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If we are ever going to level-up on media literacy, what the Trump administration and Fox News did to promote hydroxychloroquine should be a wakeup call. So it's worth thumping on this one more time. (thread) https://twitter.com/SykesCharlie/status/1263816616283738114
First, a caveat. The science on this is still evolving. More rigorous peer review is coming, but finding public health threats mean you disclose findings now. So in this case, look at the trend lines of multiple studies saying this drug is dangerous to COVID patients
In this case the public health threat isn't about the drug. It's about the President and the top-rated cable TV news outlet working together to promote the use of hydroxychloroquine as a "game-changer." This is about information and its power to persuade.
Nobody in their right mind would have though to start taking this drug until a doctor in NY started to experiment on his patients with it, then promote it. It caught the attention of right-wing media, and it was off to the races. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/technology/doctor-zelenko-coronavirus-drugs.html
Even the NYT got breathless. "Simple country doctor" is one HELL of a framing device to jab a thumb int the eye of real science. The story was more skeptical than that, but the up-front framing taps into rural vs. urban stereotypes that frames a lot of our politics in the U.S.
But that was just one story. What followed was a couple weeks of hydroxychloroquine being promoted as a possible treatment on Fox News. WaPo captured those few weeks of madness pretty well here. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/fox-news-hosts-go-mum-on-hydroxychloroquine-the-covid-19-drug-they-spent-weeks-promoting/2020/04/22/eeaf90c2-84ac-11ea-ae26-989cfce1c7c7_story.html
But the Fox News promotion came while President Trump was pushing it publicly. Crucially, he never said it was going to work. What he did was tout the swirling coverage of it with a "what do you have to lose by trying?" approach. https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/06/trump-hydroxychloroquine-fact-check/
So let's stop here and reflect. A doctor believes this drug experiment is working well and promotes it by trying to get the attention of the President rather than scientists who can confirm. The resulting coverage, from independent to partisan media, unpacks the issue.
There is a material difference between the kind of coverage NYT did vs. that of partisan outlets with an agenda of making Trump look good, but put that aside. The volume of coverage is the point. People are talking. That gives Trump license to continue softly promoting the drug.
You have to see right-wing media's role here as amplifier. They led the charge with their "hey we're just asking questions here!" schtick, which is irresponsible as hell because they weren't interested in where the truth led. The point was debate, and a view aligned with POTUS.
And the danger of that happening goes beyond the study. There was a predictable run on hydroxychloroquine that led to a shortage, meaning it wasn't available for patients who needed it for non-COVID approved therapies ( https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/health/hydroxychloroquine-shortage-lupus-arthritis/index.html).
And we saw reports of it being used experimentally without informed consent in places like nursing homes ( https://www.inquirer.com/news/coronavirus-nursing-homes-pennsylvania-hydroxychloroquine-pennsylvania-broomall-southeastern-veterans-center-20200511.html).
So we are dealing with a dangerous setup. A POTUS prone to promoting quack medicine because he's desperate to give any kind of hope, a news outlet that functions as his propaganda arm, and a public that has to deal with the effects of this.
One of the roles of propaganda is to reinforce messages from those in power through soft entry points. In this case, anecdotal storytelling. The public at large, many aren't thinking critically or don't have enough base knowledge to ask hard questions of those early stories.
Cause-and-effect sleight of hand can be powerful in a time of worry. People took it, they got better. More rigorous coverage asks about control groups, methodology, how large the sample is. It allows for the possibility of other explanations and tries to rule those factors out.
Instead we got "correlation equals causation" which violates research methods 101. And it wasn't even statistical correlation. It was anecdotal!
Propaganda is most seductive when the public is least resistant to it. We were locked away, bored and/or worried about income and the future. Suddenly a doctor has a silver bullet cure, POTUS promotes it, and media that is credible to a large chunk of the populace buys in.
Note these people with the microphone were largely careful to not say it was a cure. They were just asking questions, asking you to fill in gaps and think it was a cure. The duped public is always the pawn.
So what can we learn?
First, Fox News gets dumped on as a right-wing outlet. For the record, I don't mind ideological news outlets. I think they're fine in a broad ecosystem. But understanding their role requires nuance.
The news side is the news side, with conservative framing but journalistic methods. That's how you get Neil Cavuto telling people not to take the drug. https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-neil-cavuto-shocked-trump-hyroxychloroquine-announcement-video-2020-5
But the pundit shows are different. That's where you get Fox And Friends constantly doing pro-hydroxychloroquine segments with Dr. Oz (wtf?) https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-friends-dr-mehmet-oz-disagrees-dr-anthony-faucis-concerns-about and Laura Ingraham pushing it on her show. https://www.gq.com/story/ingraham-still-on-hydroxychloroquine-train
Some separate the pundit and news stuff on Fox. They are different, but to a lot of viewers it's all the same stew. They don't see the difference, they see the brand. The coverage coming from that brand was different than independent media, much more aligned with Trump's message.
Second, important to see the evisceration of the line between ideological media and the presidency. Past GOP presidents kept conservative media at arm's length at least in public. With Trump, the political goals of the White House largely align with conservative media coverage.
Third, you have to realize that cable news audiences have partisan loyalties. There is a built in audience of loyalists for Fox content. They aren't seeking out other sides of the story, and when they encounter it they have built-in narratives to resist counter-messaging.
"Liberal media"
"Deep state media"
"Fake news"
"They hate Trump"
Messages that they've been fed by conservative media, ones they've come to believe. And it's their shield against other views.
"Deep state media"
"Fake news"
"They hate Trump"
Messages that they've been fed by conservative media, ones they've come to believe. And it's their shield against other views.
Because of this, we have to see the danger of the moment. We have a President willing to push dangerous quack medicine, a conservative news system ready to promote his statements in lockstep, and a segment of the public ready to gobble it up uncritically.
The easy analysis is POTUS and Fox will be culpable for what comes next, for the dangerous choices the audience will make. And I'd agree with that.
But can we talk about media literacy needs here for a sec?
But can we talk about media literacy needs here for a sec?
Media literacy isn't trying to promote a particular view. One of its major goals is to get you to critically question news and information that matches your own views.
The way I talk about it: that you become a better advocate for your beliefs because your sourcing is good.
The way I talk about it: that you become a better advocate for your beliefs because your sourcing is good.
One thing I run into as an educator, even with college students, is difficulty in evaluating sources. They genuinely struggle with the lines between hard news coverage, punditry, editorials, columnists, and sites driven to promote a point of view.
But the common thread there is they don't know what good journalism looks like. They assume it means unbiased or objective because that's what they've heard, but they don't know what it means (and largely are dismayed to discover me telling them such things are impossible).
I continue to point students to the better way, that journalism is not at its core objective but a set of methodologies that allow journalists to interrogate and account for bias. From Kovach & Rosenstiel's excellent "The Elements Of Journalism":
The three I focus most on: truth as the ultimate end, a storytelling that emphasizes serving the interests of the public (citizens), and a methodology built around only telling the public what you can verify.
It's the why, the who, and the how of journalism.
It's the why, the who, and the how of journalism.
Through that lens, it was pretty easy to spot how ludicrous Fox's coverage was early on. "Just asking questions" isn't pursuit of truth, particularly when couched in a debate format full of hot bluster designed to not get answers. It wasn't journalism, it never was.
A media literate public would have tools to judge that coverage accordingly and push back (or tune out).
My solution for this has always been the same. Teach media literacy in K-12 as a set of critical thinking skills rooted in what news is and is not. The public needs a more formal education on what journalism is and what its role is.
(I'd like to require it in college too, but I think I'd have to amass more power than I should reasonably have to make it happen.)
The goal is to educate consumers how to evaluate what they see. But there is another layer here worth adding, one rooted in the reality of social networks: we need to be trained in how to resist viral propaganda we encounter in those spaces, and push back.
One of the media techniques we need for the 21st century is how to effectively argue and persuade online, to take our knowledge and share it effectively. Not to win arguments, oh no. In this case, it would save lives.
Journalism can help with that! It teaches its practitioners how to gather mass amounts of information, analyze, synthesize, and write it for audience. (side note: a journalism degree is one of the most flexible degrees you can earn; it teaches skills in high demand)
This quote from Esther Wojcicki is one of my favorites: "Journalism is the subject of the future."
(source: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/esther-wojcicki/)
(source: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/esther-wojcicki/)
So this whole hydroxychloroquine thing is a big moment for us. It revealed some systemic fraud in our news system, and in our politics. But we have ways to fix it. Let's do that.
I wrote this thread up and expanded on it a bit here. https://link.medium.com/UUCfJ6JWH6
