherry picking are part of our everyday vernacular for a reason. But proper context is often ommitted from even high quality reporting.
Let’s look at a non-Covid example: fish oil. If you read the New York Times, you would learn that:
What the hell?!?
It’s vital to really understand the context - the scientific history, the previous trials that have been done - to understand the role that each new piece of information plays and to appropriately describe its importance when reporting it.
But context alone is inadequate.
You also need the expertise to understand what you read in the paper
Helen Branswell and Ed Yong are able to report as well as they do because they have real expertise in their subject matter.
All science journalists have backgrounds in reporting on technical concepts. But there’s a difference between reporting on a topic in depth and reporting on a number of different topics superficially.
I can’t become an expert in inflammatory bowel disease by reading a few papers and seeing a couple of patient even though I’m board certified in internal medicine and took care of some IBD patients during residency. I might become proficient, but I’ll miss the important nuances that can occasionally have a huge impact.
And a science journalist can’t suddenly pivot from covering a variety of different scientific subject to suddenly covering infectious diseases and expect to do it with the level of depth and nuance necessary to inform rather than mislead.
The ultimate lesson - context and expertise matter
It seems like it should be really easy to report the news. You interview a few subject matter experts, read a bunch of articles on the topic, and then write about what’s happening.
It’s important to point out that journalists for major papers really do tend to get their facts correct. They’re up to date on the latest developments and they have access to get quotes from major experts in the field.
These characteristics are necessary but not sufficient for truly insightful science reporting. For that you need true expertise to separate the signal from the noise.
I don’t mean to suggest that you need an advanced degree or true experience in a field to do a good job reporting on it.
But when you haven’t had sufficient a immersion in a subject to develop an understanding of the context, you can end up in a situation where the facts are right but the story is wrong.
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