Variants or scariants?
Negativity and fear shaped much of the coverage around variants and vaccines earlier this year. In February 2021, Zeynep Tufekci, PhD, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill school of information and library science, wrote in The Atlantic about how much reporting has not reflected “the truly amazing reality of these vaccines,” and has instead highlighted “a chorus of relentless pessimism.”
This felt especially true earlier in 2021, when lots of coverage repeatedly emphasized what vaccinated people still could not do.
Eric Topol, MD, editor-in-chief of Medscape and executive vice president of Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, said New York Times editors told him earlier in the pandemic that he couldn’t use the word “scariant” in an opinion piece about the media’s overly fearful and sometimes inaccurate reporting around COVID-19 variants because they worried it would seem like the Times was coming after other media outlets.
“A variant is innocent until proven guilty,” said Dr. Topol. Had journalists approached the subject from that point of view, he said we would have seen “much more faithful reporting.”
Dr. Brossard and Dr. Newman worry that focusing on uncommon negative behavior, like people who break social distancing and mask rules by gathering at the beach or the bar, makes those actions seem more common than they actually are.
The evidence suggests that “if you show these kinds of things to people, you encourage them to do the same behavior,” said Dr. Brossard.
There have been other mistakes along the way, too. Early in the pandemic, many outlets pointed viewers to official government sources of information, some of which, like the White House press briefings in March and April of 2020, ended up being some of the most virulent spreaders of misinformation, said Ms. Bell.
Before that, a handful of journalists like Roxanne Khamsi were the few pushing back against the dominant media narrative in early 2020 that the novel coronavirus was less concerning than the seasonal flu.
“Science journalists have always been writing about studies that sometimes contradict each other, and what’s happened is that has only been condensed in time,” said Ms. Khamsi, a health care reporter for outlets like WIRED magazine and The New York Times and a former chief news editor for Nature Medicine.
Politics and misinformation
It’s impossible to talk about media coverage of COVID-19 without touching on politics and misinformation.
Coverage of the pandemic was politicized and polarized from the very beginning, said Sedona Chinn, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who researches the prevalence and effects of scientific disagreements in media.
By looking at network news transcripts and articles from national outlets like the Washington Post and The New York Times, Dr. Chinn and her colleagues were able to determine politicization of coverage by counting the mentions of politicians versus scientists in COVID-19 coverage and polarization by looking at how different or similar the language was surrounding mentions of Republicans and Democrats.
If the two parties were working together or on the same page, they reasoned, the language would be similar.
From mid-March through May 2020, Dr. Chinn and fellow researchers found politicians were featured more often than scientists in newspaper coverage and as frequently as scientists in network news coverage. They also found polarized language around Republicans and Democrats, particularly in stories describing duels between the (at the time) Republican national government and Democratic state and local leaders.
It’s possible that polarization in news coverage helped contribute to polarized attitudes around the virus, the authors write in the study, which was published in August 2020 in the journal Science Communication.
The politicization and polarization of the issue is mirrored in our fractured media environment, where people tend to read, listen, and watch outlets that align with their political leanings. If that trusted outlet features misinformation, the people who follow it are more likely to accept that false information as truth, said Matt Motta, PhD, a political scientist at Oklahoma State University whose research includes public opinion and science communication.
This is true across the political spectrum, he said. When it comes to COVID-19, however, right-wing media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart are more likely to promote conspiratorial tropes and misinformation about the pandemic, according to Dr. Motta and his collaborator Dominik Stecula, PhD, a political scientist at Colorado State University who studies the news media environment and its effects on society.
Across the media ecosystem, reporting on the “infodemic” accompanying the pandemic – the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation about the virus – has been a major challenge. Outlets may not be creating the misinformation, but they are the ones choosing to give it a platform, said Dr. Motta.
By repeating a false idea, even with the goal of debunking it, you can unintentionally cause the information to stick in people’s minds, said Dr. Brossard.
“Just because something is controversial doesn’t mean it’s worth covering,” said Dr. Motta. Using vaccines as an example, he said many reporters and scientists alike assume that if people have all the facts, they’ll land on the side of science.
“That is just fundamentally not how people think about the decision to get vaccinated,” he said. Instead, the choice is wrapped up with cultural factors, religious beliefs, political identity, and more.
The factors and challenges that shaped the media’s coverage of the pandemic aren’t going anywhere. Improving science and medical coverage in the future is a collective project for journalists, scientists, and everyone in between, said Dr. Newman.
“I call on scientists, too, to think really deeply about how they’re communicating – and especially how they’re communicating what they know and don’t know,” he said.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.