Greetings from sunny Richfield Springs, New York, where The Why Axis has set up its temporary August headquarters. We come to you today bearing good news, which, in slightly delayed fashion, is also the answer to last week’s #NameThatData: namely, that the chief conclusion to draw from last week’s leaked CDC report is that the vaccines are working in spectacular fashion.
But alas, that’s probably not the conclusion you arrived at if you read most of the mainstream news headlines covering the study’s findings.
“CDC study shows three-fourths of people infected in Massachusetts coronavirus outbreak were vaccinated,” blared the Washington Post.
“Breaking News: The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated,” said the Times.
And so on and so forth, all across the nation.
The study, which was leaked to the Post last week, dealt in large part with a Covid outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts in which a large number of vaccinated individuals became infected. Those breakthrough infections were what ended up in the headlines. But they were missing critical context.
“Provincetown was a worse case scenario from what I can tell,” said UNC researcher Zeynep Tufecki. “Week of overcrowded, indoors and close-contact— and also really unlucky (remember how one South Korean infected maybe 5000+ in 2020?). But many were vaccinated. Result: it’s over. No deaths. Very very few severe illness.”
“I know I sound like a broken record,” said Brown University public health professor Ashish K. Jha. “But here's the thing: The vaccines are largely working as expected. We had an outbreak in P-town with lots of vaccinated folks infected. No one died. Very few got sick. And things have returned to normal. This is how vaccines work folks.” [some punctuation added].
Misinformation researcher Carl Bergstrom slammed the coverage. “I am convinced that at this stage of the pandemic, misleading and irresponsible headlines from otherwise reputable news outlets are a major source of damaging misinformation,” he said.
“The media has to stop putting up headlines that sound like drunk texts,” said Baylor professor Peter Hotez on CNN.
The people who wrote some of the stories in question are, in many cases, some of the most careful reporters in the business. So what the hell happened?
Bergstrom attributes the fumble to the tendency toward clickbait in the era of advertiser-funded media: more surprising headlines lead to more clicks, which lead to more revenue. I think that’s partially right, but it’s not the whole story. Places like the Times and the Post are focusing more on subscription revenue now. It’s not 2014, when we were all trying to ape Upworthy headline-writing in order to drive Facebook traffic.
Still, editors love an arresting headline. That’s been the case for the entirety of the modern press’ existence. The people in charge of the headlines (and this includes editors, copyeditors and even reporters) are typically trying to put the strongest possible formulation of the story’s argument at the top of it. This may feel like clickbait, but in many cases it’s just good old-fashioned sensationalism.
Part of the reason this attitude persists, even at newspapers that have ostensibly given up chasing the ever-diminishing returns of advertiser revenue, is that reporters and editors are highly averse to thinking about how their stories affect their readers. Sure, news outlets love to chase “impact” in terms of the subjects of their coverage — the crooked politician exposed, the congressional inquiry launched, the justice delivered to a person wronged.
But the press as whole spends surprisingly little time thinking through how their coverage affects the people who read it. Ask an editor how a lurid crime story may fuel misperceptions about the prevalence of homicide, or how giving a platform to an election-denier may legitimize conspiracy theories, or how a story about a worst-case scenario outbreak may bolster vaccine hesitancy, and you’re likely to get a response that ranges from indifferent to hostile.
“We just report the facts, wherever they lead” is the typical media industry answer to these sorts of questions. “We’re not at war, we’re at work,” in one of the nobler formulations. “We report, you decide,” in one of the more cynical ones.
These answers all take an incredibly naive view of “facts” as shards of objective reality recovered from the miasma of everyday life by the valiant reporters who devote their lives to finding them. In reality — and as every reporter knows, which makes the industry’s storybook version of ‘truth’ that much more aggravating — facts are highly constructed things. Reporters, editors — all of us, really — have tremendous leeway in how we decide to present any given piece of information.
We can tell you that three quarters of infections in a recent outbreak were among the vaccinated. We can tell you that virtually none of those people got sick. We can tell you that there have been 125,000 infections among the vaccinated so far. We can tell you that works out to a breakthrough rate of well under 1 percent.
All of those statements are true, and yet they present very different versions of reality. The incredible, and often unacknowledged power wielded by the press is the power to choose which version to give to their readers. One way for the industry to rebuild the public’s shattered trust is to start being more up front about all this.