[ad_1]
But because of the new disease, scientists and public health authorities are studying in real time — and have been for more than a year and a half — developing knowledge on important topics such as immunity and long covetousness. Scientists often look for people’s answers, but this is not always clear to ordinary people because they can expect immediate and authoritative information.
“One thing [public health authorities] we didn’t necessarily move forward because we need to see that we are communicating about uncertainty, ”says Renée DiResta, head of technical research at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
This lack of clarity in public health messages, and sometimes conflict, can filter through the press and create a gap that can be disturbed and spread by misleading or unverified information, DiResta says.
“Anyone with an opinion can fill that gap,” he added.
All of these conflicting messages, along with the reality of slow scientific time, can increase mistrust. Instead of seeing the changes in official guidelines as a sign that health authorities are responding responsibly to new data, it is easy for people to believe again that those authorities and the media were wrong — for example, when the CDC changed mask guidelines. Politically motivated actors take advantage of this mistrust. Titles and deceptions tweets as reputable news outlets or journalists ’announcements age badly, they can be reused in“ gotcha ”memes, memes used by hyperpartist influences to continue to erode trust in the media.
“Entities like Newsmax will take every opportunity to find an incident that has been reported or altered from a CNN broadcast,” says DiResta.
Public health officials (and reporters who cover what officials say and do) need a better system for communicating what we don’t know yet, and explaining that the orientation can change based on new information. DiResta has defended one A view like Wikipedia public health, where the evolution of scientific knowledge and debate is public and transparent, and can lead to what many experts know. “It will never go back to the old way, where some people make some determinations in the back room and present a joint consensus to a trusted public,” he says. “That model is over.”
“If journalists spend less time developing these complex, nuanced daily stories, coups, and stories, we will do a much greater public service.”
Erika Check Hayden, UC Santa Cruz
We are already seeing this kind of back-and-forth science on social media among researchers, public health experts and doctors. Erika Check Hayden, a science journalist and director of the science communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said journalists need to reflect with greater access to scientific thinking.
“It can be informative, from a journalist’s point of view, if you understand [how experts] they’re working on what’s going on, ”he says.“ What’s not helpful is if you stick to that moment and represent some kind of conclusion. ”
That’s good advice for the average reader as well.
Pay attention to what is most useful
So how do you find reliable news that is relevant to your life? One option is to pay attention to sources that don’t just focus on coup coverage, especially local ones. Reports that contextualize the daily numbers you see will be more helpful than endless series of stories with just the data in the top line.
South Side Weekly—A non-profit newspaper based in Chicago — provides a model for something else. Weekly covers South Chicago, an area that is mostly non-white. It was produced by a large volunteer newspaper ChiVaxBot, An automated Twitter account that shares two maps side by side every day: covid-19 embedding rates by zip code and covid-19 death rates by zip code. Instead of showing a photo of the data one day, the daily updates showed a pattern over time. Due to the slow and consistent follow-up, the bot sounded the alarm about vaccine disparities: black and Latino areas had high deaths, but low vaccination rates, a situation that continues today.
[ad_2]
Source link
