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Around last summer, a quiet panic began to occur in the scientific world. The root of the problem started long before that, but by October 2023 it can no longer be ignored. People don’t trust science that much anymore. More specifically, many Americans who lived through the peak of the global impact of COVID-19 are now practicing Western medicine, including public health agencies with (you guessed it) an emphasis on epidemiology and pharmacology. , have a strong sense of distrust. This is as dangerous to people’s daily lives as it is to future public investment in important research.
And if you attend any major scientific conference this year, you’re likely to see at least one predominantly white, male bigwig wringing his hands nervously about how to deal with the problem. right. You’ll probably hear them pointing out some surprising culprits behind the credibility gap. Certainly, that has had a big impact. Deliberate political disinformation campaigns and infodemics, primarily Republican anti-science speeches, and private corporations looking to make a profit. Get rid of the horribly ignorant and sensational headlines that mislead the story.
Certainly, all of these need to be fixed, and the problem is not one-dimensional. But he’s the one culprit missing here that isn’t talked about enough, so I hope he addresses that first. This is the biggest problem I see from my crow’s nest perspective as a professional information broker in the science-to-public pipeline. This is also the easiest problem to solve, and the one that is most likely to improve the outcomes of all other proposed solutions is to put more Black women in charge. now.
The people you can convince with facts are already on the side of science and journalism and are not impressed by your racial methodology.
Across all fields of science and science communication, the absence of Black women in positions of leadership and administrative authority is the biggest hole in the metaphorical bucket of credibility. Public health and journalism institutions cannot convince the world that they are producing objective science and fair journalism when they cannot even achieve objective and fair employment. Similarly, we cannot ask the world to believe that internal political ideology (or just white laziness) is simply fabricated by evil political forces outside of white-led institutions. Otherwise, they may end up politically defending both science and journalism.
So do white supremacy organizations and media outlets want to restore broader public trust in science? good. I tell them, “The call is coming from inside the house.” If you want to clean the world, clean your own front door first. Stop worrying about what Fox News is doing or what your Twitter followers believe. It’s a red herring designed to waste money and time by playing whack-a-mole with unscrupulous spin doctors. All because they believe that by presenting more facts, they can make right-wing ideologues and their fan clubs believe in scientific and journalistic facts.
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Well, honey, I’ll let you in on a little secret. Audiences are persuaded by emotion, not by facts. And their emotions are so easily manipulated that if I want to set off five alarms and cause a riot during my family’s dinner, I’ll pay a few Republican operatives to appear on Fox at 7 o’clock. All you have to do is let them know and tell them to wear a mask. They are the AR-15 in the Republican fight against coronavirus and Jesus died for my American right to bear arms to them at Walmart. ”
The people you can convince with facts are already on the side of science and journalism and are not impressed by your racial methodology. Take a look at the 2023 Pew Research findings.
Are we surprised that news and information patterns among Black families deviated so drastically from those of white families during the peak of COVID-19? That can’t be true.
“Only 14% of Black Americans are strongly confident that Black Americans will have fair security over their lifetimes, and say it is very likely or very likely. Far more (38%) ) think it’s not very likely or not likely to happen at all, while an additional 40% say it’s somewhat likely… Lack of Black Staff at News Organizations (36%) said their main reason was racist or racially insensitive coverage.”
“Nearly one-quarter (24%) of Black Americans say they get their news from Black news organizations very or fairly often,” Pew said in a 2024 analysis. “Another 40% of Black adults say they sometimes get their news from such news outlets.”
Forty percent of Black people surveyed also told Pew that it’s important for race-related news to be written by Black writers.
“Similarly, only 15% of Black Americans say whether a journalist is Black is very or very important to them in determining whether a news story in general is trustworthy,” the report said. states. “Significant shares also say it would be very effective for news organizations to hire more Black people as newsroom leaders (53%) and journalists (44%).”
And what about the number of people hired? Triumphs for black women in science journalism are rare. We have to do better. Newslab tracks the following statistics:
“A 2018 study by the American Society of News Editors found that only 7.19% of full-time newsroom employees were Black. Only about 20% of Black employees held leadership positions; There is no data on how many of the leaders are Black women.”
No data? In 2018? Incorrect. In her archived copy of the 2018 survey, we see that Black women only account for 3.45% of her 7.19% above. And a table labeled “Percentage of Whites and Minorities in Media Leadership” reports that Black women held only 3.13% of leadership roles in 2018 and 2.16% in 2017. are doing. Were we surprised that news and information patterns among Black families were changing so dramatically during the peak of COVID-19? Does it deviate significantly from that of white families? That can’t be true.
So forget about Fox. Are your hiring processes and workplace structures designed to attract the best talent from everywhere, or are the Whether it is designed to attract only talent, and therefore most often begin to worry. You end up being as white as a Boston cop.
“Inequality is a subject of science and a topic that science journalists should cover,” Pulitzer Center grant recipient Amy Maxmen said in 2022.
“It’s often about geopolitics, economics, history and culture, and it’s much more than the science you learn in the classroom,” she says. “But if you believe that the purpose of science is progress, and I believe that too, then there will be no progress unless the results of science are widely distributed to people.”
“Science has not only been a bystander to racial violence, but in many ways has created an alibi.”
“Meanwhile,” as Sidet Harry wrote in Wired in 2021, “marginalized young journalists, especially young Black women, are being pushed out of newsrooms at an alarming rate. Hardly quoted anywhere in the media…from AI ethics to abuse.”On social media, we see not just technology, but the entire base of people tasked with covering technology and the world in which it resides. The reality is that we cannot continue this without focusing on the future. ”
That’s because science and journalism both have the same Achilles heel: the insistence that they are rooted in the pursuit of objective truth, but not objective in who determines that truth.
In 2020, Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist at Princeton University, said, “Science has not simply been a bystander to racial violence, but in many ways has created an alibi” for George Floyd’s preliminary autopsy report. He said the person who died died of underlying health conditions, rather than being killed by police officer Derek Chauvin.
The global priority for all science and science journalism is now (or should be) climate change and its effective reporting. Black women in this country are perhaps more affected by climate-related fallout than any other group. Because, as we all know, climate-related fallout is currently impacting or predicted to impact every aspect of our daily lives. form or something else. So the groups that are currently already on the ropes will feel the effects first and worst.
In 2018, Talia Buford spoke about how ProPublica tackled this issue and why we must continue to work on it.
“When we started environmental reporting as an industry, people weren’t the focus. We focused on polar bears as opposed to acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, and the impact on poor and vulnerable communities. We talked about what’s going on. It’s important to have different perspectives in newsrooms because it reminds us that there are different perspectives on stories. People of color in newsrooms. “Having people there is important because it changes the conversation,” she said. “I think Black reporters, and really reporters of color, are more familiar with intersectionality and the idea that nothing happens in a vacuum. Based on what we hear and understand from the community, we can piece together what the different impacts are in a way that other reporters might not.”
We’ve had enough of the infodemic. Enough political worries. First, let’s do the work necessary for better science and better journalism. If we don’t center Black women in scientific leadership and communication, nothing else matters.
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon’s Lab Notes, the science and health team’s weekly newsletter.
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