We spend a lot of time criticizing bad journalism after the fact. Many of those criticisms are well deserved and should be used to help media professionals avoid those same mistakes in the future.
But wouldn't it be even better if we could pinpoint some key stories we know are going to happen in the near future and provide professional journalists with a list of pre-coverage guidelines? This would be even more helpful and avoid what often comes off as reactionary, knee-jerk attacks on the media.
Luckily, we have just such an event coming up: Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has announced plans to allow the state's nail salons, massage therapists, bowling allies and gyms to open again starting this Friday. Restaurants and movie theaters will be allowed to reopen the following Monday.
We've already seen plenty of journalistic errors in the coverage of this story since it broke over the weekend. The best example is CNN.com's headline on the story that includes the phrase saying that the move, "... will likely please Trump," thus ensuring that this issue will be seen as a yet another pro/con Trump dividing line where facts go to die. (HINT: Whether or not this move will "please Trump" is something that can be actually ascertained by asking the president about it at one of his daily news conferences. It could also be reported via sources, etc. You know, by using journalism).
We also have lots of supposedly objective journalists who have already gone on record, on social media and elsewhere, rooting heavily against, (and in some cases for), the Georgia experiment to succeed. Thus, anything those journalists write about how the Georgia reopening proceeds is hopelessly tainted by their all-too-public admissions about where they stand on the idea.
But so far, all I've done is give you yet another example of criticizing bad journalist conduct after the fact. However it's a good jumping off point for the following three rules on how to cover this crucial Georgia reopening story fairly and accurately:
1) Stop publicly rooting for a particular outcome
Luckily not every journalist likely to cover this story first hand has weighed in publicly about how he or she wants it to turn out. So if you're one of those journalists who hasn't declared their feelings on the issue known as of yet, keep it that way!
Remember, you don't want to be like the Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago, who tweeted that she hoped Floridians going to the Florida's open beaches would get the coronavirus and "thin the ranks" of Trump voters and supporters of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. (Santiago later deleted and apologized for the tweets).
2) Learn and use some basic mathematical context
This is a big one that trips up journalists, even ones who are not very politically biased. Since my earliest days as a local TV news producer, I've been confronted with on-air reporters, anchors, and even print journalists who don't understand basic math. Countless times, I've had to explain the difference between percentage points and percentages, (for example: a tax rate increase from 5% to 10% is a 100% tax rate increase, not a 5% increase, etc.).
Watch carefully for these kinds of mistakes as the Georgia story plays out. Expect many journalists to describe the number of coronavirus deaths in the state by conflating the words "total deaths" and "death rate." Death rates are percentages, and total deaths are an aggregate number.
There are also likely to be careless usages of words like "spike" and "exponential" to describe what are in fact just increases in aggregate numbers over time. We're already seeing this mistake in Israeli newspapers and websites, where the total deaths due to coronavirus have remained under 200 for weeks now, but every increase to the aggregate total has been described in headlines and iPhone alerts as a "spike" or a "jump."
Context is also a place where mathematics and journalism often converge, and leaves journalism lying lifelessly on the ground. Any changes to Georgia's death or infection rates will need to be compared to states of similar sizes that have not ended any parts of their lockdowns. Otherwise, there's no way to really judge if any state is faring better than another.
Finally, journalists love to personalize stories no matter how much that practice skews mathematical or factual realities. I used to joke with my journalism students at NYU that if they create a cure for kidney disease, saving millions of lives, the New York Times would find a way to publish a remorseful piece about a janitor at a dialysis center who was now out of work.
We're already seeing this kind of journalistic malpractice in the coverage of the COVID-19 victims. Younger victims have been much more likely to have their stories covered in the news media, even though the death rate among people under 70 years old remains remarkably low. And when older people are specially eulogized by the media, you'd have to be blind not to notice that the pictures of the deceased are almost always many decades old to imply they were younger than they really were at the time of death. This is sloppy and dishonest work, period.
3) Don't make it all about about Trump
As I wrote above, CNN has already failed this test as it has made it sound -- without evidence -- like Georgia's decision to reopen was Trump's idea and he's really happy about it.
But this is all part of a lazy and nefarious news media M.O. of treating viewers like they're members of political tribes who are incapable of seeing any issue outside of a two-dimensional lens. This kind of thing existed before Trump came around, but it's worse now.
That became most evident when so many in the news media started to clearly suppress and root against any chance that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating the virus. This wasn't just an example of the media's previously non-existent caution when reporting on possible medical treatments and cures. It was, and continues to be, proof of the news media's belief that it must play an activist role against Trump. Of course, in the case of FOX News and its much more favorable hydroxychloroquine coverage, it's an example of a much smaller part of the media that acts to support the president. Either way, it's bad journalism.
There are a few more obvious pointers, like remembering not to fall into the lazy trap of depicting this story as a "dollars vs. lives" debate. Massive unemployment will also cause thousands of deaths, and journalists or anyone else not living with unemployment should never forget that.
It also would be nice if journalists would stop depicting themselves as all-knowing about the virus and what does and doesn't work to beat it. Even the world's best epidemiologists admit they're still tremendously stumped by so much of this COVID-19 mess, so let's all cool it with the social media posts and even published stories where New York and D.C.-based elitists try to publicly shame people they think are "dumb" for going outdoors.
Okay, there are your marching orders. There's still going to be a lot of bad journalism when it comes to how this Georgia reopening story is covered. But at least now no one can say they weren't shown a better way before they fell down the bad reporting rabbit hole.
