NHPR’s The Exchange, hosted by Laura Knoy, devoted a whole hour last month to “Handling H1N1” — handling it, that is, as a journalist. In other words: how should reporters and producers approach the story? Her guests included an epidemiologist, health reporters, and NHPR’s own news director.
Although the program is almost a month old, the advice in it holds up well. Among the things discussed: putting the disease and risks into context, the thinning ranks of experienced health reporters, and finding the balance between underexposing and overexposing the story.
Here’s what two of the guests highlighted.
New Hampshire state epidemiologist Dr. Jose Montero has spent considerable time talking with local media since swine flu emerged. These are some of the things that came up in their discussions:
When we’re talking about public health and infectious diseases, those are topics that create a lot of fear in the general community. And we can overdo awareness and get people to panic, or we can underdo it and then get people unprepared. [...] How do we choose wisely, how do we decide who is really an expert, who we want to be [...] leading the development of public opinion? It cannot be just the state, it cannot be only government, but how can we bring scientists and get the scientists to speak properly in a population-based approach, not about “my last weirdest, more complicated case”? [...] We need to put things in context.
Maryn McKenna is an independent public-health journalist who broke the H5N1 avian-flu story in US media back in August 1997 — so she’s been reporting on flu for a long time. One of her main concerns is the lack of seasoned health reporters:
There are very large numbers of experienced science and health reporters who have lost their jobs because of the economy and the changing shape of the media over the past couple of years. [...] So all the people who would be counted on to know this subject and to be able to give context [...], most of those people don’t work in the media anymore, and the people who are covering the story are people to whom flu is a very new thing [...] and therefore they’re more vulnerable to becoming as alarmed about the topic as a member of the average population would be.
Listen to the entire hour here.
