H5N1

Update on COVID-19 in Canada: Epidemiology and Modelling

The Public Health Agency of Canada has published Update on COVID-19 in Canada: Epidemiology and Modelling. This is a 21-page PDF which offers very up-to-date information; it may be useful to persons in other countries as well.

Download Update_covid_19_Canada_epidemiology_modelling_29june2020

Have we normalized the COVID-19 death toll?

Via the Columbia Journalism Review: Have we normalized the COVID-19 death toll?  Excerpt:

In early May, Charlie Warzel, a columnist at the New York Times, saw a tweet that hit him “like a ton of bricks.” In the tweet, Eric Nelson, who works in book publishing, imagined a future in which Americans simply get used to the death toll from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Warzel wondered if we might be there already. 

“The day I read Mr. Nelson’s tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus,” he wrote. “And yet their collective passing was hardly mourned. After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?” 

He went on to compare the possible normalization of COVID deaths to the normalization of deaths caused by gun violence. 

In late May, as America approached 100,000 total recorded COVID deaths, the Times, where editors had been reflecting on how best to mark the milestone, published a striking Sunday front page. Under the headline, “US Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss,” the Times ran a list, spanning the length and breadth of A1, naming COVID victims in the US, each with a mini obituary. (“Muriel M. Going, 92, Cedarburg, Wis., taught her girls sheepshead and canasta”; “Eugene Lamar Limbrick, 41, Colorado Springs, loved automobiles, especially trucks.”) Simone Landon, an editor on the paper’s graphics desk, said the idea was to demonstrate the humanity behind the grim numbers, amid what Landon and her colleagues sensed was “a little bit of fatigue” with COVID data, “both among ourselves and perhaps in the general reading public.”  

As that week progressed, other outlets followed suit. On Wednesday, May 27—the day the official milestone was predicted to be hit, and was—the front page of USA Today showed the faces of 100 COVID victims, next to a graphic demonstrating scale. As soon as the 100,000 number was confirmed, it was splashed atop news websites and announced on cable news. “Very sad breaking news we can report right now,” Wolf Blitzer said on CNN. “Very, very sad.” The following day, the front page of The Washington Post portrayed victims as beams of light, shooting up from a map of the US. The cover of The Economist turned the 100,000 figure into a literal milestone, casting a shadow across an empty road. Its headline: “The American way.”  

According to several news organizations and Johns Hopkins University, America passed 110,000 confirmed COVID deaths in the past few days; in other words, more than 10,000 people—10,000 beams of light, 100 times the faces on a USA Today cover, one-tenth of an Economist milestone—died in the 10 or so days since the 100,000 marker was hit. There’s been some coverage of the rising death count since late May, but nothing of the depth and breadth that we saw back then. The difference is complicated to assess (more on which below)—but it’s hard to avoid feeling like it exposed the arbitrariness of using round numbers as news pegs for human life. 

Quantifying loss of life is always fraught; with COVID-19, the methodological discrepancies in how we count cases and deaths add an extra layer of arbitrariness. (A recent analysis by the Post and the Yale School of Public Health concluded that overall deaths linked to the pandemic likely surpassed 100,000 three weeks before the official count—and headlines—caught up.) 

As the toll continues to climb, it seems likely that the gaps between the numbers we consider round enough to note will grow ever larger. Yesterday—the day I returned to Mr. Warzel’s old column—498 Americans were reported to have died. To borrow his words, “their collective passing was hardly mourned.” 

There’s a lot to parse here. The packages marking the 100,000 milestone were powerful journalism, and many of them reckoned with the nuances outlined above. (For instance, the Post, even prior to its analysis with Yale, noted that the true death count was likely higher; the Times acknowledged that a number “can never convey the individual arcs of life, the 100,000 ways of greeting the morning and saying good night.”) 

The pandemic as a whole is still a big news story, including on cable. Yesterday, for example, we heard about New York’s reopening, Trump’s imminent plan to start holding rallies again, and the World Health Organization’s warning that, on Sunday, the daily rate of new confirmed cases hit a high, suggesting that globally, the pandemic is getting worse.  

Still, too often, the COVID coverage we’re now seeing feels tired, as if it’s going through the motions. That’s understandable. After years of whiplash news and months of this particular cycle, journalists are exhausted—not to mention furloughed, underpaid, unemployed, arrested, assaulted, and so on. The pandemic story has been especially demanding to cover—for logistical, scientific, and emotional reasons—and also to consume. Fatigue isn’t limited to the press; as Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal wrote for The Atlantic on Sunday, America as a whole “slowly seems to be giving up” on the battle against the pandemic. But we have to fight such feelings. The stakes are too high not to.

COVID-19 pandemic shows global consequences of China’s local censorship rules

Via the South China Morning Post: Coronavirus pandemic shows global consequences of China’s local censorship rules. Excerpt:

Cui Yongyuan may not be a household name in the West, but the former state media television host has almost 20 million social media followers in China, or about double those tracking the Twitter account of CNN’s Anderson Cooper in the US. 

Cui was one of the highest profile bloggers on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, where he was known for his social commentary and whistle-blowing. 

But last year his posting stopped and in May he found that posts containing his nickname “Xiaocui” had been blocked. 

That same month his account on WeChat, China’s biggest social media platform with 1 billion active users worldwide, was suspended citing fraud, according to screen shots he posted on Twitter. 

“My name is censored. Are you trying to force me to the other side?”, he wrote on Twitter on May 15, referring to him having to use Western social media. 

Cui, who teaches at the Communication University of China in Beijing, has also written about the Covid-19 disease outbreak and may be the latest victim of China’s censors to join the ranks of the “digital migrants” – a term for those who have been driven on to foreign social media platforms. 

A WeChat spokesperson declined to comment on the closing of user accounts and content censorship. Three emails to Weibo seeking comment were not answered and a phone call to the company was not picked up. 

Cui did not respond to a message on Twitter asking for further information.

Fu King-wa, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Hong Kong, said China’s censorship was no longer just a local issue, because the Covid-19 pandemic showed the international consequences of blocking information about such threats. 

“In China, that kind of restricted information can really have huge global implications,” said Fu, who has been running the Weiboscope project to track censorship on the platform since 2011. 

“In an authoritarian state like China, public conversation on many critical issues is restricted, media outlets are state-controlled and dissidents and independent journalists are routinely silenced,” he said, adding that raising early warnings in such a system was particularly challenging. 

Censorship not only curtailed the response of Chinese people to the outbreak, but it may have meant that the global media was slower to wake up to the crisis, according to a paper Fu published with his colleague Yuner Zhu in the Journal of Risk Research in April. 

China has the world’s highest number of internet users at over 854 million in 2019 according to the country’s Cyberspace Administration. 

However, its online world is confined within the so-called “Great Firewall”, and everything from criticism of the government to pornography is censored. 

Technology companies that run China’s social media platforms employ thousands of content moderators as censors and develop algorithms to prevent anything sensitive from being published or to quickly remove it, while foreign websites and social media platforms such Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are blocked.  

It is possible to circumvent the wall by using a virtual private network (VPN), a piece of software that masks the location a user is posting from, but their use is illegal without a licence and they are not legally available to Apple and Android users. 

Those caught selling VPNs can be jailed. A man was given a three-year sentence by a Shanghai court in 2018. 

The Weiboscope project turned its attention to the Covid-19 disease this year, sifting through over 1.2 million posts drawn from a bank of randomly selected users and high-profile accounts that contained at least one coronavirus-related keyword. 

About 2,100 posts – or 1.7 per thousand – were censored between December and February 27, according to Fu’s data. 

Although the number may not seem high, most social media posts are usually state media reports or entertainment content, creating a massive common denominator, he said.

It’s not just Trump — Twitter fact-checking thousands of tweets, many about COVID-19

Via Global News, a Reuters report: It’s not just Trump — Twitter fact-checking thousands of tweets, many about coronavirus. Excerpt:

In addition to disputing misleading claims made by U.S. President Donald Trump about mail-in ballots this week, Twitter has added fact-checking labels to thousands of other tweets since introducing the alerts earlier this month, mostly on posts about the coronavirus. 

The company does not expect to need additional staff for the undertaking, Twitter spokeswoman Liz Kelley said on Saturday. Nor is it partnering with independent fact-checking organizations, as Facebook and Google have, to outsource the debunking of viral posts flagged by users.  

Social media platforms have been under fierce scrutiny over how they police rapidly spreading false information and other types of abusive content since Russia exploited the networks to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  

Fact-checking groups said they welcomed Twitter’s new approach, which adds a “get the facts” tag linking to more information, but said they hoped the company would more clearly lay out its methodology and reasoning. 

On Friday, Chief Executive Jack Dorsey acknowledged the criticism, saying he agreed fact-checking “should be open source and thus verifiable by everyone.” In a separate tweet, Dorsey said more transparency from the company was “critical.” 

The company’s move to label Trump’s claims about mail-in ballots separates it from larger competitors such as Facebook , which declares its neutrality by leaving fact-check decisions to third-party partners and exempts politicians’ posts from review.

“To a degree, fact-checking is subjective. It’s subjective in what you pick to check, and it’s subjective in how you rate something,” said Aaron Sharockman, executive director of U.S. fact-checking site PolitiFact, who said Twitter’s process was opaque.  

Twitter telegraphed in May that its new policy of adding fact-checking labels to disputed or misleading coronavirus information would be expanded to other topics.  

It said this week — after tagging Trump’s tweets — that it was now labeling misleading content related to election integrity.

Twitter’s Kelley said the team is continuing to expand the effort to include other topics, prioritizing claims that could cause people immediate harm.

The many COVID-19 conspiracy theories

Via the Columbia Journalism Review, an excellent article by Jon Allsop: The many coronavirus conspiracy theories.

On February 2, more than a month before the World Health Organization deemed the spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, it declared that the virus had led to a “massive infodemic.” WHO observed “an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.” 

A few months later, the infodemic has only intensified. Conspiracy theories are sloshing around the internet, alleging, among other wild claims, that China deliberately engineered the virus in a lab, that the US military implanted the virus in China, that Bill Gates wants to use vaccination to microchip the world’s population, and that the virus is spreading via 5G technology. 

Often, right-wing media outlets have boosted the signal; last week, for example, One America News Network, an outlet beloved of Trump, implicated Gates, George Soros, and the Clintons in a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control.” Sometimes, the White House has been the booster. We all remember bleachgate.  

Early this month, a viral YouTube video brought some of these strands together. The video—a clip from a “documentary” called Plandemic—starred Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who claims, among other things, that wearing a face mask can actively make you sick, and that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suppressed her work on the harms of vaccines. (There is zero evidence for any of this.) 

The video was promoted aggressively by anti-vaccination activists and by adherents of QAnon, a convoluted deep-state conspiracy theory; the Epoch Times, a right-wing media outlet with ties to Falun Gong, also boosted Mikovits’s message. This week, Davey Alba, of the New York Times, reported that mentions of Mikovits on social media and TV have “spiked to as high as 14,000 a day.” 

Facebook and YouTube eventually removed the video, but not before it reached millions of users. Erin Gallagher, a social-media researcher who charted the video’s spread, concluded that “both platforms were instrumental in spreading viral medical misinformation.” 

According to Anna Merlan, of VICE, Zach Vorhies, a former YouTube and Google staffer who now has ties to QAnon and anti-vaxxers, helped orchestrate the video’s virality.

The Mikovits video reached at least eight million people, and it may only be a small taste of conspiracies to come. Kevin Roose, who covers technology for the Times, writes that he was watching the clip from Plandemic when a “terrifying thought” struck him: “What if we get a COVID-19 vaccine and half the country refuses to take it?” 

Roose sees a number of reasons why a future COVID vaccine could play into the hands of propagandists—it’ll likely have been fast-tracked, adding rocket fuel to existing vaccine-safety fears; it’ll likely be mandatory, at least for certain groups, boosting anger about perceived government overreach; and anti-vaxx boogeymen, including Gates and the WHO, may end up being closely involved in its development. 

The anti-vax movement, Roose writes, is highly organized and media savvy. By contrast, the messaging of authoritative official health sources can be clunky and poorly suited to online discourse. As Renée DiResta, a researcher with the Stanford Internet Observatory, wrote in a recent column for The Atlantic, “All too often, the people responsible for protecting the public do not appear to understand how information moves in the internet era.” 

The pandemic is particularly fertile ground for conspiracists. There is not, as yet, an authoritative, established scientific consensus about the virus and its spread, leaving wide informational gaps for nonsense to fill. And the fact that the coronavirus is, as I wrote in March, an “everything story,” affecting every single aspect of our lives, lends itself conveniently to a conspiracist’s habit of thinking in terms of sweeping theories with unifying explanatory power. 

Yesterday, The Atlantic launched “Shadowland,” a series of pieces, on themes broader than the coronavirus, examining America’s vulnerability to paranoid thinking. In an introductory note, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, writes that “the conspiracy theorists are winning.” That, he believes, poses an “existential threat.”  

Deep, insightful coverage of our poisoned information ecosystem is welcome. Still, conspiracy theories are highly fraught terrain for the reality-based press. By debunking theories, we risk reinforcing their appeal, and furthering their spread. “Throw a fact check at a subversion myth, and it will transform into proof for believers,” Whitney Phillips wrote for this magazine’s recent disinformation-themed issue. “After all, trying to disprove the existence of a Satanic plot is exactly what a Satanist would do.” 

Journalists must decide, on a case-by-case basis and in real time, which theories are widespread—and harmful—enough to demand rectification, and the best way to go about doing that. It isn’t an easy task. It’s especially hard when lives are on the line.

Three reasons why Jacinda Ardern's COVID-19 response has been a masterclass in crisis leadership

Via The Conversation: Three reasons why Jacinda Ardern's coronavirus response has been a masterclass in crisis leadership. Excerpt

Imagine, if you can, what it’s like to make decisions on which the lives of tens of thousands of other people depend. If you get things wrong, or delay deciding, they die.  

Your decisions affect the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, resulting in huge economic disruption, mass layoffs and business closures. Imagine you must act quickly, without having complete certainty your decisions will achieve what you hope.  

Now imagine that turning your decisions into effective action depends on winning the support of millions of people. 

Yes, you do have enforcement capacity at your disposal. But success or failure hinges on getting most people to choose to follow your leadership – even though it demands sudden, unsettling, unprecedented changes to their daily lives. 

This is the harsh reality political leaders around the world have faced in responding to COVID-19. As someone who researches and teaches leadership – and has also worked in senior public sector roles under both National and Labour-led governments – I’d argue New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is giving most Western politicians a masterclass in crisis leadership. 

Three communication skills every leader needs 

When it comes to assessing New Zealand’s public health response, we should all be listening to epidemiologists like Professor Michael Baker. On Friday, Baker said New Zealand had the “most decisive and strongest lockdown in the world at the moment” – and that New Zealand is “a huge standout as the only Western country that’s got an elimination goal” for COVID-19. 

But how can we assess Ardern’s leadership in making such difficult decisions? A good place to start is with American professors Jacqueline and Milton Mayfield’s research into effective leadership communication.  

The Mayfields’ research-based model highlights “direction-giving”, “meaning-making” and “empathy” as the three key things leaders must address to motivate followers to give their best. 

Being a public motivator is essential for leaders – but it’s often done poorly. The Mayfields’ research shows direction-giving is typically over-used, while the other two elements are under-used.  

Ardern’s response to COVID-19 uses all three approaches. In directing New Zealanders to “stay home to save lives”, she simultaneously offers meaning and purpose to what we are being asked to do. 

In freely acknowledging the challenges we face in staying home – from disrupted family and work lives, to people unable to attend loved ones’ funerals – she shows empathy about what is being asked of us.  

The March 23 press conference announcement of New Zealand’s lockdown is a clear example of Ardern’s skillful approach, comprising a carefully crafted speech, followed by extensive time for media questions. 

In contrast, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pre-recorded his March 24 lockdown announcement, offering no chance for questions from the media, while framing the situation as an “instruction” from government, coupled with a strong emphasis on enforcement measures. Where Ardern blended direction, care and meaning-making, Johnson largely sought “compliance”.

Who are your trusted sources on COVID-19?

Via Duke Today, an excellent answer to the question: Who Are Your Trusted Sources on COVID-19? Excerpt (but check the whole list):

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread, the question of where to turn for solid information has never been more important. Many Duke experts are being approached now for their expertise and insight. But where do they turn for guidance and for the latest information? Duke Today asked several Duke experts to share their preferred sources. We’ll share their insights over the coming weeks.  

Gavin Yamey, professor of the practice of global health and public policy and director of the Duke Center for Policy Impact in Global Health, is himself a widely quoted authority on pandemics. To stay abreast of the COVID-19 pandemic, he consults a variety of media, social media and online sources.  

MEDIA   

•     I read everything by Helen Branswell, global health reporter for STAT. Her reporting on COVID-19, from when the pandemic began, has been the finest to date. 

•      John Burn-Murdoch’s scatterplots for the Financial Times have become a valuable resource.

The challenges of reporting on a global COVID-19 pandemic

Via the Columbia Journalism Review: The challenges of reporting on a global pandemic.

Over the past several weeks, the coronavirus known as COVID-19 has become a full-blown global pandemic. Schools and restaurants are closed, stock markets are plummeting, and millions of people are trying to navigate a new world of social distancing and self-isolation. As the number of those infected and hospitalized continues to mount, journalists are working overtime to try to help the public understand the crisis. This week on CJR’s Galley discussion platform, we’ve been talking with reporters, editors, and others about how they are covering the outbreak—and about how they are dealing with their own anxiety.  

Since the story of COVID-19 broke, CJR’s Jon Allsop has seen lots of impressive coverage, including stories on the impact on vulnerable, low-income workers. But nothing ever seems like enough, he says: “The story is so huge that even these great efforts aren’t enough for us to get our heads around it fully.” Eliza Barclay, who covers health, science, energy, and the environment for Vox, agrees that the virus story has been demanding. “The science and response have evolved so quickly, the implications of it are massive and dire, and there is no end in sight to its dominance over everything else,” she says.  

Is all the coverage causing unnecessary panic? Different people have different reactions to difficult news, Barclay says. “Also, fear is a natural human emotion and one that we should expect and allow in our audience. An uncertain, difficult situation like this one is inevitably going to trigger a lot of fear. But I think people are better off with good, clear reporting.” Besides, she adds, fear is often translated into action. “Look at Greta Thunberg’s messaging: It’s stark and clear about the catastrophes that lie ahead without drastic action and it has sparked significant action to reduce emissions.”  

Tom Gara, the opinion editor for BuzzFeed News, has been producing a newsletter about the coronavirus. Twitter, for all its faults, has become a valuable resource for news about COVID-19, he says. “I’m one of the few people left on earth who still just wholeheartedly, without reservation, loves Twitter, and I’ve found it just amazing during all this.” There’s a lot to sift through, he adds. “But I’ve found that virtually anything worth reading ends up surfacing there, and that ranges from stuff published by news outlets to rants on Medium, scientific papers, announcements from local authorities, whatever.” 

CJR also spoke with Claire Wardle, the co-founder and executive director of First Draft, a nonprofit dedicated to studying misinformation. In typical circumstances, it’s common for her to find professional trolls weaponizing misinformation for economic or political gain, but when it comes to COVID-19, she says, the biggest source of misinformation has been people sharing questionable data or tips because they genuinely want to help. “It’s not misinformation,” she explains. “I would say it’s exaggerated gossip. Most of it is really close to the truth. As far as we can tell right now. It’s mostly people being terrified, and many of them are living at home by themselves. People need community and connection, so they’re turning to each other.”

CJR also spoke with Claire Wardle, the co-founder and executive director of First Draft, a nonprofit dedicated to studying misinformation. In typical circumstances, it’s common for her to find professional trolls weaponizing misinformation for economic or political gain, but when it comes to COVID-19, she says, the biggest source of misinformation has been people sharing questionable data or tips because they genuinely want to help. “It’s not misinformation,” she explains. “I would say it’s exaggerated gossip. Most of it is really close to the truth. As far as we can tell right now. It’s mostly people being terrified, and many of them are living at home by themselves. People need community and connection, so they’re turning to each other.”

Wardle’s advice to journalists—and everyone—is to “watch your emotions.” The more emotional your response, the less likely it is to be accurate. And despite being an expert on misinformation, Wardle confesses that even she shared a less-than-accurate WhatsApp post about COVID-19. “I’ll be honest, I’ve been on lockdown for 8 days now,” she says. “I live alone. I’m across the Atlantic from my friends and family and I couldn’t get home right now even if something bad happened because of the travel bans. We’re all human and we’re all worried right now. So all of us can fall for rumors. That’s what we need to remember.”

To learn about COVID-19 pandemic abroad, Chinese sift through fake news

Via Sixth Tone: To Learn About Pandemic Abroad, Chinese Sift Through Fake News. Excerpt:

While COVID-19 has largely been brought under control in China, fake news about the coronavirus ravaging foreign countries is spreading online at an alarming rate.  

People who spend a lot of time on Chinese social media may recognize the following headline template: “(Country) under coronavirus: shops shut down, difficult to return home, it’s so hard to stay in (country)!!” Depending on which articles they’ve come across, they may recall Algeria, Indonesia, Egypt, or some other country as the subject of the article, though the content for each is largely the same. 

As COVID-19 infections fall in China but rise abroad, social messaging app WeChat has been flooded with fake news about the supposedly chaotic pandemic situations in foreign countries. An analysis published Wednesday by Sixth Tone’s sister publication The Paper said that, out of more than three dozen public accounts found to be spreading fake news, many were publishing nearly identical articles, with the only differences being the country’s name and a few minor details.  

The Paper’s analysis cited articles published by two public accounts called “Ethiopia Information for Chinese” and “Hungary Information for Chinese.” Both articles described how businesses in the respective countries had been severely affected by the pandemic, as told through the eyes of a Chinese person living there — a Mr. Xu in the Ethiopia story and a Ms. Liu in the Hungary story. Both articles said that although Xu (or Liu) was worried about the virus, he (or she) had resolved to remain abroad rather than return to China.

The analysis also traced the nearly identical articles to three companies in Fuqing, in the eastern Fujian province — a city that, like Wenzhou to the north, is known for its large number of emigrants abroad. Together, the three companies manage at least 68 different WeChat accounts that claim to share news from Europe, Africa, South America, and elsewhere in Asia.  

According to Shanghai Observer, another domestic outlet, the companies are controlled by three people in the same family: Guo Hong, Xue Yuming, and Guo Shiqiang.  

Guo Shiqiang bluntly told the outlet that the articles were fabricated in order to capitalize on people’s interest in the pandemic. Since there are lots of people from Fuqing working overseas, he had decided to share articles about the COVID-19 situation abroad in hopes of getting their attention, according to Shanghai Observer. 

Most of the trio’s spurious stories have been deleted by WeChat, and they are currently under investigation by local police.

The psychological toll of COVID-19 coverage

Via the Columbia Journalism Review, good advice—especially for those of us active on blogs and social media: The psychological toll of coronavirus coverage. Excerpt:

WE ALREADY HAD INFORMATION OVERLOAD. Then came a global pandemic. Coronavirus is an “everything story,” as Jon Allsop noted in Monday’s CJR newsletter: “unfathomably huge stories—that are all part of one, even more unfathomably huge story”. 

If the shuttered restaurants and roommates making a mess of your kitchen-table workspace aren’t reminder enough that COVID-19 has changed daily life, the news articles about the shuttered restaurants and myriad Twitter threads about other peoples’ roommates making a mess of their kitchen-table workspaces will intensify your awareness.   

That doesn’t even begin to cover stories which attach the pandemic to anything, everything.  The coronavirus and small businesses, the coronavirus and the stock market, the coronavirus and education, the coronavirus and the 2020 election, the coronavirus and how to cut your own bangs. 

On Tuesday, the Washington Post’s health desk released a round-up of mental health experts’ practical steps to easing anxiety. In the article, psychologist Kathy HoganBruen recommends that anxious readers “really try to limit the news consumption or just staring at your phone and your computer, because for most of us that makes mental health worse rather than better.”  

How responsible are we for the feelings that our stories inspire? Is it a journalist’s job to make readers afraid? Is it a journalist’s job to keep people calm? Such questions are, in a sense, an accelerated version of the dilemmas inherent in writing about climate change.  Abby Rabinowitz wrote for CJR, in May of last year, that “there is a longtime convention among climate scientists and communicators that panic is counterproductive.” 

But Rabinowitz also notes David Wallace-Wells’ position in a New York Times Op-Ed from early 2019: “fear may be the only thing that saves us.” Greta Thunberg echoed Wallace-Wells in her own Op-Ed for The Guardian later the same year: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

Dr. Narine Yegiyan, a former journalist and current professor of communication at University of California, Davis, studies how human brains prioritize information in times of cognitive and emotional overload. “Our brain uses very ancient principles to deal with a very modern world,” Yegiyan says. No matter how much information is available, human brains cannot possibly process it all. “Every minute, our body has to decide what goes in, and what information has to be sacrificed.”  

What it prioritizes, out of a survival instinct, is sensational news: Fast-moving! Big! Potentially dangerous! But hyper-focus lowers our ability to process and retain information. And when bad news is everywhere, our processing ability gets even worse. As Yegiyan explains it: “If you encounter a tiger, you’re not going to stop and figure out how many stripes it has.” 

Yegiyan recommends that news organizations slow down and attempt to provide respite and build trust by being a higher-level gatekeeper for information: doing the deeper, slower thinking that news consumers don’t have the time for.   

In times of crisis, newsrooms ought not stop producing the news. But they can slow down, ask themselves what matters most, and be a calm guide for readers. Signal, not noise.