![]() The largely volunteer newspaper produced the ChiVaxBot, an automated Twitter account that shares two maps side by side each day: covid-19 vaccination rates by zip code and covid-19 death rates by zip code. The Weekly covers the South Side of Chicago, a majority nonwhite area. South Side Weekly-a nonprofit newspaper based in Chicago-offers a model for something different. Reporting that contextualizes the daily numbers you see is likely more helpful than an endless series of stories that simply rattle off the top-line data. ![]() So how can you find trustworthy news that feels relevant to your life? One option is to keep an eye out for sources, especially local ones, that don’t exclusively focus on blow-by-blow coverage. That’s good advice for the average reader, too. “What’s unhelpful is if you latch on to that at any given moment and portray it as some sort of conclusion.” “It can be informative, from a journalist’s perspective, if you understand are working out what is going on,” she says. Erika Check Hayden, a science journalist and director of the science communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says that journalists need to remember to do their due diligence with this increased access to scientific deliberation. We already see that kind of scientific back-and-forth play out on social media between researchers, public health experts, and doctors. "If journalists spent less time on this day-to-day, blow-by-blow, and more time developing these complex and nuanced stories, we will be doing a much greater public service." Erika Check Hayden, UC Santa Cruz “It is never going to go back to the old way, where they make some determination in some back room and present a unified consensus to a trusting public,” she says. DiResta has argued for a Wikipedia-like approach to public health, where the evolution of scientific knowledge and debate is public and transparent, and a wide range of experts can contribute what they know. Public health officials (and the reporters covering what officials say and do) need a better system of communicating what we don’t yet know and explaining that guidance could change on the basis of new information. “Entities like Newsmax will take any opportunity to find a misreported or changed fact from a CNN broadcast,” DiResta says. Sloppy headlines and misleading tweets by reputable news outlets, or journalists’ predictions that age poorly, can be repurposed into ”gotcha” memes that hyperpartisan influencers use to continue chipping away at trust in the media. Politically motivated actors exploit that distrust. Instead of seeing changes in official guidance as signs that health authorities are responding to new data responsibly, it‘s easy for the public to believe that those authorities and the media had it wrong again-for example, when the CDC changed its mask guidelines. “That void can be filled by anyone with an opinion,” she adds.Īll those conflicting messages, combined with the reality of slow scientific timelines, can exacerbate distrust. This lack of clarity-and sometimes the conflict-in public health messages can filter down to the press and create a vacuum where misleading or unverified information can fester and spread, DiResta says. Why? One reason is that “ scariant” stories drive clicks, and many outlets rely on digital ads, which generate money on the basis of traffic. She says that sometimes, news outlets that write about variants are “calling out that the theater is on fire” but neglect to “inform people where the exits of a theater are and how to get there.” We would stay focused on 'The vaccines work-let's get vaccinated.'" Gigi Kwik Gronvall, Johns Hopkins "If this pandemic had happened 10 years ago we wouldn't be having this conversation. And either way, the variants are all treated the same by doctors. That means most people who catch covid won’t ever know which variant they got, Kwik Gronvall says. In the US, at least, genetic sequencing is mainly used for broad surveillance-not on a case-by-case basis. It’s true that delta’s increased transmissibility has forced many jurisdictions to reinstate masking and distancing.īut if you see a headline like “How to tell if you have the delta variant,” you need to know that it’s ultimately an unhelpful way to think about things.
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