What should the media learn from coronavirus?

Apr 30, 2020

Charlie Warzel, a New York Times opinion writer focusing on the intersections of technology and media, dives deep into the media's challenges during the coronavirus pandemic. He articulates how rapidly changing data complicates reporting, leading to public distrust. Warzel emphasizes the need for transparency and better communication of uncertainty. He also discusses the importance of diverse perspectives in journalism and critiques how misinformation can undermine public health messaging, ultimately advocating for a more resilient media approach.

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ADVICE

Embrace Uncertainty

The media should embrace uncertainty and probabilistic reporting.
Clearly communicate what is known and unknown, treating audiences with sophistication.

INSIGHT

Balancing Accuracy and Alarm

The media faces a challenge: balancing the need for accuracy with the pressure to be calming.
Consistently downplaying potential threats can lead to underestimation when a real crisis hits.

INSIGHT

Differing Incentives

Venture capitalists can be right occasionally and still succeed, while journalists must be consistently right.
This difference in incentives affects how each approaches risk and uncertainty.

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The coronavirus is “a nightmare scenario” for media, wrote New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel. “It is stealthy, resilient and confounding to experts. It moves far faster than scientists can study it. What seems to be true today may be wrong tomorrow.”

Warzel is right. We’ve talked a lot in recent years about fake news. But combatting information we know is false is a straightforward problem compared to covering a story where we don’t know what’s true, and where yesterday’s expert consensus becomes tomorrow’s derided falsehoods. In these cases, the normal tools of journalism begin to fail, and trust is easily lost.

There’s been a lot of criticism of what the media missed in the run-up to coronavirus. Some of it has been unfair. But some of it demands attention, reflection, and change. There’s also a lot the media got right, and those successes need to be celebrated and learned from. The questions raised here are hard, and go to one of the trickiest issues in journalism: how does a profession that prides itself on reporting truth cover the world probabilistically? What do we do when we simply can't know what's true, and when some of what we think we know might become untrue?

Warzel covers the way technology, information, and media interact with and change each other. He’s one of the people I turn to first when I’m churning over these questions, which is…not infrequent. And so what you’re going to hear in this podcast is a bit different than the normal fare: this is less an interview-with-an-expert, and more the kind of conversation that I — and others in the media — am having a lot of right now, and that I think we at least need to try and have in public.

References:

What went wrong with the media’s coronavirus coverage? by Peter Kafka, Recode

What we pretend to know about the coronavirus could kill us, by Charlie Warzel, NYT

Book recommendations:

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

If you enjoyed this episode, check out:

Is the media amplifying Trump's racism? (with Whitney Phillips)

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