We all got it wrong on coronavirus at some point
#2 of 3 take-aways from the past few months.
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The Worldwise View
Today we have the second takeaway message from media monitoring in the first months of the pandemic.
If you missed the first one, you can catch up here.
Now let’s get into this tangled web of science, politics and risk.
#2—We all got it wrong on coronavirus at some point
By early February, less than a month after the first reports of illness caused by a virus yet to be named, I was alert but not too worried.
Still, I’d noticed something about the coverage that made me uneasy. And it turned out to be more significant than I appreciated then.
I decided to write about it in this Medium piece—saying, in a nutshell:
“Much of the coverage skirts around questions over how worrying this virus really is — reflecting social-political preoccupations more than it does risk.”
At the time, the spotlight was focused on Wuhan’s fight against the virus. And what was coming through mainstream coverage revolved around angles like China’s authoritarian responses, or how the country’s lockdowns could have a knock-on effect on the global economy.
If you looked for it, you could find reports of the scientific work behind the scenes. You could get some answers, or clues at least, on questions that have to do with risk.
But this wasn’t on the front pages—not until the virus hit Europe. And if public health experts, who science journalists rely on, saw a threat coming, they kept fairly quiet in the media. Perhaps too quiet (more on that later).
Part of the reason is what tends to dominate front-page news: politics and the economy. Obviously, those sections aren’t staffed with science journalists. That means that early coverage tended to fall on political journalists who would naturally take a different lens—more likely to ask about who’s to blame than probe to get a science-based picture on risk.
Since then, that balance has been somewhat restored. Through some excellent coverage science journalism has proven itself to be essential and nimble.
Many journalists without scientific expertise pivoted to the health beat as we collectively try to understand this pandemic. And a few expert hands rose to the task consistently—Ed Yong for the Atlantic, Kai Kupferschmidt for Science, Amy Maxmen for Nature, Helen Branswell for STAT, Natasha Loder for the Economist, many others.
But there are lingering questions over how the crisis was handled by the media and by experts.
For a while, the only similarly critical take that I spotted came from this feature in Vox, published in mid-April.
In the piece senior correspondent Peter Kafka probes what went wrong with early coverage in US media, raising points that have relevance globally—how health officials’ early assessments were often wrong, why journalists didn’t say enough about known unknowns, that signs of a serious threat were missed.
It’s a classic dilemma when it comes to communicating risk, and neither scientists nor journalists excel at it:
“This core challenge for journalists won’t go away after the pandemic: There are always going to be threats that could eventually lead to disaster, but most of them don’t. If we holler every time we see one, we’ll be wrong and no one will listen to us. If we don’t holler when there’s a real one, we will have let down our audience,” writes Kafka.
It’s probably fair to say that we all got it wrong at some point—which isn’t to absolve those with a responsibility to protect the public, or to play the blame game.
Several weeks down the line, some of these aspects of pandemic coverage are getting some wider attention.
On July 15 I was attending an online discussion on Covid-19 coverage organised by the LSE, when Lancet editor Richard Horton asked why the media didn't take this pandemic more seriously in January. There was no answer; but at least the question was being asked.
And this week ABSW—the Association of British Science Writers—tackled similar questions in a panel discussion framed as a ‘battle’ between political and science journalists (it was pretty friendly fire). The issue was raised in an earlier ABSW event, where I heard Cambridge-based statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter touch on the problem of non-science journalists covering the pandemic beat.
At this week’s event I had a chance to ask the panellists why they thought early signs of a global threat didn’t make it to the front pages:
“Do you think that's down to priority given to political reporting (e.g. criticisms of China), or is it also down to scientists' reluctance to take risks on communication?,” I asked.
I’m not sure they shared my assessment that early signs of the threat weren’t covered adequately. Pallab Ghosh, BBC Science Correspondent and ABSW honorary president, said media coverage was “proportionate” to the risk.
There was a similar reaction by Fiona Fox, chief executive of the Science Media Centre, who reflected on the question by adding the observation that scientists are often encouraged not to exaggerate risks when communicating to the public.
And this gets back to some of the points raised above—whether scientists were too quiet early on, and how to get it right when communicating risk.
My question to the panel elicited another comment which spoke pretty directly to take-away message number 3, coming up soon—stay tuned 🌎
A final note from the week’s soundtrack
Worldwise is written by Anita Makri
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