Environmental Health and the media, Part 3: make noise, make the news.

The cynicism of the trade needs to be abandoned, for the true patterns
of the journalistic apprentice are not the slick persons who scoop the
news, but the patient and fearless men of science who have labored to
see what the world really is.
--Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (1920/1995)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So far, this series has looked at environmental health and the media in counterpoint--that is, as separate institutions that may function

either as antagonists or allies. A number of contrasts and points of conflict have emerged:

* a taste for drama versus a preference for sober understatement,

* a tendency to generalize versus a tendency to qualify, and

* a desire for the limelight versus a tendency to hide.

In the previous two installments, JEH suggested that environmental health professionals could stand to learn from--or at least become more tolerant of--media practices. This article, however, will look at a fundamental commonality of purpose and outlook underlying the two professions--a shared ideal, in other words. And this time, the media will be less a model to be emulated than an object lesson. What has gone wrong in journalism in recent decades can serve as a warning to environmental health. The dangers are twofold: On the one hand, the common philosophical roots of the two professions can entail some blind spots, and on the other hand, a loss of commitment to those roots--to the shared ideal--may be symptomatic of a profession in decline.

What is this shared ideal?

"This is kind of a goofy-sounding thing," said Michael Hawthorne, environment reporter with the Chicago Tribune, "but what is science?... It's the pursuit of truth. And what is journalism? It should be the pursuit of truth as well. So in that respect, we're--I wouldn't say one and the same, but--very similar."

In Worlds Apart: How the Distance Between Science and Journalism Threatens America's Future, Hartz and Chappell put it this way: "Both professions view themselves as examiners, analysts and purveyors of reality" (1997, p. 13).

Theorists of journalism trace this common purpose to the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries (Kovach & Rosenstein, 2001), which proposed that the way to know things about the external world is through hypothesis, testing, and verification. They are passionate about the importance of this kind of fact-based journalism: "History has taught us by bloody experience what happens to a society in which the citizens act on the basis of self-interested information--whether it is propaganda of a despotic state or the edicts of a sybaritic leisure class substituting bread and circuses for sovereignty" (Kovach & Rosenstiel, p. 193).

But look again at Hawthorne's comment. It indirectly reveals a great deal about the state of the media. The preliminary apology--"This is kind of a goofy-sounding thing"--is symptomatic of a professional culture in which embracing a high-minded ideal (e.g., the pursuit of truth) may be perceived as naive at best and presumptuous at worst. In this context. Hawthorne's implicit distinction between the state of science (it is the pursuit of truth) and that of journalism, (it should be the pursuit of truth) sounds a little wistful.

Compare the utter confidence with which Richard Maas, co-director of the Environmental Quality Institute, embraces the same ideal: "Whatever the truth is, that's the truth, and you have to speak it as objectively as you can, and you have to state it evenly and loudly, and you're not whispering, and you just don't worry about any of that [what the focus groups want]. As long as you're speaking the truth from a knowledgeable, pure place, everything will work out."

Perhaps not every environmental health professional will feel quite so certain that it's always more advantageous to tell the truth than to tell people what they want to hear. But in general, journalists seem to have traveled much further down this path of cynicism. And the current widespread disrespect from which they suffer suggests that in the long term, a "naive" commitment to truth telling may do more for a profession than attempts to cater to prevailing tastes.

To illustrate the dangers--from loss of commitment to the pursuit of truth, on the one hand, and from a too-automatic adherence to the principles underlying that ideal, on the other--this article will look at what media professionals and media critics have been saying about the current state of public health coverage. It's interesting that the media has managed to get into both kinds of trouble at once.

But First a Clarification of Terms

Discussions of journalism have grown so controversial in recent years that a brief primer on some familiar terms may be in order. For this discussion, JEH will draw heavily on the work of Kovach and Rosenstiel (1999, 2001), whose Elements of Journalism (2001), in particular, delineates professional standards and is widely used as a teaching text. Kovach and Rosenstiel trace the roots of modern journalism to Walter Lippmann, a prominent journalist of the first half of the 20th century. Partly in reaction to the shortcomings of the penny press and "yellow journalism," Lippmann advocated that the profession adopt "more of 'the scientific spirit'" because "'there is but one kind of unity possible in a world as diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than aim; the unity of disciplined experiment'" (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001, p. 72). In recent years, journalism has lost touch with these roots; Kovach and Rosenstiel note that some newer concepts have been advanced as improvements on the old-fashioned goal of seeking the truth, but they consider them--two familiar ones in particular--to be inadequate.

1. Fairness Is Not Balance

The problem with using "fairness," as a guiding principle for journalism, according to Kovach and Rosenstiel, is that it is "too abstract" and ultimately "more subjective than truth" (2001, p. 46). "Fair to whom?" they ask. To one's sources? To the readers? What if one source is telling the truth and the other is not? "Fairness," writes Daniel Okrent, former public editor for the New York Times, "requires the consideration of all sides of an issue; it doesn't require the uncritical reporting of any" (2004).

2. Balance Is Not Objectivity

Ultimately, Kovach and Rosenstiel point out, "balancing a story by being fair to both sides may not be fair to the truth" (2001, p. 46). In this view they are seconded by Mooney, who, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, sees balance as the byword of "a prevalent but lazy form of journalism that makes no attempt to dig beneath competing claims" (2004, p. 28). An unthinking adherence to balance, he believes, leads to the he-said-she-said formulas whose emptiness and banality readers have learned to hate.

Objectivity Is Not a State of Mind

All this does not mean that fairness and balance should be thrown out the window. Kovach and Rosenstiel see these concepts as "techniques--devices--to help guide journalists in the development and verification of their accounts" (2001, p. 71). The other important tool in this process is objectivity.

Objectivity, they argue, is "one of the great confusions of journalism" (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001, p. 72). It has been taken to mean that the journalist is not supposed to have an opinion about the matter at hand. But "in the original concept ... the method was objective, not the journalist" (p. 74). Indeed, by the early 20th century, when Lippmann was calling on journalists to learn from the methods of scientists, it had been increasingly recognized that bias, often unconscious bias, was practically inevitable (Okrent, 2004). Objectivity referred to a method of testing information "precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their [journalists] work" (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001, p. 72).

Like fairness and balance--like science--objectivity is a method designed to help an investigator overcome his or her "own limits of perception" and his or her "own experience" (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001, p. 71). The method enables individuals who may not be naturally humble to act and think with humility: "Not only should they [journalists] be skeptical of what they see and hear from others, but just as important, they should be skeptical about their ability to know what it really means" (p. 85).

The Method--A Shared Strength

How does the objective method work in journalism? As in science, the pursuit of truth is an ongoing process:</p> <pre> The individual reporter may not be able to move much beyond a surface level of accuracy in a first story. But the first story builds to a second, in which the sources of news have responded to mistakes and missing elements in the first, and the second to a third, and so on. Context is added in each successive layer. (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001, p. 41) </pre> <p>Or, as Hartz and Chappell put it,</p> <pre> Both [scientists and journalists] must settle for partial truth. The scientist works within parameters set by hypotheses, incrementally adding experimental results to an ever-expanding knowledge base. The journalist works with limitations imposed by a daily deadline, revising each story as additional information is available. (1997, p. 13) </pre> <p>Kovach and Rosenstiel advocate several principles in the service of this process, among them a rule of "transparency," which means letting the audience know how information was obtained, clearly identifying one's sources, and identifying the potential biases of those sources. "Only by explaining how we know what we know can we approximate this idea of people being able, if they were of a mind to, to replicate the reporting," they write (2001, p. 81).

This process--the pursuit of truth--is a strength that, at their best, journalism and science have in common.

The Shared Blind Spot

Some idealistic readers might be asking at this point: Isn't telling the truth--or at least shouldn't it be--everyone's ideal? The highest incarnation of every profession?

The answer is no. Consider, for instance, politicians, artists, carpenters, and investment bankers: The ideal may be to persuade, or to make something, or to build something--in some way to improve or change the environment people live in. In their highest forms, professions that subscribe to this ideal have a profound recognition that their activities help shape certain truths--and a sense of responsibility for the impact they have in doing so. (Of course, this habit of mind, too, has its characteristic pitfalls; a constitutional aversion to reality checks can get everyone in trouble.)

By contrast, an empirical focus on "what is" involves a tendency to accept the world around one as a given. In the media, this habit of mind can be heard in those who declare that they are just mirrors, they are just reflecting the world as it is, they are "just" giving the public what it wants to hear. To almost everyone else in the world, the power the media has to shape what the public wants to hear seems blindingly obvious. It's only the media outlets themselves (and not all of them) who, as Kovach and Rosenstiel put it, offer explanations of their work that "make journalists seem passive, mere recorders of events rather than selectors or editors" (2001, p. 41).

For environmental health, a reflexive respect for "what is" can mean a tendency to be reactive--or even resigned--in the face of challenges like public indifference or budget slashing by policy makers. As a whole, the profession has also come very late to the media-handling tactics that businesses, politicians, and other government agencies embraced years ago--so late, in fact, that the media environment is already shifting under their feet, in part because of the impact of those tactics. (For a more detailed discussion of how environmental health is behind the curve in media relations--and ways in which it could get out ahead--see Part 2 of this series.)

The point here is not that environmental health professionals (or the media) should renounce the pursuit of truth; it's that professional habits of thought carry over into areas where they are not necessarily applicable. That's why they're blind spots. What we're really talking about is two ways of thinking about reality. One might be called empirical. The other might be called (a little provocatively) creative. When it's a question of, say, cooking temperatures, the difference between the empirical and creative outlooks could mean the difference between safe restaurants and a rash of foodborne-disease outbreaks. When it's a question of public perceptions about environmental health, the difference between the empirical and creative outlooks means the difference between following and leading.

Consequences of the Media Blind Spot for Public Health Reporting

The Current Look of Public Health Reporting

"Much local TV health and medical news coverage looks like the media equivalent of a 99-cent drive-thru menu: quick, cheap, but ultimately unnourishing," writes Andrew Holtz, a freelance health reporter and former medical correspondent for CNN. The media gravitates toward simple stories "in the good guy versus bad guy mold, complete with action-packed plot and appealing characters," note Wallack and co-authors (Wallack, Dorfman, Jernigan, & Themba, 1993). Because "the drama must be clear and distinct," television news, in particular, "systematically limits what is presented" (Wallack et al., p. 58). Holtz points out that journalists find stories about a new pill or the expansion of prescription drug coverage much easier to sell to editors than health and prevention issues. He would like to cover issues such as home and neighborhood design--an environmental issue with a long-term impact on public health. But, he says, when a reporter tries to sell such a story, he or she is likely to get "blank looks from editors" (Holtz, 2003, p. 7).

"If there's a bombing, you can run to where it happened," a producer with a major television network told JEH. "Where is the environmental health story taking place? The what, where, when--that's not always clear.... Honestly, a talking head talking about something that's not important that day and not immediately urgent--I don't think it's something we'd do or that most people would, frankly, tune in. I wouldn't tune in most of the time."

"Environment stories," said David Ropeik, a former television environmental journalist who teaches risk communication and working with the media at the Harvard School of Public Health, "are often about issues. Sprawl. Endocrine disruption. Climate change. Acid rain. And that's outside the norm of general press coverage. They often lack a definable victim or number of victims ... We know what they [endocrine disruption, climate change, acid rain] might do in general ways, but to whom and how many of those whoms? Don't know."

"Most environmental health stories I think are sort of long term, they take a while to unfold, the science is not always clear. We don't want to do stories where no one knows what's going on," said the television network producer. "I think otherwise people, probably rightly, kind of tune you out. If you're saying, 'We don't know, we don't know, we don't know,' you just become a sort of hum and din."

As a result of the parameters most of the media has set itself for what counts as news, public health coverage has a haphazard, pointillist quality and generally fails to keep the public informed in substantive ways about ongoing issues. William Marler of the law firm Marler Clark, which often represents food-poisoning victims, pointed out that there have been recurring problems with Salmonella contamination in juice and E. coli outbreaks associated with hamburger; while individual cases may make the news (especially cases involving victims "worthy" of sympathy--children, for instance), he sees "little discussion and follow-through" about "patterns in industry" that may be leading to these outbreaks.

Blaming the Audience

The contemporary media storytelling parameters imply a public that is almost unreachable in its self-absorption, ignorant (especially with respect to science), and learful. Hartz and Chappell believe that media gatekeepers like editors, news directors, and producers underestimate the public (1997). "A curious dichotomy is at work in this group. They have enormous power, yet they often deny it. The prevailing spin is that they are only giving the public what it wants" (1997, p. 55).

Kovach and Rosenstiel suggest that "journalists are not merely the victims of changing taste. They are also its architects" (1999, p. 98).

Or, as press critic Jay Rosen puts it, "The press is not supposed to heed the people. It's supposed to feed and sustain the public" (Rosen, 2003). This is where the empirical habit of mind, or excessive respect for "what is," falls short. It leads to the assumption that the problem is "out there."

A number of commentators have suggested that in fact the viewing public wants more substance, more complexity, and more in-depth reporting (Downie & Kaiser, Hartz & Chappell, 1997, p. 24; Kovach & Rosenstiel, 1999, pp. 73-74; Papper & the Radio and Television News Directors Association & Foundation Journalism Ethics Project, p. 14, p. 38). Some news directors are skeptical about these analyses, countering that because the surveys about audience interests rely on self-reporting by members of the public, they may overstate the interest in quality coverage (Hartz & Chappell, p. 24).

Either way, the notion that the press merely reflects the interests of its audience ignores the possibility that a loss of substance in much of the media might itself have had an impact on public knowledge and interests. It suggests that a continuing decline in quality is somehow a law of nature--as if humanity by definition will get increasingly dull and narrow-minded as the years go on or as if the market will get increasingly efficient by shedding naive ideas about humanity. This kind of thinking manifests a deeply pessimistic vision and constitutes a profound insult to the people the media purports to be appeasing. There is a tendency to cite "biological fact" in support of this pessimism--to point out that people are "wired" to respond to negative stimulus (hence the need to tell scary stories in order to drown out the competition). Again, this take on reality ignores the long-term effect of the media's own offerings: If you say "boo" loudly, people will turn around to find out what's going on, potentially abandoning more substantive conversations to do so. But if you repeatedly cry boo, people will stop turning around--and if you continue, they may get annoyed and chase you off.

Consequences for Public Health and Environmental Health

The media's focus on individual-illness stories can make it difficult to articulate what Wallack and co-authors call "the public policy dimensions of prevention" (1993, pp. 73-74). Currently, the American public seems to have only the vaguest sense that health issues can refer to anything other than health care for individuals--pills, doctors, and hospital care. The upper and middle classes, in particular, have become convinced that "public health" means health care for other people, a matter of charity. As one analyst writes, "In the minds of many, 'public health' had become synonymous with 'publicly funded health care'" (Gursky, 2003, p. 13). That means the majority of the public no longer believes it has any stake in public health. Given this loss of a basic conceptual framework, the term "environmental health" fares even worse: It has no meaning at all in the minds of most of the public: It does not compute.

JEH would suggest that environmental health professionals are too resigned to this "reality." It's interesting to note that the most systematic analyses of what's wrong with the way the media covers environmental health come from public health advocates, academics, a law firm, and members of the media themselves--JEH has heard much less of this kind of thinking from health professionals actually working in health departments.

What Should Environmental Health Professionals Do?

There may be times when it is advantageous to give the media what it wants (e.g., a narrative with an innocent victim) in order to make environmental health a part of a common public vocabulary. Part 2 of this series offered some tips for doing so. But maybe environmental health professionals could also be less reverent about the "reality" of how the media works. Maybe by speaking up more, they could have a hand in changing the shape of what the public is interested in--in changing the terms of the debate.

By way of example, Marler of Marler Clark told JEH that every year for the last three years, there have been foodborne-illness outbreaks in California associated with bagged lettuce. Each outbreak has been covered--individually--because "there were sick people, and it was terrible," he said. But no one has been connecting the dots: "No one [in the media] has gone back and said, 'You know, let's look at this. What's the common denominator here? How is the public at risk?... It's easier to do some kid who just got out of the hospital and has a quarter million dollars in medical bills, end of story.'"

That's the "reality" of how the media works. Marler thinks health departments should be more courageous about intervening. He notes that although the state health departments in California and Minnesota have done several reports on lettuceborne outbreaks, no one has "stuck them all together" and gone to the media with a write-up.

A story like that, he thinks, could "potentially lead to changes in industry behavior, changes in consumer behavior, and changes in how the industry deals with that." Environmental health professionals should be prouder of what they do, he told JEH, and more willing to make noise--to make news.

Would the media be interested? Would they listen?

Marler thinks so. But he also thinks environmental health departments would fare better in the media if they got over a sort of defensive dryness. "Many environmental health people I deal with, whether it's on the epi side of things or it's on the environmental health inspection side of things, see the victims as statistics. Not as real victims.... I usually show a video of a victim of foodborne illness--some kid who's brain damaged or lost their kidney or had a large intestine removed. Those are fairly graphic understandings of what actually happens sometimes." In other words, environmental health professionals could make themselves more persuasive by thinking and speaking more viscerally.

A fear of being sensationalist or sounding alarmist is understandable. But maybe it's time to get past that fear and express some passion. Marler may well be right that by refusing to articulate the seriousness of the health issues the profession deals with, its practitioners are in effect downplaying the importance of their work. As long as environmental health professionals don't lose sight of their ideals--"as long as [they] are doing their job and doing it well," as Marler said--"they should be real proud of what they do."

Keep telling the truth, in other words, but maybe not so stoically.

Acknowledgements: JEH thanks everyone who was interviewed for this story; without their contributions, it could not have been written. In addition to the interviews mentioned in the article t with Marler Clark, and Elin Gursky, principal deputy for biodefense with the National Strategies Support Directorate of ANSER, provided valuable context. Special thanks are due to Alicia Green, Journal project specialist, who shared her contacts among journalists. As always, discussions with NEHA Executive Director Nelson Fabian provided background, direction, and intellectual focus for the inquiry.

REFERENCES

Downie, L.D., Jr., & Kaiser, R.G. (2002). The news about the news. New York: Knopf.

Gursky, E. (2003). Progress and peril: Bioterrorism preparedness dollars and public health. New York: The Century Foundation. Retrieved November 15, 2005, from http://www.homelandsecurity.org/bulletin%2Fbioprepar%24/BioterrPrespare%24%2Epdf.

Hartz, J., & Chappell, R. (1997). Worlds apart: How the distance between science and journalism threatens America's future. Nashville, TN: First Amendment Center. Retrieved June 30, 2005, from http://www.freedomforum.org/publications/first/worldsapart/worldsapart.pdf.

Holtz, A. (2003). Frustrations on the frontlines of the health beat: News organizations need to find spaces to be homes for stories that are now often orphaned. Nieman Reports, 57(1), 7-9.

Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (1999). Warp speed: America in the age of mixed media. New York: The Century Foundation Press.

Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (2001). The elements of journalism: What newspeople should know and the public should expect. New York: Crown.

Lippmann, W. (1995). Liberty and the news (P. Roazen, Ed.). New Brunswick, NJ; London, UK: Transaction Publishers.

Mooney, C. (2004). Blinded by science: How "balanced" coverage lets the scientific fringe hijack reality. Columbia Journalism Review, 43(4), 26-35.

Okrent, D. (2004, Nov. 14). It's good to be objective. It's even better to be right. New York Times. Retrieved November 22, 2005, from http://www.nytimes.com.

Papper, B., & the Radio and Television News Directors Association & Foundation Journalism Ethics Project. (2003). Local television news study of news directors and the general public. Retrieved September 6, 2005, from http://www.rtndf.org.

Rosen, J. (2003, Oct. 25). Maybe media bias has become a dumb debate, part two. In Pressthink [Weblog]. Retrieved November 15, 2005, from http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2003/10/25/bias_answers.html.

Wallack, L., Dorfman, L., Jernigan, D., & Themba, M. (1993). Media advocacy and public health: Power for prevention. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Rebecca Berg, Ph.D.

Editor's note: NEHA is committed to providing its members with information specific to the profession of environmental health. The Journal of Environmental Health has taken a major new step in this direction by employing a staff reporter. Rebecca Berg, who has long copy edited the Journal, will be writing in-depth reports on trends and events in the field. Her reports will provide Journal readers with important insights into the profession. They will also be designed to encourage discussion of controversics, challenges, and big-picture issues facing the profession. Readers are invited to participate in these discussions through letters to the editor: Please send your responses, opinions, or comments to Joanne Scigliano, Content Editor, [e-mail].