media reporting case study

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• Published: 28 September 2021

News media coverage of COVID-19 public health and policy information

• Katharine J. Mach 1 , 2 ,
• Raúl Salas Reyes   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1683-8516 3 ,
• Brian Pentz   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2713-6699 3 ,
• Jennifer Taylor   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8301-3434 4 ,
• Clarissa A. Costa 3 ,
• Sandip G. Cruz 3 ,
• Kerronia E. Thomas 3 ,
• James C. Arnott   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3989-6724 5 ,
• Rosalind Donald 1 ,
• Kripa Jagannathan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4584-8358 6 , 7 ,
• Christine J. Kirchhoff   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2686-6764 8 ,
• Laura C. Rosella   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4867-869X 9 &
• Nicole Klenk   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8224-6992 3  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  220 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies
• Science, technology and society

During a pandemic, news media play a crucial role in communicating public health and policy information. Traditional newspaper coverage is important amidst increasing disinformation, yet uncertainties make covering health risks and efforts to limit transmission difficult. This study assesses print and online newspaper coverage of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 for March 2020, when the global pandemic was declared, through August 2020 in three countries: Canada (with the lowest per-capita case and death rates during the study timeframe), the United Kingdom (with a pronounced early spike), and the United States (with persistently high rates). Tools previously validated for pandemic-related news records allow measurement of multiple indicators of scientific quality (i.e., reporting that reflects the state of scientific knowledge) and of sensationalism (i.e., strategies rendering news as more extraordinary than it really is). COVID-19 reporting had moderate scientific quality and low sensationalism across 1331 sampled articles in twelve newspapers spanning the political spectrums of the three countries. Newspapers oriented towards the populist-right had the lowest scientific quality in reporting, combined with very low sensationalism in some cases. Against a backdrop of world-leading disease rates, U.S. newspapers on the political left had more exposing coverage, e.g., focused on policy failures or misinformation, and more warning coverage, e.g., focused on the risks of the disease, compared to U.S. newspapers on the political right. Despite the generally assumed benefits of low sensationalism, pandemic-related coverage with low scientific quality that also failed to alert readers to public-health risks, misinformation, or policy failures may have exacerbated the public-health effects of the disease. Such complexities will likely remain central for both pandemic news media reporting and public-health strategies reliant upon it.

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Introduction.

News media reporting is understood to play a central role during national security and health emergencies (Laing, 2011 ; Klemm et al., 2016 ; Pieri, 2019 ). News coverage communicates risks to readers and shapes public perceptions through the amount, content, and tone of reporting. It simultaneously frames ongoing public debates about policy responses, including conflicting priorities relevant to the timing or stringency of implemented policies (Laing, 2011 ; Pieri, 2019 ). Pandemic policy-making requires rapid, iterative responses under conditions of knowledge deficit, as well as the coordination of multi-level public-health agencies and sectors (e.g., hospitals, schools, and workplaces) (Laing, 2011 ; Rosella et al., 2013 ). In these complex circumstances, news media serve as a primary source of health information and uncertainties and connect health professionals, policymakers, and the public in critical ways (Laing, 2011 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ). The quality and balance of scientific coverage, such as through reporting that reflects the state of scientific knowledge and is not overstated, affect trust in science and accountability for decision-making (Laing, 2011 ; Klemm et al., 2016 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ).

Inadequate scientific quality in news coverage of past pandemics has posed risks and limited capacities to disseminate public-health guidance and coordinate responses (Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ). Reporting on the state of scientific knowledge during a novel, evolving pandemic is challenging. Low-quality scientific reporting of pandemics may overstate or understate disease risks or the efficacy of protective measures for different individuals or fail to communicate the nature of the evidence. Such reporting may constrain the feasibility or effectiveness of options for policymakers directing government action, miss opportunities to inform individuals making health decisions, and increase the exposure of health professionals to disease. It can both exacerbate disease outcomes and generate unnecessary fear, in combination with other factors shaping perceptions among the public (Laing, 2011 ; Klemm et al., 2016 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ). For example, news media reporting may have overly emphasized the threat of the 2009 A/H1N1 influenza (H1N1) pandemic with insufficient indication of available protective measures, and in pairing trustworthy information from credible scientists with uninformed opinions, it may have promoted a “false balance” (Laing, 2011 ; Klemm et al., 2016 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ). Further, news coverage rapidly waned after the initial pandemic declaration even though public-health risks persisted (Klemm et al., 2016 ; Reintjes et al., 2016 ). Similar issues with media reporting occurred during the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak and the 2014 Ebola outbreak (Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ; Pieri, 2019 ).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, media representations of complex, rapidly evolving epidemiological science shape public understandings of the risks, measures to limit disease spread, and associated political and policy discourses. Traditional newspaper media coverage may have particular importance given simultaneous misinformation and disinformation, social fragmentation, political polarization, and failures of policy coordination, and national newspapers influence how other outlets cover the same subject across media platforms (Ball and Maxmen, 2020 ; Holtz et al., 2020 ; Thorp, 2020 ; Grossman et al., 2020 ). The COVID-19 pandemic creates an opportunity to assess the strengths and limitations of the media’s pandemic coverage and provide insights for future news media coverage. Such assessment also informs the communication strategies of public-health institutions and policymakers towards clear public-health guidance and coordinated responses across health systems (Laing, 2011 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ; Pieri, 2019 ).

Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, our countries of focus, differ in how they govern public health, including pandemic responses. In its constitutionally determined role, the Canadian federal government sets healthcare standards and administers funding to support the healthcare system spanning provinces and territories (Government of Canada, 2016 ). Pandemic health-related policies are set and implemented predominantly by provinces with federal guidance from Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada (Adeel et al., 2020 ). The U.K. central government funds healthcare throughout the United Kingdom yet only sets policies for England. Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales each govern their own National Health Service systems. By contrast, the healthcare system in the United States is a complex mixture of public and private health insurance programs. The U.S. federal government generally adopts a leading role during national crises, although during the COVID-19 pandemic states and municipalities have led adoption and implementation of most policy measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 (Adeel et al., 2020 ). Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2019 Global Health Security Index ranked the United States first, United Kingdom second, and Canada fifth among 195 countries for preparedness to manage a serious disease outbreak (Cameron et al., 2019 ).

In this paper, we systematically quantify the amount, scientific quality, and sensationalism of newspaper media coverage of COVID-19 in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Newspapers studied span the political spectrum of each case-study country (Table 1 ) (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010 ; Puglisi and Snyder, 2015 ; Anderson and Coletto, 2017 ; Mitchell et al., 2018 ; Hönnige et al., 2020 ; Jurkowitz et al., 2020 ; Austen, 2020 ). Our analysis begins two weeks prior to COVID-19’s official recognition as a pandemic and follows its development over the subsequent five months (i.e., from 1 March 2020 to 15 August 2020). Given the volume of COVID-19 news media articles published over the timeframe of this study, we created a manageable corpus for analysis by randomly sampling one day of media coverage per week for six consecutive 4-week periods; we then randomly selected five eligible articles from each news outlet on each sampled day for the evaluation of scientific quality and sensationalism. In our evaluation, scientific quality refers to the alignment between reporting and the state of scientific evidence and its uncertainties, and sensationalism is a discursive strategy rendering news as more extraordinary, interesting, or relevant than it really is (Oxman et al., 1993 ; Molek-Kozakowska, 2013 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ). We apply previously validated survey tools developed to measure scientific quality and sensationalism of pandemic-related health news records in combination with broader methods from policy analyses of pandemic responses (SI Coding Tool) (Oxman et al., 1993 ; Rosella et al., 2013 ; Molek-Kozakowska, 2013 ; Reintjes et al., 2016 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ). We analyze (1) the COVID-19 public-health outcomes and policies in each country and (2) the amount, scientific quality, sensationalism, and topics of COVID-19 news media coverage across the political spectrum of each country.

Public health contextualization of news media analyses

To contextualize our news media analyses, we analyzed and visualized existing data sets on the number of COVID-19 cases, deaths, and tests in each country (e.g., Roser et al., 2020 ; CBC News, 2020 ; Public Health England and NHSX, 2020 ; CDC, 2020 ). We also recorded the key public-health declarations, policies, and guidance during the study time period (e.g., drawing from WHO, 2020a , 2020b ; see also SI Table S1 ). We tracked these decisions at international scales through to subnational scales in each country studied. Media analyses outlined below thereby were considered with respect to the reported number of cases and confirmed deaths and policy actions taken (Reintjes et al., 2016 ).

News media search strategy and inclusion criteria

Print and online news media records were retrieved from the Factiva database for news outlets across the political spectrum of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States (see Table 1 ) (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010 ; Puglisi and Snyder, 2015 ; Anderson and Coletto, 2017 ; Mitchell et al., 2018 ; Hönnige et al., 2020 ; Jurkowitz et al., 2020 ; Austen, 2020 ). Selected news media outlets have primary news products in print and online media, rather than television broadcasting or social media, and full article entries available in Factiva. Search terms included “coronavirus,” “COVID-19,” “epidemic,” “outbreak,” “pandemic,” or “SARS-CoV-2.” Individual English-language news articles were retrieved for sampled dates between 1 March 2020 and 15 August 2020. This period captures news media coverage prior to the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic and over the subsequent five months.

Individual news records were screened to identify original news reporting (i.e., news reporting and news analysis articles) relevant to our study objectives. First, eligible articles must have a direct focus on the public-health implications of COVID-19 or on attempts to control its spread—in some or all of an article’s text. By excluding articles without this focus, we ensured all articles included in the study could contain scientific information on the public health effects or spread of COVID-19 and associated policies. Second, eligible articles must be focused on the newspaper’s country of publication (e.g., an article reporting on COVID-19 transmission or mitigation efforts in only New Zealand or China, without discussion of implications for the newspaper’s country of publication, would be excluded). We included this eligibility criterion to analyze science–policy interfaces and science–society interactions most proximate to the news outlets, although we acknowledge that articles about other countries may influence perceptions of readers even without direct discussion of implications for them. Third, eligible articles must be original news reporting or analysis, meaning we excluded opinion pieces, editorials, interview transcripts, microblogs, front-page snippets, news roundups, obituaries, advertisements, corrections memos, and letters to the editor; these excluded article types would have required distinct question framings beyond the scope of our codebook. This third criterion, therefore, ensured that coded responses could be compared coherently across articles for the different measures of scientific quality and sensationalism.

Sampling of news media articles

As the evaluation of scientific quality and sensationalism through manual coding is time intensive, and a very large number of COVID-19 news media articles were published during the timeframe of our study, we used a random sample of news media articles for analysis, prioritizing sampling during each week over the course of the study timeframe. The sample design enabled a manageable analysis of newspaper media coverage and potential changes over the timeframe of the study. First, the sample of news media articles was constructed by sampling one day of media coverage per week in consecutive four-week periods. These four days of the week were randomly sampled without replacement (Monday through Saturday only, not including Sunday in the sampling), given cyclic variation in news media coverage (Lacy et al., 2001 ; Riffe et al., 2016 ). The study timeframe was divided into six four-week periods of equal duration from 1 March to 15 August 2020.

Second, for each randomly sampled day, all available news records were retrieved from Factiva for the 12 news outlets (Table 1 ). Randomly selected articles were screened for eligibility, with the goal of identifying 5 eligible articles for each news outlet on each sampled day. In some cases, fewer than 5 eligible articles were published by a given outlet on a sampled day. In these cases, the full set of eligible articles was included in the study.

Analysis of scientific quality and sensationalism of news articles

The coding tool for measuring scientific quality and sensationalism of news article records was adapted from the final tool of Hoffman and Justicz, designed for evaluating pandemic-related health news records (Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ). Scientific quality, as defined in that study, is “a measure of an article’s reliability and credibility on a given topic” (Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ). Importantly, scientific quality is linked to the state of scientific understanding and its uncertainties at specific moments in time rather than being an absolute or objective characteristic. The codebook we applied for measuring scientific quality is therefore designed to be flexible and responsive to the inevitable shifts in scientific understanding that occur through time, most especially during a novel disease outbreak and evolving pandemic. Sensationalism, as defined in that study, is “a way of presenting articles to make them seem more interesting or extraordinary than they actually are” (Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ).

Our coding tool (SI Coding Tool) included six questions for scientific quality (each evaluated on a scale from 1 to 5—5 corresponding to highest quality) and six questions for sensationalism (each evaluated on a scale from 1 to 5—5 corresponding to highest sensationalism). The question categories (SI Coding Tool) for assessing scientific quality were as follows: applicability, opinion versus facts, validity, precision, context, and global assessment (i.e., an overall assessment of the article’s scientific quality based on the five preceding specific measures). For sensationalism, the question categories (SI Coding Tool) included exposing, speculating, generalizing, warning, extolling, and global assessment (i.e., an overall assessment of the degree of sensationalism in the article based on the five preceding specific measures) (Oxman et al., 1993 ; Molek-Kozakowska, 2013 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ).

In addition, metadata collected for each article included the coder’s identity, the article title, the article’s sample date, the news outlet (including if the article was originally written by another outlet such as the Associated Press), the societal sector (up to 2 selected per article), and public-health measures discussed (SI Coding Tool).

Coder assignments, training, reliability assessment, and analysis

For each sampled day, two independent coders assessed all relevant news media records based on the scientific quality and sensationalism questions and article-attribute metadata. Coders recorded scores for each article through a Google-form version of the codebook (SI Coding Tool).

To ensure consistent application of the coding tool, substantial training and calibration occurred over a six-week period. First, the three coders in coordination with the project leadership team read national and international public-health agency descriptions of the coronavirus disease and associated public-health policies and measures. Second, the coders completed multiple rounds of individual coding of example news articles, followed by group discussions of application of the codebook. The group discussions considered difficult judgments and common versus unusual examples. The goal was to ensure consistent application of the coding tool across question categories and the range of article examples that arose. During the training and calibration phases of coding, we updated the codebook to include examples specific to news records on COVID-19 (SI Coding Tool), and we tracked illustrative examples (news articles and specific quotes) across the scale (1–3–5) for the scientific quality and sensationalism question categories. This process led to development of example answers particularly representative of low versus high scientific quality and low versus high sensationalism under each category of response. Additionally, we developed “decision rules” for the more unusual or challenging categories of examples to ensure consistency across coders, especially where disagreements arose in individually assigned responses.

Interrater reliability was assessed during the training and calibration stage and throughout the duration of the study. Where coders assigned scores for a given question that were 3 or 4 units apart on the 1–5 scale, a reconciliation discussion occurred; the small fraction of question responses in this category following the training stage enabled the coders and project team to continue developing and ensuring shared understanding of coding approaches for unusual or challenging applications. Weighted Cohen’s Kappa, with quadratic weighting, was applied given the high-inference codebook and ordinal data collected via a Likert scale, as previously done for related measures (Cohen, 1960 ; Fleiss and Cohen, 1973 ; Oxman et al., 1993 ; Antoine et al., 2014 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ; Tran et al., 2020 ). Coded data were analyzed with Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance and post-hoc multi-comparison pairwise tests (kruskal.test and kruskalmc in pgirmess package in R) (Giraudoux et al., 2018 ; R Core Team, 2020 ).

Public health and policy contexts

From March through August 2020, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States differed substantially in their public-health responses to COVID-19 and in health outcomes from the novel coronavirus disease (Fig. 1 ). Beginning in early March, all three countries implemented a combination of policy measures to contain the spread of COVID-19, including emergency laws, stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, school and business closures, border and travel restrictions, social distancing measures, and quarantines upon entry (SI Table S1 ). These restrictions were followed by gradual phases of reopening measures allowing restricted social and economic activities to occur. Across the three countries, the role of national versus subnational governments differed with respect to authority and actions on public-health guidance and care, resulting in differing timing and levels of coordination for both restrictions and reopening measures (SI Fig. S1 ). From March to August 2020, the United Kingdom experienced the highest death rate from COVID-19 (maximum 7-day average of 13.9 deaths per million people; Fig. 1 ), whereas the United States had the highest case rate of the three countries (maximum 7-day average of 203.5 cases per million), as well as the greatest cumulative number of cases and deaths globally (SI Figs. S2 - S3 ). Of the three countries, Canada had the most effective public-health outcomes as measured by per capita COVID-19 case or death rates (Fig. 1 ).

COVID-19 cases, deaths, and national-level policies are indicated for ( A ) Canada, ( B ) the United Kingdom, and ( C ) the United States. 7-day rolling averages of cases (left vertical axis, solid black line) and deaths (right vertical axis, dotted black line) per one million people are shown for the timeframe of this media study, 1 March through 15 August 2020 (Roser et al., 2020 ). The timeline for each country specifies national-level public-health policies and guidance, especially emergency declarations, school and non-essential business closures, travel and border restrictions, quarantines and social distancing, mask usage, and reopening phases. Implementation of enforceable policies (solid) and non-enforced guidance (dotted) is specified with vertical red lines, and corresponding reopening and relaxation of policies and guidance are specified with vertical blue lines. Detailed descriptions of national-level policies within each panel are provided in SI Table S1 .

The amount of pandemic media coverage

The studied news outlets differed in the amount of news media coverage related to COVID-19 from 1 March through 15 August 2020 (Fig. 2 ). The amount of coverage increased notably in March as case rates climbed in each country, subsequently decreasing gradually in May and June while case rates also declined. Across the 24 randomly sampled days, the 12 studied news outlets published 18,430 articles related to COVID-19. Of these, an estimated 4321 articles (23.4%) were eligible for inclusion in this study—that is, as news reporting or analysis relevant to the country of publication and containing a direct focus on COVID-19 public health or policy information (SI Figs. S4 - S5 ). Articles with a direct focus on COVID-19 public health or policy information (to a small or large extent) could be coded for the scientific quality of the reporting of this information and its sensationalism.

For each randomly sampled day ( A ) and each news outlet ( B ), the total number of individual news records is shown, based on Factiva database searches for articles related to COVID-19 public health and policy information (Methods). News articles are partitioned across the following categories: articles eligible for inclusion in our study (eligible), articles not focusing on the newspaper’s country of publication (location out of scope), articles that are not original news reporting or analysis (opinion/editorial/letters), and articles that include COVID-19-relevant search terms, but do not include any direct focus on COVID-19 public health or policy information (no direct focus). Estimated totals for these categories are calculated using (i) the total number of Factiva returns and (ii) the rates at which articles were assigned to these categories during the eligibility screening process for each outlet and randomly sampled day (SI Fig. S4 ). On the stacked bars, percentages of articles falling into each category are specified for each day ( A ) and news outlet ( B ).

Content analysis of pandemic media coverage

We collected a manageable, well-defined random sample of 1331 news media articles satisfying our eligibility criteria (SI Fig. S4 ) for coding of scientific quality and sensationalism (SI Coding Tool and Dataset S1 ). Six questions each for scientific quality and for sensationalism were evaluated on a scale from 1 to 5 (5 corresponding to highest scientific quality or sensationalism, 1 corresponding to lowest scientific quality or sensationalism). Question categories included for scientific quality: applicability, opinion versus facts, validity, precision, context, and global assessment (i.e., an overall assessment of the article’s scientific quality); and for sensationalism: exposing, speculating, generalizing, warning, extolling, and global assessment (i.e., an overall assessment of the degree of sensationalism in the article) (SI Coding Tool). For this content analysis, interrater reliability was moderate to substantial for the summative “global” assessment of scientific quality and sensationalism (SI Table S2 ). Reliability was similarly high for specific scientific quality and sensationalism measures, with the exception of questions for which coded scores displayed restriction of range or unbalanced distributions (e.g., “generalizing” scores of mostly 1 and 2, rather than ranging from 1 through 5 with balance around 3; SI Coding Tool and Dataset S1 ) (Hallgren, 2012 ; Tran et al., 2020 ).

The scientific quality of pandemic media coverage

The scientific quality of news media articles differed among news outlets across the political spectrums of the respective countries (Fig. 3 ). Within each country, the overall scientific quality of news reporting and analysis was lowest on the populist-right of the political spectrum (mean summative “global” scientific quality of 2.58, n = 106 articles, for Toronto Sun ; 2.67, n = 115, for Daily Mail ; and 2.28, n = 118, for New York Post ; p  ≤ 0.001 for Kruskal–Wallis, p  ≤ 0.05 for within-country pairwise comparisons except Daily Mail versus Times of London and Telegraph , SI Table S3 ). For these outlets, lower scientific quality was especially evident for validity, precision, and context as measures of scientific quality (e.g., articles reporting claims without fact checking, specificity, or background details) (Fig. 3 ).

Scores for six scientific quality questions (SI Coding Tool) are shown (mean, 95% confidence interval) for articles ( n  = 1331) communicating COVID-19 public health or policy information (Fig. 2 ): ( A ) applicability, ( B ) opinion versus facts, ( C ) validity, ( D ) precision, ( E ) context, and ( F ) global assessment (i.e., an overall assessment of the article’s scientific quality). Each question was evaluated on a scale from 1 to 5 (5 corresponding to highest scientific quality). Sampled articles were published between 1 March and 15 August 2020 (Methods). Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance and post-hoc multi-comparison test statistics are in SI Table S3 .

The sensationalism of pandemic media coverage

The sensationalism of news media articles was low overall for all news outlets, although somewhat greater for outlets on the left and middle of the political spectrum in Canada and the United States (Fig. 4F ). In both countries, news outlets at the populist-right combined low scientific quality with low sensationalism (Figs. 3 F and 4F ). In Canada, the overall sensationalism of news reporting and analysis was lowest for the Toronto Sun (mean summative “global” sensationalism of 1.77, n  = 106 articles; p  ≤ 0.001 for Kruskal–Wallis, p  ≤ 0.05 for pairwise comparisons with Globe and Mail and National Post , SI Table S3 ). In the United States, overall sensationalism was lower in the Wall Street Journal (mean global sensationalism of 2.03, n  = 118 articles) and New York Post (mean of 2.13, n  = 118), as compared to the New York Times (mean of 2.40, n  = 120) and Washington Post (mean of 2.38, n  = 119; p  ≤ 0.001 for Kruskal–Wallis, p  ≤ 0.05 for pairwise comparisons, SI Table S3 ). For these outlets, lower sensationalism was especially observed for exposing, speculating, and warning as measures of sensationalism (Fig. 4 ). In the United Kingdom, overall sensationalism did not vary across news outlets ( p  = 0.283 for Kruskal–Wallis, SI Table S3 ).

Scores for six sensationalism questions (SI Coding Tool) are shown (mean, 95% confidence interval) for articles ( n  = 1331) communicating COVID-19 public health or policy information (Fig. 2 ): ( A ) exposing, ( B ) speculating, ( C ) generalizing, ( D ) warning, ( E ) extolling, and ( F ) global assessment (i.e., an overall assessment of the degree of sensationalism in the article). Each question was evaluated on a scale from 1 to 5 (5 corresponding to highest sensationalism). Sampled articles were published between 1 March and 15 August 2020 (Methods). Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance and post-hoc multi-comparison test statistics are in SI Table S3 .

Syndicated versus original reporting

Across all outlets, the scientific quality of original reporting (mean global scientific quality of 2.93, n  = 1278 articles) was significantly higher than the scientific quality of syndicated articles (mean of 2.71, n  = 54; p  = 0.020, Kruskal–Wallis; SI Fig. S6 and Table S4 ). Additionally, the sensationalism of syndicated articles (mean global sensationalism of 1.82, n  = 54 articles) was significantly lower than the sensationalism of original reporting (mean of 2.14, n  = 1278; p  ≤ 0.001, Kruskal–Wallis; SI Fig. S6 and Table S4 ). The Toronto Sun published the highest proportion of syndicated news articles by far, with 34% of the paper’s 106 coded articles originating from syndicated sources. Other news outlets with more than 1% of coded articles drawing from syndicated sources included the Toronto Star (6% of articles) and the National Post (11%).

Neither scientific quality nor sensationalism varied substantially through time, with the exception of lower scientific quality on 3 July 2020 resulting from limited coverage of the healthcare sector that day (Fig. 5 , SI Fig. S7 ).

The topics of news media articles analyzed ( A ) over the timeframe of this study and ( B ) by news outlet are specified. Sampled articles were published on randomly sampled days between 1 March and 15 August 2020 (Methods). The topic of each article ( n  = 1331) was categorized by societal sectors (up to 2 selected per article) related to healthcare, leisure and entertainment, economics and commerce, government and politics, and other social services.

The topics of pandemic media coverage

News media articles were categorized based on the societal sectors (up to 2 per article) that were the primary focus of each article (Fig. 5 ). The sectors, related to healthcare, leisure and entertainment, economics and commerce, government and politics, and other social services, are listed in full in Figs. 5 and 6 . Although all analyzed articles contained information on the public-health effects of COVID-19 or measures to limit its spread (SI Fig. S4 ), topics of focus differed widely, for example including recreation, the arts, transportation, or daycare, not just medical facilities or vaccine research.

Scientific quality ( A ) and sensationalism ( B ) of news media articles are indicated by the topics of articles. Overall global assessment scores for scientific quality and sensationalism (SI Coding Tool) are shown (mean, 95% confidence interval) for articles communicating COVID-19 public health or policy information (Fig. 2 ). For each article, scientific quality and sensationalism were each evaluated on a scale from 1 to 5 (5 corresponding to highest scientific quality or to highest sensationalism). Sampled articles ( n  = 1331) were published between 1 March and 15 August 2020 (Methods). The topic of each article was categorized across the following societal sectors (up to two selected per article): healthcare and institutions; health-related medical and technology research; family, lifestyle, and social groups; professional or high-level sports; public parks and recreation; culture and the arts; private sector impacts and measures; employment impacts and benefits; macroeconomics and economy-wide fiscal or stimulus measures; politics and elections; law enforcement and court systems; foreign affairs and international aid; transportation, shipping, and border closures; education and daycare; public services; and energy and the environment.

The topics of news media articles corresponded to scientific quality and sensationalism of news reporting and analysis to some degree (Fig. 6 ). News media articles related to healthcare, health institutions, and health-related research were most common (Fig. 5 ), and they had significantly greater scientific quality compared to articles on other topics (mean global scientific quality of 3.23 for healthcare and institutions and 3.72 for health-related research; p  ≤ 0.001 for Kruskal–Wallis, p  ≤ 0.05 for pairwise comparisons except with energy and the environment; Fig. 6A ). News media articles during the first four-week period studied, starting 1 March 2020, included the greatest focus (50.2% of coverage) on healthcare and related institutions and research (Fig. 5A ).

Sensationalism of articles related to politics and foreign affairs was greatest (mean global sensationalism of 2.53 for politics; and of 2.49 for foreign affairs; p  < 0.001 for Kruskal–Wallis, p  < 0.05 for pairwise comparisons of politics versus all sectors except foreign affairs, employment, and energy and the environment; Fig. 6B ). For example, sensational statements related to politics and foreign affairs could include exposing disinformation from political leaders or extolling political leaders for border closures as a pandemic or broader policy response. News outlets in the United States published the most articles related to politics and elections (63.8% of coverage across all outlets; Fig. 5B ).

Public-health policies consistently covered through time included measures related to social distancing, testing and tracing, and protective equipment and disinfection practices, while coverage of mask guidance and reopening policies increased over the course of the study (Fig. 7 ).

Sampled articles ( n  = 1331) were published on randomly sampled days between 1 March and 15 August 2020 (Methods). Public-health policies and measures in each article were coded under specific categories related to social distancing, testing and tracing, protective equipment and disinfection practices, reopening policies, vaccines and treatments, and more (all relevant categories selected for each article).

Managing the public health and societal risks of a pandemic requires iterative, informed decision-making by governments, individuals, and the private sector. News media play a central role in communicating public health and policy information, establishing accountability for decision-making, and shaping public perceptions through the number of news reports, their content, and their tone (Klemm et al., 2016 ; Reintjes et al., 2016 ). For news outlets spanning the political spectrum of three countries with contrasting public-health outcomes and policy responses (Fig. 1 ), based on a random sample of days, coverage related to COVID-19 increased substantially in March 2020 and declined gradually thereafter in May and June (Fig. 2 ), not rebounding even during the dramatic increase in U.S. COVID-19 cases in June and July (SI Figure S5 ). Understanding this news media reporting in the early stages of COVID-19 response provides important lessons for ensuring the accessibility of information in support of public health and gauging its degree of effectiveness in creating accountability for policy decisions.

News media reporting grappled with complications of scientific understanding and its uncertainties during the timeframe of our study, as assessed through our measures of validity, precision, and overall scientific quality. For example, the mechanisms of disease transmission, especially airborne transmission, were slow to be recognized, leading to dynamic adjustments of public-health guidance (e.g., for mask usage by the general public) (Zhang et al., 2020 ). Despite such uncertainties and frequent knowledge updates over time, the scientific quality of reporting was highest for the healthcare sector, also the most commonly occurring article topic (Fig. 6 ). The scientific quality of reporting overall did not improve as the pandemic proceeded and knowledge of COVID-19 increased, which may be attributed to shifts from healthcare to other topics of news media reporting (Fig. 5 and SI Fig. S7 ).

We did, however, identify major differences in the degree to which newspaper reporting of COVID-19 presented high-quality scientific information about the public-health effects of the coronavirus disease and measures to limit its spread. News media articles generally had moderate scientific quality overall (Fig. 3F ). Outlets on the populist-right of the political spectrum of each country, though, had significantly lower scientific quality in reporting related to COVID-19 (Fig. 3F ). Scientific quality was low especially for validity, precision, and context as measures of scientific quality, as well as for the distinction between opinion versus facts in some cases (e.g., articles reporting claims without fact checking, specificity, background details, or sourcing) (Fig. 3 ). These findings pertain to news reporting and analysis, rather than opinion pieces, editorials, or letters, which were excluded from the scope of news media articles we evaluated. The differences across outlets suggest that, in reading news reporting and analysis in different newspapers, readers access reporting of varying scientific quality related to the health risks and effectiveness of available measures to limit disease transmission.

Further, patterns of U.S. media reporting were correlated with failures of national leadership under the Trump Administration, and they may have both reflected and contributed to politicization of COVID-19 in the United States. During this study’s timeframe, the United States led the world in cases and deaths despite its pre-pandemic ranking as the country best equipped to manage a pandemic such as COVID-19 (Cameron et al., 2019 ). These public-health outcomes occurred against a backdrop of disinformation and failures of national leadership (Evanega et al., 2020 ; Ball and Maxmen, 2020 ; Holtz et al., 2020 ; Lincoln, 2020 ; Thorp, 2020 ). Lack of national leadership was observed in the relative dearth of national-level public-health policies and guidance (Fig. 1 ) and the divergence of subnational policy responses, correlated with partisan politics (SI Fig. S1 and Table S1 ). Elites and incumbent governments have outsize influence on public opinion and media coverage, which likely contributed to polarization and politicization of pandemic media coverage (Green et al., 2020 ; Hart et al., 2020 ). Linked to these trends, we observed higher sensationalism related to politics and elections topics and greater coverage of these sectors among U.S. newspapers (Figs. 5 – 6 ). Additionally, news outlets on the political left in the United States (i.e., New York Times , Washington Post ) published articles with more exposing and warning coverage, for example discussing disinformation on the part of government leaders and the risks of disease (Fig. 4 ). Although most Americans believe the media are fulfilling key roles during the pandemic, the majority of these individuals identify as Democrats, and Democrats trust many more new sources than individuals identifying as Republican (Jurkowitz et al., 2020 ; Gottfried et al., 2020 ).

In both Canada and the United States, low scientific quality was paired with lower-than-average sensationalism in news outlets on the populist-right (Figs. 3 F and 4F ). Sensationalism was low overall for all news outlets, but within Canada and the United States, it was lowest for the Toronto Sun and New York Post , as well as the Wall Street Journal . Although low sensationalism is generally considered beneficial, very low sensationalism combined with low scientific quality may have failed to alert readers to public-health risks and policy failures in some cases (e.g., per the measures of exposing and warning coverage in Fig. 4 ). Such trends also resulted, in part, from higher reliance on syndicated articles, especially in Canada, potentially related to structural and economic changes in news media (SI Fig. S6 ). Across the political spectrum, our results demonstrate that existing ideological perspectives may influence how information is used in reporting (Rosella et al., 2013 ). For example, news outlets at the populist-right in the United Kingdom and the United States may tend towards support of populist-right governments, demonstrating preference for those governments’ interpretation of the science, implemented policies, and use of science to justify choices made (Bennett et al., 2008 ; Grundmann and Stehr, 2012 ).

The studied news media outlets—traditional, national-level print media—have disproportionate influence on the content of other media platforms and on how that content is covered (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010 ; Denham, 2014 ). A better understanding of the effects of news media—or lack thereof—on public-health decision-making and public sentiment in the early stages of this pandemic can, for future pandemics or other public-health crises, increase public-health officials’ capacity to adapt communication strategies in disseminating guidance and coordinating responses of health system stakeholders (Laing, 2011 ; Rosella et al., 2013 ; Klemm et al., 2016 ; Hoffman and Justicz, 2016 ; Pieri, 2019 ). Such understanding is crucial as the impacts of the policy actions themselves accumulate. The findings of this study point to complex interactions among scientific evidence on public-health risks and response measures, societal politicization of the science, and the scientific quality and sensationalism of media reporting. An inherent tension may exist: tendencies towards low sensationalism, especially combined with low scientific quality, may in some cases lead to characterization of public-health threats and policy failures as less extraordinary and relevant than they actually are.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its Supplementary Information .

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Acknowledgements

S. Damouras provided advising on methods of statistical analysis, and J. Niemann formatted references. Funding for this work was provided by the University of Toronto Scarborough Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences and the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

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All authors conceived the analysis. KJM, RSR, BP, JT, CAC, SGC, KET, and NK designed the methods of analysis with review by all authors. RSR, BP, JT, CAC, SGC, and KET collected data. KJM, RSR, BP, and JT performed analysis of data and developed visualizations of data. KJM, RSR, BP, JT, and NK drafted the manuscript with review and edits from all authors.

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Mach, K.J., Salas Reyes, R., Pentz, B. et al. News media coverage of COVID-19 public health and policy information. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 , 220 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00900-z

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The Case for Media Impact

Table of Contents

The media—and especially nonprofit media—has spent the past few years struggling to measure the impact of its work. Some outlets are compelled to do so by counting their philanthropic supporters; others see their impact as foundational to audience development and engagement, and still others are beginning to experiment with the role of impact measurement in advertising and other revenue streams. Of course, at its core, journalism is intended to have an effect: to inform the public so we can be civically engaged and hold the powerful to account.

But what does it mean for a journalistic organization to put the goal of impact at the center of its mission? In this report, we explore this question through the lens of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its explosive project, “Evicted and Abandoned,” in which a collaborative reporting project of more than fifty reporters and fifteen organizations in twenty-one countries took on the World Bank. The investigation found that, over the last decade, projects funded by the World Bank have physically or economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people; that the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation have financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations; and that, from 2009 to 2013, World Bank Group lenders invested fifty billion dollars into projects graded with the highest risk for “irreversible or unprecedented” 1 social or environmental impacts.

Part One of the report introduces the current impact conversation in the media arena and describes ICIJ’s structure and strategy. Part Two traces the forerunners to some contemporary journalists’ discomfort with the notion of impact as a goal for media, and finds that, in fact, the notion of journalistic impact is nothing new. In Part Three, we examine how ICIJ’s impact imperative affects the organization’s approach to story choice, production, and distribution. The report also covers the challenges associated with this model and suggests what other journalistic organizations can learn from the experience of ICIJ.

Key Findings

• A networked structure necessarily requires that ICIJ relinquish control of the investigation and content produced by partner organizations, which can result in reporting errors.
• Measuring the impact of one organization and one project is difficult. Even knowing about the far-flung impact of ICIJ partner stories is near impossible.
• Collaborations, however complicated, result in increased capacity, larger audiences, and greater potential for impact. ICIJ’s above-and-below distribution strategy has proven effective.
• Large, international media generates attention to issues from international elites, while local and national media generates awareness among the most affected populations.
• A rolling thunder approach whereby reporters stick with the story long after the initial publication keeps the spotlight on the issues.

Recommendations

• Impact is not a dirty word : In our experience, news organizations are often wary of putting impact at the center of their operations for fear of getting too close to the ethical line separating unbiased journalism from advocacy work. The case of ICIJ demonstrates that an impact imperative need not cross this line, nor is impact necessarily a requirement that funders foist upon organizations. Instead, by having a clear mission that puts impact at the center of all it does, an organization can formulate its own theory of change (even if implicit) to guide strategy.
• Give your audience more—people like positive change more than bad news : The next step for media organizations is to take the expansive notion of impact that helps to govern internal strategy and communicate these changes with audiences. Now, as the American public’s trust in both media and government hovers at an all-time low, it is more important than ever to show the positive change that often stems from crucially important investigative reporting. This includes not just the political and institutional responses, but also the nuanced changes that happen at the level of individuals and communities.

Download a PDF of the full report here.

Media Impact

In the wake of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ “The Panama Papers” investigation, almost overnight a prime minister resigned; official investigations opened around the world; leaders from the United States, India, Australia, Norway, and France spoke out; and China began a censorship campaign to ensure its citizens would not access the findings. But the impact of “The Panama Papers” was not luck. It was the result of ICIJ’s carefully planned campaign. While investigative reporting designed to achieve impact may seem antithetical to the principles of journalism, ICIJ has high reporting standards that are widely respected in the field.

But what does it mean for a journalistic organization to have a core mission based on generating impact? To begin to answer this question, we focused our research on determining the effects of ICIJ’s impact imperative on the organization’s structure, processes, and strategies.

Impact in a Historical Context

The relationship between media and culture has been examined for generations, and the current study of journalism impact has precursors. In the 1920s and 1930s, scholars focused on the relationship between media and politics—at just the moment when media began to claim impartiality. Politics and dominant culture are often seen as being inextricably linked, if not synonymous.

In later parts of this paper, we review those forerunners: from Antonio Gramsci’s argument that media is a tool of the elite to create culture and dominate politics, thereby quieting the masses, 2 to arguments from economists like James T. Hamilton that assert the media is often instead a mirror reflecting consumer preferences. 3 We also cover those of social movement scholars who find that movements and organizations use the media to bring their cultural and political critiques into the mainstream, thereby shifting the broader cultural consciousness. 4 5

For the moment, though, we will accept that “media impact”—whether intended or unintended—exists, and is a suitably complex topic that has preoccupied researchers and journalists alike for almost as long as the industry has existed.

Media and Impact: Why Are We (Still) Talking About It?

There are at least three particular forces that make media impact a timely subject.

Funding for nonprofit journalism comes with impact requirements

The rise of nonprofit news organizations roughly coincides with the decline in traditional, legacy news outlets. The nonprofit model is supported by philanthropic foundations, individual donors, and members. According to a recent Knight Foundation report, foundation support accounted for fifty-eight percent of nonprofit news revenue in 2013. 6 However, many of the current, large funders of journalism, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Omidyar Network, have historically funded service delivery organizations and projects, not media 7 8 —a trend widely discussed in the nonprofit media and philanthropic communities. This creates an immediate tension, as, for example, it’s far easier to measure the impact of inoculations administered than the impact of a series of news reports on the importance of inoculations. Furthermore, service organizations have clear goals, while media organizations often have broader and more vague missions around values like contributing to a healthy democracy or protecting the public interest. However, as nonprofit media organizations and their funders have negotiated (often uneasy) partnerships, academics and other researchers have edged into the conversation and proposed other methods for understanding media’s effects—both on individual behavior and more complicated processes like framing public debate on issues.

The crisis of trust in journalism has made impact a brand differentiator

This second trend has been less explored but may have more powerful implications for media, including commercial media. In an era during which the public’s trust in legacy news organizations is rapidly eroding, 9 a media organization’s ability to understand its impact and then communicate that impact to its audience can potentially increase the organization’s perceived trustworthiness in the eyes of the audience. If this hunch were proven to be true, this would have huge implications for the media industry and its long-term sustainability.

The rise of analytics data has produced a culture and means of measurement, and demanded a counterweight

The last decade’s boom in newsroom analytics has influenced newsroom operations. It is commonplace to have loads of metrics that can be interpreted as indications of the success of journalists’ output. The first wave of audience data tools focused on pretty crude measures (often aligned with the needs of those selling advertising)—clicks, unique visitors, and visits. The state of analytics has massively evolved since then, capturing virality and user actions on page, among many other data points. Many journalists, upon publishing a story, pay close attention to how it spreads on Twitter and Facebook. In her report, “The Traffic Factories,” Tow Center fellow Caitlin Petre observed that while newsrooms’ cultural values play a big part in how staff use and perceive analytics, the very existence of readily available data that could be used to indicate a story’s worth is a potent force. 10 This defines the modern media, and separates the era of digital platforms from analogue. Some are troubled by this, whether they condemn it outright, or seek to synthesize the traffic and social analytics practices with computable indications of journalism’s other social values—impact in particular.

ICIJ: Global Collaboration for Maximum Impact

Collaboration rarely happens in the news industry, especially in investigative reporting where projects are carefully guarded under lock and key until an organization chooses to break the story. But new media outlets, and especially nonprofits, are exploring collaboration and recognizing the potential for increased reporting capacity, distribution reach, and impact. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is one such organization that has flipped the traditional model on its head and embraced radical collaboration.

ICIJ is a project within the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Public Integrity and was founded by journalist Chuck Lewis in 1997. Observing the rapid globalization of the 1990s, ICIJ’s original members believed that a journalism organization with an international mindset could be well suited to report stories that sprawled beyond any single country. At a time, according to ICIJ, when rapid globalization places “extraordinary pressures on human societies,” 11 it aims to be a globalized reporting network that counterbalances these pressures.

Mission and values

ICIJ’s mission is, perhaps not surprisingly, to “be the world’s best cross-border investigative team.” However, that comes second to its first aim: “to bring journalists from different countries together in teams—eliminating rivalry and promoting collaboration.” 12

Interviews and participant observation with ICIJ staff clearly indicated that ICIJ’s collaborative nature, cross-border reporting, and, more importantly, its syndicated distribution models are tactics in the service of impact.

Operating processes

ICIJ has a networked organizational structure with two spheres. First, its directly employed journalists, located across countries, form the network node. Then, ICIJ’s network expands to include more than 190 investigative journalists in over sixty-five countries. They are generally employed by other newsrooms and publish under their employers’ mastheads.

According to ICIJ website, “ICIJ reporters and editors provide real-time resources and state-of-the-art tools and techniques to journalists around the world.” 13 In-country reporters contribute to the collaborative investigations through on-the-ground reporting. Reporters pool resources as needed and freely share information. ICIJ Computer Aided Reporters provide data and data support to reporters who might not otherwise have the skills or programs necessary to conduct the analysis. Projects are then compiled and simultaneously published internationally in a syndicated manner, in multiple languages and publications across the globe.

Operational funding comes from philanthropic foundations and individual donations. Gerard Ryle, the leader of ICIJ’s headquarters staff in Washington, D.C., has primary responsibility for identifying and securing funding for general operations (although some comes through the Center for Public Integrity’s networks), which is not tied to specific editorial projects or topics. However, once an investigation is underway, ICIJ will often apply for smaller grants to fund additional reporting angles.

ICIJ’s structure, operating model, and editorial focus flows from its purpose. According to Ryle, the organization reports stories that are international, where it has evidence that institutions have broken down, and where it there are significant problems which should be—and can be—remedied.

ICIJ and impact

ICIJ has an underpinning model of change, namely that the wider the reach of high-quality, investigative stories and the stronger the distribution partners (in audience size and credibility), the greater the potential for change to remedy the problem (impact). Although ICIJ unambiguously aims for impact and practices journalism in pursuit of exposing problems so that they can be fixed, the organization does not start with a prescription for particular outcomes.

ICIJ’s model for change contrasts with many organizations that identify as social impact organizations. Social impact organizations with strong monitoring and evaluation processes generally work with what’s known as a theory of change, or a set of logical steps working back from the desired outcome. For example, if the desired outcome is fewer children dying in a specific region and common causes of death are known, a public health organization will ask what intervention can be taken to prevent those causes of death, and what resources and actions are needed to achieve that intervention.

To better understand how ICIJ’s collaborative process works and where “impact” fits into the big picture, we closely followed the reporting, production, distribution, and impact of one project, “Evicted and Abandoned: The World Bank’s Broken Promise to the Poor.” 14 We were flies on the wall in editorial and production meetings, and conducted interviews with ICIJ staff and reporters from other organizations who participated in the project. This process is documented and explored in detail in Part Three of this paper.

ICIJ team shares responsibility for collecting impact indicators. Indeed, many functions within the organization are shared. Again, according to Ryle, that’s necessary for such a small team. The journalists continue to follow the story, which can include reporting on reactions by subjects or stakeholders. The online editor compiles traffic and social metrics, and also has primary responsibility for updating the blog with impact indicators. Impact is often then reported back to audiences as follow-up content.

However, because ICIJ projects are published in multiple languages in newspapers, on websites, and throughout social networks across the world, compiling comprehensive analytics is effectively impossible. And, while some news of real-world change makes its way back to ICIJ staff and can be documented, much change that occurs in local, regional, or even national settings is never known by the organization.

Thus, for ICIJ, the operating model is an impact catch-22: the large and diffuse network leads to powerful investigative stories with sweeping scope and a huge potential for change, but these same qualities make understanding reach, audience, and the full scale of real-world change difficult, if not impossible.

Story selection

ICIJ’s story selection adheres to journalistic news values that would be familiar to most investigative teams; however, to those news values ICIJ adds an extra filter regarding the potential impact of a project. Ryle says, “We’re looking for obvious issues of global concern, always look[ing] for a systemic failure in things,” and asking, “can we make a difference?”

He emphasizes that there is no direct relationship between funding and story selection. However, once a story is chosen, ICIJ will approach grant-making organizations it thinks would be interested in funding sub-projects, such as a reporting trip. For example, when reporters Sasha Chavkin and Mike Hudson realized that a part of the “Evicted and Abandoned” story would require reporting on World Bank activity in Asia, ICIJ applied for a grant to do on-the-ground reporting in the region.

ICIJ also considers the type of stories it has already reported when selecting future projects. Ryle says that ICIJ is aware that the organization has a reputation for doing high-quality investigations into tax-haven stories fueled by leaks. The organization thus seeks out different types of stories, such as “Evicted and Abandoned,” to avoid being perceived as a “one-trick pony.” In Ryle’s words: “You’ve got to satisfy your CEO. You’ve got to satisfy the board . . . Also, funders start mumbling . . . even though it’s a series of stories on the same topic, they see it as one story.”

This suggests a subtle influence of the funding model: The team looks for stories that fulfill ICIJ’s primary criteria, but that can also widen and strengthen the organization’s reputation as able to tackle a diverse range of stories.

Reporting and publishing strategy

ICIJ partners with other journalism organizations for both reporting and publication. ICIJ forms partnerships with organizations in countries relevant to the investigation both to increase on-the-ground reporting capacity and to ensure localized distribution of the investigation. In this way, ICIJ can maximize the amount of reporting that is possible with limited budgets and guarantee that the stories will reach the largest possible audience.

ICIJ does not partner with activist organizations. Ryle clarifies that ICIJ maintains a distance from activist organizations, and that, “[When] you even let them know that you’re about to publish something, that is bordering on advocacy by itself.” When there is an investigation that is relevant to advocacy organizations, ICIJ will often send the final, public version of the story to them in order to spur impact.

ICIJ’s global reporting and publishing strategies are closely intertwined. “We need to have a story that will make its way onto the front pages of every newspaper or TV station that we work with,” says Ryle. “It has to work equally well in France, as it does in Germany, as it does in Brazil, as it does in Japan.” And, while ICIJ acknowledges that it is difficult to find and report stories that are global in nature, Ryle asserts that, “by getting the right one you’re almost automatically guaranteed to get one part of the impact, which is that . . . news organizations publish the story prominently.”

After the launch of an investigation, ICIJ processes in place to track the project’s impact both for journalistic and management purposes. As described above, the strategy requires that journalists stay assigned to the investigation, continuing to report out stories that were identified during the initial investigation, as well as following new leads generated by the first rounds of publication. Reporters also report on the impacts of the investigations.

ICIJ furthermore gives one of its major funders, philanthropist Graeme Wood, a report every six months on how, operationally, his money has been spent and what it has produced. That explicitly includes instances of impact.

The awareness that media has an impact on society, culture, and politics is not new. However, journalism’s focus on media impact has surged in recent years, especially in nonprofit, investigative reporting organizations and those that fund this type of work. ICIJ is a new type of news organization with collaboration at its core and impact in its mission. This focus influences how ICIJ approaches story choice, partnerships, reporting processes, publication strategies, and follow-up reporting.

Part Two of this report explores theories of media and social change, as well as theories from other industries and academic fields, such as health and development, advertising and marketing, the social sciences, and documentary film. In Part Three, we use ICIJ’s “Evicted and Abandoned” project as a case study to more deeply understand how an impact imperative permeates one investigation.

Impact Theory

The notion of journalistic impact—that is journalism having an effect on individuals, organizations, and society—is not an invention of this century. At the very least, the practice of collecting, making sense of, and distributing information is built upon an assumption that individuals will access the information, which will inform their perspectives, decisions, opinion, attitudes, and knowledge. However, in recent years, impact has become a hotly debated topic in the media industry. Amid the failure of the legacy newspaper model, paranoia around “new media” that doesn’t follow long-established journalistic rules of the game, and an obsession with whether and how millennials access and consume news and information, is in the zeitgeist.

This section traces the forerunners to journalists’ current concerns with impact, starting with the years before the press adhered to a rhetoric around disinterested objectivity. Later on, a theoretical and evidence base developed to show that journalistic influence not only existed but could, in certain circumstances, be identified and measured. However, other fields have more precise and established impact-assessment regimes. This paper briefly surveys some that may be interesting and relevant to journalists.

Media, Impact, and Politics: Easy Allies in the Early Days

Newspapers in the United States were not founded on the principle of existing as an unbiased fourth estate to keep government in check. Instead, during the majority of the eighteenth century, newspapers were largely (directly or indirectly) supported by political parties. 15 16 17 Their raison d’etre was influence.

Party papers often suppressed stories that were damaging to their party and/or politicians, failed to publish facts about events when stories were not suppressed, and printed stories with significant spin. 18 Newspapers were produced with the express goal of supporting the party and ensuring that the party’s candidates were elected.

In the 1870s, the number of independent papers began to increase in the United States’ urban areas. Economist James T. Hamilton and others have made compelling economics-based arguments for the growth of independent presses from 1870 through 1920 (a foreshadowing of the current era’s economic upheaval in media economics). First, technological advances in the steam cylinder printing press, wood-pulp paper, and the telegraph lowered the cost per unit of a paper, even if they increased the up-front cost of production. Second, urban growth meant more consumers in a geographic area, providing opportunity for new papers to enter the market. Independent papers were able to attract a heterogeneous audience, and thus were more profitable than party papers aimed only at attracting a homogenous audience. Third, the growth in audience brought increased advertising revenue. Advertising revenue, paired with increased subscription revenue, meant that party support was no longer the most profitable option for newspapers. 19

While “independent” did not necessarily equate to “unbiased,” independent papers were not affiliated with political parties, suppressed fewer relevant news stories, had less (at least obvious) bias in their stories, and provided more facts. 20 However, these new independent newspapers were not without a mission. In fact, the owners and editors of independent papers worked to expose corruption in politicians, parties, and government institutions. Whether or not the independent press resulted in better informed or less partisan voters is difficult to prove. However, in the words of Gentzkow et al., “While we cannot prove that a more informative press helped diminish corruption, it does appear that campaigns against corruption succeeded when they were supported by news coverage.” 21

So, while impact might not have been a media industry buzzword in 1890, the media was undoubtedly working to effect political change in the United States. With a change in the market size and an increased economy of scale, independent newspapers between 1870 and 1920 grew in popularity (and profitability) based upon the premise that independent news was credible news. It seemed consumers agreed with them, and by 1900 independent papers accounted for more than forty-seven percent of all dailies and more than fifty-five percent of circulation. 22

Professionalization and (the myth of) neutrality

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, literacy in the United States became more widespread, the population expanded, new cities formed, and journalism and media products multiplied to serve these populations. The changing operating environment for news businesses swung their explicit identities and goals even further away from influencing a populace on behalf of their owners or funders. While Michael Schudson and Chris Anderson urge us to avoid the pitfall of looking for a genesis moment for the journalism profession, they agree with other journalism scholars that the rise of the neutrality norm coincides with the field’s professionalization. 23 For many authors, “Objectivity continues to be the sine qua non of journalistic professionalization: explain the reasons behind the emergence of objectivity as an occupational practice, fix a date at which it first emerged, and you have gone a long way towards uncovering the “secret” of professional journalism.” 24 .

If, then, journalists were not explicitly aiming to have impact or influence, researchers have looked for the field’s alternative value and role in society. What was it that justified audiences paying money, workers providing their labor, and owners their capital? (Owners’ profit and workers’ wages could only be produced if the enterprise provided value to readers, perceived or real.) 1 Retrospectively, scholars of journalism identified the concept of “newsworthiness,” an idea that the subjects of the news have within them elements which make them worthy of being a media product, and thusly deserving the attention around which a business model could be built. At the heart of the idea of newsworthiness is an implicit belief that what journalists are covering is worthy of the audience’s time and attention.

Those scholars have spent much time studying, documenting, and critiquing news values. In 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge put forth what they hypothesized to be the top twelve factors of newsworthiness: frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, consonance, unexpectedness, continuity, composition, reference to elite nations, reference to elite people, reference to persons, and reference to something negative. They, and those who follow in their tradition, focus on the supply side of the media equation. That is, while they hypothesize that these factors have “certain effects among the audience,” the effects of journalistic news values are not the social phenomena under consideration. 25

While researchers and practitioners alike have used Galtung and Ruge’s study as a starting point to delve deeper into supposed news values, 26 27 others have critiqued the endeavor by arguing that it ignores the ideological underpinnings of news values.

One early critic of media as an instrument of ideological power was Antonio Gramsci. Writing in Fascist Italy, he argued that the regime exerted indirect power over civil institutions such as schools, the legal profession, trade unions, and the print media in order to control and incorporate the proletariat into its ideology. 28 This interpretation is strongly associated with the concept of “hegemony.” However, the media’s ideology was not generated in a vacuum. Kellner explains:

The hegemony model of culture and the media reveals dominant ideological formations and discourses as a shifting terrain of consensus, struggle, and compromise, rather than as an instrument of a monolithic, unidimensional ideology that is forced on the underlying population from above by a unified ruling class . . The hegemony approach analyzes television as part of a process of economic, political, social, and cultural struggle. According to this approach, different classes, sectors of capital, and social groups compete for social dominance and attempt to impose their visions, interests, and agendas on society as a whole. Hegemony is thus a shifting, complex, and open phenomenon, always subject to contestation and upheaval. 29

Writing specifically about U.S. media of the twentieth century, Gamson et al. argue that the frames journalists use, which are constructed through “routine, taken-for-granted structures of everyday thinking contribute to a structure of dominance.” 30 As with Gramsci’s dialectic, they acknowledge that the audience has agency in interpreting these frames. 31 But ultimately, the imbalance in power means the common sense, or “gut feeling” of the journalist (and the editor, company, and industry) is perhaps the strongest contributor to their readers’ perceived reality. 32 For current readers considering journalistic impact, these theorists provide an argument that, despite journalists’ claims to objectivity and the intrinsic newsworthiness of their stories, societal power-holders use the media to exert their control and influence audiences’ views.

Nonetheless, since at least the mid-1900s, journalists have claimed objectivity and neutrality as a core tenet of the profession, and cited these factors as justification for their position of power in creating our shared reality through broadcast and print media. In the words of Schudson and Anderson:

U.S. journalism’s claim to objectivity—i.e., the particular method by which this information is collected, processed, and presented—gives it its unique jurisdictional focus by claiming to possess a certain form of expertise of intellectual discipline. Establishing jurisdiction over the ability to objectively parse reality is a claim to a special kind of authority. In sum, journalistic objectivity operates as both an occupational norm and as object of struggle within the larger struggle over professional jurisdiction. 33

But what of the audience? Gamson et al. assert that the social constructions disseminated through media are likely to be both unconscious on the part of the journalists and unrecognized as such by the reader. 34 “News is both a permanent social structure and a means of social reflexivity and contestation; a product as well as a productive process.” 35 But the question begs to be asked: What do citizens believe to be newsworthy? What do they want more of? And, perhaps most importantly, why?

Ida Schultz dances around these questions when she writes: “Where most of the classical newsroom studies used titles such as ‘making,’ ‘creating,’ ‘manufacturing,’ or ‘constructing’ the news, the best title verb describing journalistic practice within the analytical framework of reflexive sociology would be positioning the news.” 36 Following Bourdieu, Schultz recognizes that journalists and media companies are part of the journalistic field, and as such they interact with other producers of culture and knowledge. Thus, rather than constructing a news story with an unintentional but powerful frame, she posits that journalists position their work internally to get their stories green-lit. Furthermore, media organizations actively work to externally position their content in such a way as to maximize its appeal to audience members. 37 Now, not only had “news values” been identified, but critics had articulated a tension between journalists’ claim to being a neutral filter for the news and their self-interest in amplifying or, at least, emphasizing newsworthy elements. If their work could be seen as consequential, it was more important and more valuable.

Mainstream media in the United States has been loath to acknowledge the power inherent in its industry, the ends that result from their means of communication, and the news values of its audience(s). Note Schudson and Anderson: “Journalism seems to simultaneously make a grandiose knowledge claim (that it possesses the ability to isolate, transmit, and interpret the most publicly relevant aspects of social reality) and an incredibly modest one (that really, most journalists are not experts at all but are simply question-asking generalists).” 38

The evidence base for journalistic evidence

Researchers have long worked to identify and quantify the influence of the news media on individuals, society, and politics alike. Particularly relevant to our study, in 1972 Max McCombs and Donald Shaw put forth their theory of Agenda Setting, which aimed to develop an empirical basis for how the media affected what the public paid attention to. Comparing the issues that the media emphasized in its coverage of the U.S. presidential election campaign and the issues that survey respondents recalled, the researchers found that the more the media covered an issue, the more audiences considered that issue to be important. 39

The theory was extended to how the media influences audiences’ perceptions of facts within an issue, such as the positive and negative attributes of people and organizations in the news. 40 Researchers investigated the ways in which agenda setting worked in non-political subjects, including business reputations, sports, and religion (generally speaking, the principles held true). They also started to find that the recency and volume of individuals’ exposure had a significant influence on how much they retained the information in memory, (i.e., when issues drop out of the media agenda, most people mostly forget the details). 41

In the mid- and late 2000s, the growing prominence of digital media, and in particular the early social media technologies (blogs, comment boards and the like), prompted researchers to extend their understanding of a changing environment that allowed, as never before, individuals to participate in fragmented, conversational groups and clusters (and for the conversations to be studied on a mass scale). 42 The framework of “agenda melding” was one result; the idea that individuals join groups and partially assimilate the group’s opinions of what’s important, or maybe stay silent. 43 Mostly, after joining a broadly like-minded group they do not seek to change the group’s dominant views to align with their own outlier views on minor matters.

A study of 2012 U.S. election-time Twitter also observed differences between how people with different political affiliations absorbed salience: The researchers, using the relatively new term “network agenda setting,” concluded that supporters of the Republican nominee Mitt Romney appeared to absorb their online network’s views on salient topics and facts more than did Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s supporters. 44

While the foci of agenda setting studies have varied across time, platforms, and individuals’ characteristics, the field of research has provided a range of empirical bases from which to understand the way news media can and has influenced public perceptions of events, individuals, and organizations.

Rediscovering an impact mission

In recent years, media organizations have been motivated to explicitly embrace the reality that they are, in fact, influential social forces. Having lost their dominance over channels of communication, and as consumers of news look to new and unconventional sources for information, legacy companies are coming to grips with the fact that evolution is now necessary for their survival. They have started to attend to what happens post-publication: Audience engagement, especially via social media, is an accepted practice in newsrooms, and engagement editors are common in media companies across the United States. The proliferation of nonprofit media has allowed for a wave of experimentation in the co-creation of news, and deep audience and community engagement by media.

An increasing number of both nonprofit and commercial media organizations are betting that impact—that is, any change in the status quo as a result of an intervention on their part (content, engagement, etc.)—is key to their long-term sustainability. 45 While this trend started in the nonprofit news space and was largely pushed by philanthropic foundations with a history of program evaluation around the NGOs they support, many commercial media outlets are taking it as a given that to show real, positive change as a result of their reporting will build a deeper relationship between their brand and their audience. The logic goes something like this: The more impact a news organization has, the more people will trust that brand and the greater affinity they will feel for it; thus, they’ll return more regularly to the organization’s website/broadcast program/newspaper, ultimately generating more revenue for the organization.

However, impact is still not the most important metric for the vast majority of media organizations. For example, again in Caitlin Petre’s ethnographic research report, “The Traffic Factories,” she finds that traditional media metrics rule newsrooms, and that these metrics have an effect on journalism. Especially relevant is her finding that traffic-based rankings can “drown out” other forms of evaluation, thereby engendering a range of emotions in journalists such as “excitement, anxiety, self-doubt, triumph, competition, and demoralization.” 46

Measuring Impact in Other Fields

If a history and literature review of how journalism has approached its influence and impact is useful as a look down deep into the topic, then this next section may be useful as a survey of adjacent fields’ approaches. Some pertinent professions’ practices are briefly outlined below.

Impact and metrics in development and health

Journalism researchers looking for expertise in achieving and evaluating impact can turn to the development fields, in particular the NGOs, foundations, and international organizations focused on health and social well-being. Their best practice, when planning an intervention, is to develop a “theory of change.” 47 The first step is to envision and articulate the ultimate outcome (e.g., bringing down rates of infant mortality in Afghanistan from 115 per thousand to forty per thousand), then work backwards through each precondition needed to change from the status quo to the desired condition. One of the many preconditions might be all children getting vaccinations, for which a precondition is parents knowing and agreeing to vaccinations, for which a precondition is an effective public information campaign, and so on. At each step the theory of change relies on cause and effect models that are accurate for the local environment. Ideally each intermediary step has indicators, which can be meaningfully measured.

Funders in the development field have also driven the adoption of standardized metrics to express the value of their outcomes. The DALY and QALY, favored by parts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization, exemplify this practice, but the fundamental idea (having a comparable metric for expressing outcomes) underpins similar methods used by the Hewlett Foundation, the Acumen fund, and the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, among others.

In 1994 a movement to professionalize health development reached a milestone by establishing the DALY, or Disability Adjusted Life Year, intended to be a single metric to capture the impact upon a human of any condition, such as a disease or a trauma. 48 (Development organizations’ interventions aim to reduce that number.)

Using this framework, individuals in the target population experience a condition that burdens them a given amount. For example, total blindness is expressed as a sixty-percent burden, death is a 100-percent burden, whereas protein malnutrition to the point of wasting is considered a 5.3-percent burden. If a person lives with blindness for ten years, they would have lost six DALYs. Protein malnutrition for ten years becomes 0.53 DALYs, and so on. The figure can then be combined into a formula to express costs and benefits across populations: An intervention costing five dollars per person which prevents otherwise certain blindness, given to 100 five-year-olds with a life expectancy of seventy-five years, might be expressed as:

100 * (75-5) * 60% = 4,200 DALY at a cost of 100 * $5 = $500

So this intervention has a cost per DALY of about 12c ($500/4,200) and thusly can be compared to any other intervention.

However, many readers will immediately see that while this might be precise, it has many points incorporating assumptions and estimations which risk losing accuracy and even meaning, while also flattening the lived experience of many individuals into a single number. Within the rich literature critiquing DALY, a Health Policy paper published one year after its introduction acknowledged limitations—including that the DALY sits within a narrow utilitarian value system—but did not wholly reject it. 49 Three years after DALY’s introduction, two more economists from Oxford and Harvard, Sudhir Anand and Kara Hanson, detailed both technical and ethical problems, concluding that DALY’s results would be practically flawed and decisions based on them would also be inequitable. 50 As late as 2014, Princeton researcher Rachel Parks charted the rise, resilience, and continuing use of the DALY through important centers of global health policy. 51

Impact-minded journalists may be interested in the DALY for two main reasons, aside from its persistent power. Philanthropists have the option of giving their money to organizations that can express a likely value of their intervention in a simple number. (Responsible organizations will include caveats and acknowledge uncertainty, but at least they offer a comparable data point.) However, the underlying theory of change in journalism is far less direct than health organizations’. Journalists may need to articulate that their case for funding must embrace that uncertainty. For example, in James T. Hamilton’s book Democracy’s Detectives, he conducts an economic analysis of the cost of producing investigative reporting versus the monetary social value to provide a quantifiable economic societal cost savings. 52

Impact and Metrics in Information and Communication Worlds

Science and social sciences

Moving from the fields of development closer to the world of journalism, we pass academia and scientific research where there has been an established and highly structured metric for impact. When researchers publish formal articles in peer-reviewed journals, those publications will have an “impact factor,” calculated by taking the number of times the journal has been cited in a year and dividing by the total number of articles published over the previous two years, as recorded by Thomson Reuters’ “Journal Citation Report” (JCR). Tenure and promotion committees pay heed when researchers, especially those in the sciences and social sciences, publish papers in highly rated journals such as Science and Nature. However, the “JCR” does have its critics who say that Thomson Reuters’ database skews toward North America, its data is hard to verify, that the calculation cannot fathom whether the citation is approving, disapproving, or central to the citing author’s argument, and a host of other problems.

As a counterpoint to the “JCR” impact factor, some academic researchers have started to pay attention to “Alt-Metrics,” a system which also includes indicators of usage (in the form of views and downloads), peer review, discussion on social media, data usage, as well as citations. 53 Researchers add their own expert understanding to either of those frameworks of whether peers’ findings have become useful and built-upon in the field. For particularly important findings, studies are replicated; theoretically, when the research is done again, in the same way, it should produce the same results.

Advertising/marketing

Leaving aside, for a moment, the vast chasms of motivation, methods, and form (at least traditionally) that separate advertising and journalism, there are still similarities. Advertising intends to persuade the audience, as does some journalism. Advertising’s success metrics, however, are much more clearly linked to driving revenue for businesses (although that relationship became complicated in later years).

Indeed, the early performance indicators for marketing executives in products and services firms were found in the financial statements. In the 1950s and 1960s, according to marketing historian Bruce Clarke, most advertising was judged on whether revenue and/or operating profit went up (more sales being made or products commanding a higher price compared to the cost of production), and/or market share increased. 54 As advertising management became more sophisticated, executives argued that those indicators lagged their output by too much. Their solution was to measure softer, but standardized indicators: primarily, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and brand equity. 55 (At this point, journalists might start to see potential lessons: These labels refer to attitudes held by people exposed to media works, although the difficulty remains of proving causality in an intrinsically chaotic environment.) Customer satisfaction was expected to drive future sales revenue in volume and the higher prices customers would be prepared to pay because they were already satisfied with the product. The financial premium derived from satisfaction, loyalty, and audiences’ overall improved perception of the brand, in the form of increased revenue and lower subsequent customer acquisition costs, was called brand equity. Surveys of marketing professionals have revealed more attitudinal metrics, and myriad combinations of financial and non-financial measures, but they still follow the logic that a population’s perception of a product or service will influence the financial statements over time. 56 Marketing and advertising firms traditionally used surveys and focus groups to measure these attitudinal factors, although the advent of social media has produced a set of tools promising to deliver customer insights and measure the impact of marketing and communications. 57

Although journalists may balk at adopting practices from the marketing industries, that field has developed expertise in measuring the effects of their activity.

Documentary filmmaking

Journalists and documentary filmmakers are perhaps the closest relatives in this survey. The fields overlap. However, the inclusion of philanthropic funding sources in documentary economics precedes the rise of the online news organizations like ProPublica and The Marshall Project, which are strongly associated with impact and foundation-funded journalism. As such, the documentary community has established a practice and rhetoric around impact which is more recognized than in other mission-driven journalism.

Media-funding philanthropists, including the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Bertha Foundation and the Sundance Institute, underwrote a guide to impact for the documentary field. Its roots lie in a model published by political and communication theorist Harold D. Lasswell in 1948. Lasswell said, simply, the best way to describe an act of communication was:

Who Says What In Which Channel To Whom With What Effect? 58

Jana Diesner, a researcher in computer science with relevance to impact assessment, applied this approach in a framework for measuring the impact of documentaries. She called it the CoMTI model, suggesting research techniques and suitable metrics for measuring results throughout four dimensions of a film: its content, medium, target, and impact. Within the impact dimension Diesner uses the preexisting idea that effects can be on individual, communal, societal, or global levels, which may take the form of changes to awareness, sentiment, and actions. 59 Although Diesner’s CoMTI paper was an intermediary step toward building a computational tool to analyze text from the network of stakeholders around a documentary, the model and its constituent parts is valuable as an extensive catalogue of metrics and research techniques for assessing journalistic impact.

The history of thinking around how journalism affects society supports a conclusion that journalists must accept that their work can and frequently does have consequence. However, unlike some of the other professional fields outlined above, it is easier to see something like influence—one element within a suite of factors leading to an end result, rather than the direct impact of a health intervention like immunizations or cataract surgery. Nonetheless, each of the impact and influence theories discussed above have their limitations. Journalism, which necessarily operates in the chaos of the uncontrolled real world, must expect to tackle uncertainty, which is antithetical to a stable and predictable theory of change.

ICIJ Case Study

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists was founded by Chuck Lewis in 1997 as part of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Public Integrity (CPI). Observing the rapid globalization of the 1990s, ICIJ’s founders believed that a journalism organization with an international mindset could be well suited to report stories that sprawled beyond any single country. As a time of rapid globalization places “extraordinary pressures on human societies,” 60 according to ICIJ, the organization aims to be a globalized reporting network which counterbalances these pressures.

In October 2016, the CPI announced that ICIJ would spin off to become a free-standing organization. In a press release, the CPI stated: “The CPI’s Board of Directors has decided that enabling ICIJ to chart its own course will help both journalistic teams build on the massive impact they have had as one organization, and allow each to pursue new opportunities and options for funding and pursuing their crucial work.” 61 According to ICIJ director Gerard Ryle, the fundamental differences in ICIJ’s networked, collaborative structure and processes were at odds with the more traditional Center for Public Integrity, which focused on U.S. national, watchdog, and government accountability reporting. Furthermore, international philanthropic entities are governed by the laws, rules, and regulations of the state in which they are based. And, there can be limits to donations on international organizations. An independent ICIJ will then potentially have access to a different and/or increased pool of funders. 62

In this chapter, we examine how ICIJ’s impact imperative affects the organization’s approach to story choice, production, and distribution. We also ask what challenges are associated with this model and share what other journalistic organizations can learn from the experience of ICIJ. We use ICIJ “Evicted and Abandoned” investigation into the World Bank as a prism for separating the structures, processes, calculations, and strategies that together form ICIJ’s high-impact model.

ICIJ’s stated mission is to “be the world’s best cross-border investigative team,” which it does by bringing “journalists from different countries together in teams—eliminating rivalry and promoting collaboration.” 63 While there are indications that collaboration is becoming an emerging norm in today’s new media landscape, ICIJ has been ahead of this curve. In this landscape of increasing collaboration, ICIJ stands out due to the sheer size and scope of its projects, many of which involved dozens of journalists and media organizations across the globe.

The network structure of ICIJ and its syndicated content model were developed with one goal in mind: impact. In interviews and through participant observation with ICIJ staff, we found clear indications that ICIJ’s collaborative nature, cross-border reporting, and, more importantly, its syndicated distribution models continue to be tactics in the service of impact. According to editor Mike Hudson: “Everything is predicated on writing powerful stories: accurate, hard-hitting, deep digging, powerful journalism. And then, readership. But these all dovetail. The primary discussion is about the content, but knowing [the rest] will lead to impact.” 64

Hudson recognizes that impact—real-world change—may take “many years to manifest.” For example, he says, “Action plans are announced but not implemented.” While change might be promised, action can be just “mere spasms of reform that don’t do anyone any good.” The real impact, he adds, “is that change that is sustained attention beyond PR and press releases.”

ICIJ’s networked organizational structure consists of two spheres. At its core, ICIJ directly employs journalists located across the globe (at the time of writing, staff includes six full-time and seven contract journalists), who report, coordinate the reporting efforts of others, and develop projects’ distribution strategies. ICIJ’s extended network includes more than 190 investigative journalists in at least sixty-five countries. These reporters are generally employed by other newsrooms and publish under their employers’ mastheads. ICIJ provides monetary and other resources such as data reporting to in-country reporters, as necessary.

ICIJ assumes that for high-quality investigative stories, the greater the reach of a story and the stronger the distribution partners (in audience size and credibility), the greater the potential for change to remedy the problem (impact). Although ICIJ unambiguously aims for impact and practices journalism in pursuit of exposing problems so they can be fixed, the organization does not acknowledge or promote any specific prescription or outcome.

On the surface, ICIJ’s model seems almost absurdly obvious: Partner with as many reporters and organizations across the globe to conduct in-depth investigations and distribute them globally to reach maximum audience. But the elegance of the model obscures the degree of complexity required in the scaffolding for these projects. The success of ICIJ projects relies on the successful maneuvering of ICIJ to manage partner relationships, expectations, information, and much more. ICIJ senior editor Michael Hudson acknowledges that the partnership model is inefficient if one considers only the number of stories published based on effort put into investigations. However, he says that this model is not necessarily set up for maximum output, but instead for impact: “A key part of impact is agenda-setting and dominating the conversation.”

ICIJ director Gerard Ryle notes that there are two main advantages to the organization’s partnership model, through which they bring partners in early in the reporting process: First, partners are able to contribute reporting resources, and local knowledge and expertise; and second, partners provide almost guaranteed publishing platforms across the globe. He says that with this model, in some cases, “A story can be published in thirty-five countries in a single day.” 65

As a nonprofit, the collaborative model has additional logic for ICIJ. “The basic business model [of journalism] is failing,” Ryle says. “Organizations aren’t spending the kind of money they used to spend on investigative journalism. By pooling resources, we’re able to cut out a lot of the cost.” By sharing photographs, graphics, and travel and document costs, ICIJ is able to manage large-scale projects much more quickly and at lower cost than a traditional newsroom.

Case study: “Evicted and Abandoned”

Spoiler alert: ICIJ’s collaborative “Evicted and Abandoned” investigation found that, over the last decade, projects funded by the World Bank have physically or economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people; that the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation have financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations; and that, from 2009 to 2013, World Bank Group lenders invested fifty billion dollars into projects graded the highest risk for “irreversible or unprecedented” social or environmental impacts. 66 But how did they get this story? And how did an ICIJ investigation result in a powerful international institution, the World Bank, changing its own internal policy?

ICIJ is known for its big investigations with a leak at the center. However, in 2014, ICIJ wanted to diversify the types of stories it covered so as not to be pigeonholed as an outfit that “just” gets leaks. The brief came down for reporters to begin poking around and pitch ideas. Reporter Sasha Chavkin, sensing a possibility, started going to World Bank seminars in the spring of 2014, where he heard complaints about adverse effects of World Bank projects. Chavkin started to research and found that the complaints panel was hearing from complainants in Kenya, Honduras, and India, and that there were many impoverished people who were having their lives disrupted as a result of World Bank projects.

The World Bank’s state mission is to “end extreme poverty within a generation and boost shared prosperity.” 67 The bank has a promise of no harm, and for infrastructure or other physical projects, it is required to resettle or otherwise recompense affected people. However, Chavkin found indications that there is chronic undercounting of the actual harm done and individuals displaced as a result of World Bank projects, and that, often, the action plans that are designed to mitigate negative effects of bank projects are not implemented. Furthermore, there is no effective redress to any private processes or projects funded in whole or in part by the World Bank, and there are examples of violent evictions and people being displaced into lands controlled by tribes hostile to the new settlers. In one example, it became clear to Chavkin that a sum of the one to two billion-dollar fund made available to an Ethiopian health and education program were going toward forcible resettlement (theoretically to where there was more education infrastructure).

Chavkin says he wanted to understand the deeper roots of this story. Of the investigation, he notes, “I think it’s about both the scale of displacement and human rights abuses and violence associated with World Bank projects, and then the fact that pretty systemically the World Bank seems not to be following its rules for protecting the people who are in the path of its projects.” While local media covered individual cases of violence or wrongdoing resulting from these projects, Chavkin says it took reporting to determine that there was actually a larger systemic problem of forced resettlement that the World Bank seemed to accept fairly routinely as a part of its projects. Furthermore, he says, “There seemed to be very broad failure to take the required steps to protect the people who were being displaced.” 68

Chavkin and his editor, Mike Hudson, found sociologists and others who had been tasked with assessing the potential adverse impact of World Bank projects and who are meant to provide checks on approvals. However, they recognized that these experts do not hold any meaningful power and are often sidelined. Instead, “The World Bank approval side of the operation has all the power,” says Hudson, adding that the World Bank is “run and staffed by engineers and economists who have a very modeled, abstract way of understanding the world.”

When asked what ICIJ identified as a hypothetical “win” would be for the “Evicted and Abandoned” project, editor Mike Hudson says: “A win would be if ICIJ can penetrate the World Bank and write about what’s going on. [To] give voice to the marginalized, give a hearing to the people who are seen as peripheral.” He is clear that, as a news organization, ICIJ can not aim at for specific policy changes, but he asserts: “We want the world, the World Bank, policy makers, politicians, academics, “real people,” activists, voters, media to sit up and listen and read. This is important.”

For “Evicted and Abandoned,” Hudson estimates that ICIJ ultimately partnered with about fifteen other organizations. 69 From the outset, key partners in the United States included the Huffington Post, which was tasked with reporting and building a data interactive, the Global Post, NPR (through a freelancer), the GroundTruth Project, and the Investigative Fund. Internationally, early partners were The Guardian in the United Kingdom, El País in Spain, and three Swiss newspapers. Other partners included the German stations WDR and NDR. ICIJ recognized there was a reporting hole in Asia, so it applied for a grant to do reporting in the region. Ultimately, other partners included Nigeria’s Premium Times, BIRN in the Balkans, a Slovenian freelancer (Blaz Zgaga), radio freelancer Keane Barron (funded through the Fund for Investigative Journalism), freelancer Barry Yeoman (funded by The Nation Institute’s Investigative Reporting Fund), and Fusion.

ICIJ wrote, “In all, more than 50 journalists from 21 countries worked together to document the bank’s lapses and show their consequences for people around the globe.” 70 ICIJ also analyzed thousands of World Bank documents and made them accessible through an interactive database. 71 The byline for the main story read: “By Sasha Chavkin, Ben Hallman, Michael Hudson, Cécile Schilis-Gallego and Shane Shifflett. With reporting from Musikilu Mojeed, Besar Likmeta, Ciro Barros, Giulia Afiune, Mar Cabra, Anthony Langat, Jacob Kushner, Jeanne Baron, Barry Yeoman, Blaž Zgaga and Friedrich Lindenberg. ”

Differing journalistic norms, practices, and standards pose challenges in cross-country collaborations. Hudson says that ICIJ defaults to U.S. standards and style because they stand up elsewhere in the world. While he emphasizes that he doesn’t necessarily think that U.S. journalism is “better” than others, using this as the standard has worked so far.

ICIJ carefully selected reporting and publishing partners to maximize on-the-ground reporting capacity, reach, and potential impact of this investigation. According to Hudson, while “most of the consideration was about the fullness of the story,” there was a deep awareness of audience. “The composition of the partners was totally informed by balance, coverage, and ability of various partners to meet certain needs. For example, [ICIJ selected] Fusion for [its reach and expertise on] social media.”

Early in the reporting process, ICIJ selected the Huffington Post as a core partner with the intent of reaching a wide audience of “non-wonks.” The team immediately began thinking about the design: who would host the project, who would do the reporting, who would be responsible for editing, and who would do the data and design work. In the end, reporters said the reporting and writing was “pretty evenly split” between ICIJ and the HuffPo.

There were two separate data visualizations for this project, one hosted by the Huffington Post and the other by ICIJ. We asked HuffPo data reporter Shane Shifflett how the decision was made to have two visualizations. Shifflett says that HuffPo’s team decided that for its general audience, a map was the easiest way to present the complex information from the investigation. “HuffPo is eager to clue readers into what they can do, talk about solutions, and see how they can help. ICIJ is interested in impact and goals,” he says. 72 So, ICIJ’s visualization was in-depth and made the deep data and records it had used during reporting accessible to its more technical and informed audience in order to provide the necessary information to pressure the World Bank directly.

On the HuffPo side, Shifflet says the team had to completely rethink the way in which it told this investigation for its audience. For example, he says he and his colleagues worked from the assumption that the HuffPo audience would know what the World Bank is, but that they wouldn’t be familiar with the intricacies of how international policy is made or the institutions in place to hold them accountable. Shifflet produced an interactive map and visualizations for the stories hosted on the HuffPo, with the central goal being to increase awareness of the World Bank. Shifflet also recounts that the HuffPo welcomed the opportunity to work with ICIJ’s investigative reporters, and to be able to champion such an important project.

ICIJ shared the full text stories with the Huffington Post and agreed to its posting the content on its website. According to ICIJ’s online editor Hamish Boland-Rudder, “The things I wanted in return for that was guarantee that we’d be able to have access to analytics to track the traffics website on that site, as well as have links back to our site and, more importantly, that these links be fairly prominently displayed. Also, we requested that there be an email sign-up.”

At launch, “Evicted and Abandoned” country-specific stories included Kenya, 73 Ethiopia, 74 Peru, 75 India, 76 Honduras, 77 and Kosovo. 78 The stories were written by a combination of ICIJ staff and partners, with local reporting partners in all cases. According to reporter Sasha Chavkin, ICIJ “chose our case studies based on the severity of impact to displaced communities, the quality of existing documentation, and the extent to which they illustrated larger themes [ICIJ] wanted to investigate (human rights abuses, financial intermediaries, etc.).” He says they also worked to have geographic diversity and to have stories that would be of interest to ICIJ’s partners on the project.

Strategizing for Impact

The project launch date was a key piece of ICIJ’s strategy for “Evicted and Abandoned,” designed to maximize audience reach and the potential for impact. Prior to publication, lead ICIJ reporter on the project Sasha Chavkin explained: “Our launch is going to be the day before the World Bank spring meetings this year. That’s not a coincidence. Right now the Bank is rewriting its safeguard rules. 2 […] And we want our story to come out before the second version is published.” And while Hudson says that the team did not talk explicitly about the impact the project would have, it did make explicit predictions about readership potential, assuming that wide readership was most likely when there was a news hook.

ICIJ decided to have a rolling release of its prepared stories over a four-week period. This strategy was designed to drive sustained traffic, which (in its tacit theory of change) would produce impact. At the time of project launch, ICIJ had eight known stories. Chavkin explains:

We are trying to present the most compelling body of work to the widest audience we can . . . Some of that requires strategic decisions. For example, there are eight stories overall that we have planned. We could release all eight on the same day. We think no one would possibly read of all of them. So that’s why we’re going with four on the first day, and then the others will come out a week at a time after that.

ICIJ had also committed Chavkin and Hudson full time to the project for the remainder of 2015, after having already worked on it for ten months. Mike Hudson says, “That’s where the true impact comes from . . . We get a big bump on the first publish then the traffic reduces. More time allows the team to cover reactions, and respond to any leaks or sources who emerge to suggest new lines of reporting.” He suggests that this style of rolling release and ongoing coverage is different from “most other news organizations.” While he names a few exceptions, such as The New York Times, he says, “Most do big splash then move on.” In addition to a rolling release sustaining public attention and increasing the potential for impact, he says it also allows the story to evolve.

ICIJ staff members emphasize the importance of delineating journalism from advocacy. Ryle, for example, says that while he recognizes that advocacy groups “do fantastic work” with ICIJ stories that contribute to investigations’ impact, “We don’t want to be the advocates for a number of reasons.” He adds: “If our stories are good enough, they’ll get picked up by these groups, and if they’re not, then we’re failing as journalists.” For Ryle, impact can mean many things. “For me, impact is, you know, outrage—public outrage, companies changing laws, parliamentary debates, you know, protests in the streets, all of which we actually do get,” he says.

Online editor Hamish Boland-Rudder says that ICIJ does not have any “official” way to monitor the impact of its projects:

The best thing that I can point towards is I’ve started a tag on our blog: impact tag. And because we have no formal measurement tool setup, I’m not formally reporting things at all. That’s kind of the place where we try and collect the most important stuff or what seems to be the most important stuff. That’s really the only record of it that we have.

Chavkin says he finds out about the impact of his projects mostly from the news, through Google alerts, on Twitter, and from other ICIJ members around the world who tell ICIJ when “stuff is happening.” When something seems important enough to share, Chavkin says, “I put it in a post.”

In the case of “Evicted and Abandoned,” ICIJ knew it had hit a nerve when the World Bank began pushing back on the story before it had even been published. ICIJ reported that, “In March 2015—five days after the reporting team send detailed questions informing the bank it had found “systemic gaps” in its protections for people displaced by its projects—World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim issued a statement admitting “major problems” with the bank’s resettlement practices and announcing a reform plan to fix them. 79 The World Bank also released a five-and-a-half page document titled, “Action Plan: Improving the Management of Safeguards and Resettlement Practices and Outcomes.” 80 It is worth noting here that ICIJ directly links its reporting to the World Bank response. ICIJ published a follow-up story in May that said former World Bank top employees did not think the Action Plan addresses the deepest flaws in the system. 81

When the investigation was published in mid-April of 2015, the bank pushed back in a more direct way. The Guardian ran a version of the story in which it misstated some of ICIJ’s findings. According to Chavkin and Hudson, “Essentially [ The Guardian ] said that 3.4 million people had been forced from their homes, which was not our finding. It was that 3.4 million were physically or economically displaced. And so the bank made a formal complaint to The Guardian . The Guardian corrected the things they had misstated.” The Guardian readers’ editor wrote a column, “The Readers’ Editor on . . . the Pluses and Perils of Journalistic Partnerships,” in which he admitted the paper’s mistakes and said: “ The Guardian ’s writers and editors failed to get their heads around a complex exposé on which our partners in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists had been working for months.” 82

The Guardian blunder aside, “Evicted and Abandoned” generated an impressive global response. Chavkin and Hudson followed the global pickup of the story, both by ICIJ partners and other news organizations. While they do not know the number of media outlets that ran the story, they informally kept track of the coverage estimate that there were “more than fifty, probably close to 100” articles written across the globe about the project. “Some of these are about the general findings [of the project], and some have actually used [ICIJ] data to look at displacement occurring within their own countries. So we’re glad to see all of that pickup,” they say.

ICIJ has closely followed the long tail of impact stemming from the project and, in many cases, its team members have written follow-up stories about these changes in order to communicate them with their audiences. However, in these stories about the impact of “Evicted and Abandoned,” ICIJ does not explicitly tie the changes to the investigation.

Immediately following the investigation in April 2015, EarthRights International filed a lawsuit in the United States against the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm, the International Financial Corporation, on behalf of people living and working near a coal plant in northwest India. 83 While ICIJ about this lawsuit, which charges the World Bank with serious environmental and economic to fisherfolk, farmers, and villagers and the parallels to the findings of its own investigation, the post does not say that the lawsuit has any direct relationship to “Evicted and Abandoned.” In July 2015, the IFC claimed legal immunity from being sued in the United States.

In June, ICIJon the dismal results of a World Bank employee survey that found staffers did not have a clear understanding of the direction of the institution, nor did they agree that the bank “creates a culture of openness and trust.” 84 Again, ICIJ did not claim that these survey results, which were worse for the bank than the prior year’s, were a result of “Evicted and Abandoned.” However, the article does construct a timeline in which the World Bank’s surveys shifted significantly from 2014 to 2015, with “Evicted and Abandoned” being one of two incidents that happened between the two (the other being demotions and reduced salaries), thereby implying that it played a role in the employee dissatisfaction. ICIJ also reported that a leaked document with open-ended answers to the survey revealed that staffers fear retaliation from senior management.

In July 2015, ICIJ reported that a World Bank Inspection Panel found that the bank had used outdated census data when funding a power transmission line project in Nepal. 85 This resulted in many more families being displaced and compensation being slow, if at all.

Finally, in December 2015, the World Bank implemented reforms to address the economic and environmental resettlement costs to individuals living in areas where bank projects were developed. 86 The reorganization gives autonomy to specialists who enforce social safeguards, including independent staff and budgets; hires new social safeguard specialists; requires “Resettlement Boot Camp” for all safeguards staff; and increased overall funding for safeguards support. ICIJ reported that the World Bank’s “Resettlement and Safeguards Management” factsheet was a response to its continued reporting on the issue. 87

Honors and awards

Honors and awards are common indicators of the success of any journalistic endeavor. By this standard, “Evicted and Abandoned” was a considerable success.

• National Headliner Award—Online Writing
• Online News Association—The Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award (Large Newsrooms) 88
• Overseas Press Club of America—Whitman Bassow Award for International Environmental Reporting 89
• New York Press Club—Gold Keyboard Award for Outstanding Enterprise or Investigative Reporting 90
• New York State Society of CPAs—Excellence in Financial Journalism Award
• Society of Professional Journalists/Sigma Delta Chi Award—Feature Photography 91
• Investigative Reporters and Editors Award—Finalist
• Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism—Finalist
• Society of American Business Editors and Writers “Best-in-Business” Award—Finalist
• John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism—Finalist
• D.C. Chapter of Society of Professional Journalists Dateline Award—Finalist

Challenges and Learnings

A collaborative reporting project of more than fifty reporters and fifteen organizations in twenty-one countries, taking on a behemoth like the World Bank—what could go wrong? While certainly there are nearly infinite answers to this question, in fact, very little did go askew.

According to editor Mike Hudson, the largest challenge with “Evicted and Abandoned,” as with most ICIJ projects, is working with partners in different countries where journalistic norms, practices, and laws vary greatly. However, by using American journalistic norms as the standard and then working closely with reporters who are producing work that will contribute to ICIJ stories, Hudson says they meet issues head on. However, as was seen with The Guardian story that misrepresented “Evicted and Abandoned”’s findings, the model is not bulletproof.

Another challenge when working with partners arises when trying to understand the widespread and multifaceted impact of such a massive undertaking. At the most basic level, ICIJ staff members say that it is difficult, if not impossible, to get web and social media metrics from partners in order to truly know the reach of a project. Furthermore, it’s likely that only a fraction of the on-the-ground, real-world change that happens in the wake of ICIJ projects ever makes its way back to the eyes and ears of ICIJ staff. And, because there are not ICIJ staff dedicated analytics or impact, there is little bandwidth to improve these processes.

But even with these challenges and an incomplete understanding of the scope of impact of “Evicted and Abandoned,” there are at least three lessons worth stating.

First, collaborations, however complicated, result in increased reporting capacity, larger audiences, and greater potential for impact. Having in-country reporters contribute to investigations means reporting can be done more cheaply than otherwise, and with greater cultural competency. This means there is a built-in audience for the stories in countries across the globe.

Related is ICIJ’s above-and-below distribution strategy, where large international media like the Huffington Post and El País generate attention to issues from international elites, while local and national media generate awareness among the most affected populations. The resulting pressure from the grassroots and elites create a vise for institutions and power holders, forcing them to respond. 3 92

Finally, ICIJ stuck with the story long after initial publication, focusing its spotlight on the World Bank and the changes it had committed to making. This rolling thunder approach kept international attention on the World Bank, likely resulting in its continued efforts to address the problems and wrongdoing identified in “Evicted and Abandoned.”

In our experience, news organizations are often wary of putting impact at the center of their operations for fear of getting too close to the ethical line that supposedly separates unbiased journalism from advocacy work, or fear of the perception of straddling that line. However, the case of ICIJ demonstrates that an impact imperative need not cross this line, nor is impact only necessarily a requirement that funders demand of organizations. Instead, by having a clear mission that puts impact at the center of all it does, an organization can formulate its own theory of change (even if implicit) to guide strategy.

When an organization pays attention to the levers of change relevant to an investigation and incorporates these into its strategy for publishing a story, the project often becomes both wider and deeper in scope. Suddenly, editorial partnerships become logical pathways to reach broader audiences, informing more people about wrongdoing and helping to set agendas in geographic locations where structural change is possible.

The next step for media organizations, including ICIJ, is to take the expansive notion of impact that helps to govern internal strategy and communicate these changes with audiences. At a time when the American public’s trust in both media 93 and government 94 hovers at a dismal twenty percent, an all-time low, it is more important than ever to show the positive change that often stems from crucially important investigative reporting. This includes not only the political and institutional responses, but also the more nuanced changes that happen at the level of individuals and communities. Communicating these impacts can potentially help improve public trust in media as an agent for positive change, while also providing models of citizen engagement in processes of social change.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, especially Pete Brown and Claire Wardle, for their support, patience, and feedback throughout the lifecycle of this project. Many thanks to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for participating in this project. The degree of ICIJ reporters’ and editors’ transparency and thoughtfulness have been an inspiration. June 2017

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• We acknowledge that advertisers paid a lot of the financial costs of journalism, but readers still need to find value if they are to “pay” for the product with their attention. ↩
• The World Bank safeguard rules are those designed to minimize potential harm to individuals affected by World Bank projects and activities. ↩
• This finding mirrors that in a 2015 study of the impact of the CIR’s reporting on a disability claims backlog at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. ↩

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Scientific research in news media: a case study of misrepresentation, sensationalism and harmful recommendations

Accurate news media reporting of scientific research is important as most people receive their health information from the media and inaccuracies in media reporting can have adverse health outcomes. We completed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a journal article, the corresponding press release and the online news reporting of a scientific study. Four themes were identified in the press release that were directly translated to the news reports that contributed to inaccuracies: sensationalism, misrepresentation, clinical recommendations and subjectivity. The pressures on journalists, scientists and their institutions has led to a mutually beneficial relationship between these actors that can prioritise newsworthiness ahead of scientific integrity to the detriment of public health.

1 Introduction

1.1 media and scientific research.

Clear, balanced and accurate representation of scientific research in news media is important. Media both shape and reflect public opinion [Caulfield et al., 2014 ]. The public receive a significant amount of their health information from the media [Caulfield et al., 2014 ; Phillips et al., 1991 ]. Those who receive their health information from the media are not limited to general audiences but include content experts such as healthcare professionals and policy makers [Geller, Bernhardt and Holtzman, 2002 ]. Media coverage of health issues can influence government policy [King, Schneer and White, 2017 ] and impact healthcare decision making [Johnson, 1998 ]. Health information in news media can have a greater impact on public health behaviour than government led and supported public health campaigns [Seale, 2003 ]. Whilst scientific research includes vast fields that encompass many disciplines of investigation in both in the natural (biology, chemistry, physics) and social world (sociology, anthropology, psychology), in this paper, we refer to ‘scientific research’ as a short-hand way of referring to lab-based and clinical research with clear translations and implications for human health.

Research in natural scientific fields is generally considered positivist. Positivist research, like that undertaken in the case that is described in this study, is viewed as researchers working from a paradigm in which objective truths about the world can be developed through rigorous adherence to the scientific method. Scientific research uses rigorous methods to ensure researcher objectivity and minimise bias [O’Connor and Joffe, 2014 ]. However, a subtle shift occurs when scientific research is written about in public domains such as mainstream news media [O’Connor and Joffe, 2014 ]. Given the goals of media communication, the overall complexity, phrasing, language, and the relatability of the science needs to be adapted for a mainstream audience. Researchers’ goal of reporting high quality scientific research in media and the need for scientific research to be comprehensible and newsworthy presents competing priorities. As social science researchers, we view this under-investigated tension as important and worthy of study. Throughout this article we use a social constructivist perspective to investigate and explain the tensions that emerge when scientists communicate the outcomes of positivist science outside of the strict confines of academic publishing. We acknowledge the socially constructed nature of the journal article, the press release and news media reporting and aim to explore the processes, structures and activities that create these different modes of communication.

Since the 1990’s there have been significant changes to news media environments that have impacted both on the way science is communicated to the public and the way consumers of news engage with, and receive information about science. Recent changes include that ownership of media organisations has become more concentrated and media has become more digitized with convergence across platforms [Erdal, 2019 ]. In contemporary society, the public engages with news across multiple platforms using both traditional and digital sources. In 2018, the Pew Research Centre reported that people in the U.S. are most likely to receive their news from television followed by news websites, radio, social media and print newspapers [Shearer, 2018 ]. In 2019, Ofcom reported that people in the United Kingdom (U.K.) are most likely to receive their news from television followed by internet sources, radio and then print newspapers [Ofcom, 2019 ]. In 2019, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism reported that Australians are most likely receive their news from online sources followed by television, print and social media [Newman et al., 2019 ]. Important to note is that the sources that people receive their news from are shifting with online content being of increasing importance, especially for younger audiences such as those aged 18–29. In the U.S., for example, most young people report consuming news via social media followed by news websites [Shearer, 2018 ].

In addition to the change in ways that society consume news, there has been a steady decline in employment of ‘traditional’ journalists globally. In Australia around a third of all print journalist positions were lost in the twenty years from 1996 to 2016 [O’Regan and Young, 2019 ]. In the U.S., newsroom employment dropped by 23% from 2008 to 2019 [Walker, 2021 ]. These job losses have coincided with a steady decline in the circulation, readership and advertising revenue of print newspapers [Barthel, 2017 ]. As in many other countries, Australia has also seen a steep decline in specialist science journalists, with general journalists now covering science-related news without necessarily having any science training [Watkins, 2019 ]. In addition, the speed of today’s news production has resulted in the disappearance of scrutinised information and considered reflection [Le Masurier, 2015 ]. The pressure to produce real time news has resulted in greater inaccuracy [Hargreaves, 2003 ] and a dependence on press releases that are written by the public relations professionals employed by universities and research institutes [Lewis et al., 2008 ]. Even if journalists had the time to read journal articles, the majority of those articles remain behind journal paywalls [Butler, 2016 ]. Journalists are also under increasing pressure to generate ‘click bait’ and are therefore driven by headlines that include words such as “breakthrough”. In combination with a lack of science training and time pressures this results in inaccuracies and sensationalist stories being published [Watkins, 2019 ]. Research has shown that inaccurate or exaggerated scientific reporting has, in part, been a result of the information in the press releases [Sumner et al., 2016 ].

Researchers have reported that the desire to create newsworthy stories about science led to a perverse situation where poorer quality research can garner more news coverage than robust research based on a strong priori hypothesis, as the poorer research is more likely to yield surprising and newsworthy results. For example, Selvaraj and colleagues investigated study designs of medical research published in news media and found that newspapers were less likely to cover randomised controlled trials than observational studies and therefore preferentially reported on medical research with weaker study designs [Selvaraj, Borkar and Prasad, 2014 ]. Another example of this is when the poorly designed and subsequently retracted and debunked study led by Andrew Wakefield and published in the Lancet that described an association between the measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism was widely published in news media and resulted in a reduced vaccination rate of children for years following the publication of the article [Godlee, Smith and Marcovitch, 2011 ]. Research designed to quantify the effect of this paper has demonstrated that this one study alone has been a primary cause of childhood vaccine scepticism in the U.S. highlighting that media attention of inaccurate scientific research can undermine public trust in vaccines [Motta and Stecula, 2021 ]. This case of the MMR vaccine is an example of widespread and damaging news coverage from a poorly design scientific study. The consequences of communicating scientific research via media when it involves misinformation, like the MMR vaccine, can lead to public misunderstanding, distrust in science and harmful health behaviours [Kata, 2010 ].

Other researchers have highlighted, that unlike for scientists, for the media, communicating the limitations and risks of a study may be of a lower priority. Omission of limitations and risk has been reported in a number of studies, Caulfield and colleagues found that vitamin D when reported on in news media was linked to a variety of health conditions for which there is no definitive scientific evidence in addition to under reporting the risks associated with vitamin supplementation [Caulfield et al., 2014 ]. Cassels and colleagues analysed the representation of five specific drugs in Canadian newspapers with the main findings being that the majority of articles did not mention potential side effects or harms [Cassels et al., 2003 ]. Schwitzer summarised the work of independent health news reviewing organisation ‘healthnewsreview.org’ which evaluated 1,800 health news stories across many U.S. news organisations. Findings showed that 70% of health news articles were deemed unsatisfactory when assessed for attributes such as quantifying potential harms and benefits and reporting on costs [Schwitzer, 2013 ]. Researchers have theorised that the omission of limitations and risks in the reporting of scientific studies in news media is to increase their newsworthiness or conversely, as described by Mellor, reporting on attributes such as limitations is considered a non-news value [Mellor, 2015 ].

In addition to the omission of limitations and risks, writing techniques used in journal articles, press releases and news media to make scientific research more newsworthy include the use spin and positive framing. In the context of scientific research, spin has been described as communicating findings so that the benefits of an intervention seem stronger or more positive than they actually are [Haneef et al., 2015 ]. The motivations to use spin to increase newsworthiness when writing about scientific research in news media have been linked to scientists, public relations specialists and journalists. In an analysis of randomised controlled trials reported in news media, Yavchitz and colleagues reported that the key predictor of ‘spin’ in a press release was the use of ‘spin’ in the conclusion of the abstract of the journal article [Yavchitz et al., 2012 ]. Even before the journal article is published, researchers have found that spin can be present at the beginning of the research process from grant applications in addition to academic journal articles and consequentially any material that is based on these documents [Landhuis, 2016 ]. Others have argued that spin can be introduced in the press release. Sumner and colleagues found that exaggerations and warnings in news reports mirrored those in press releases [Sumner et al., 2016 ]. Others have found fault with the practice of journalists. Taylor and colleagues [Taylor et al., 2015 ] investigated the accuracy of news media coverage of a meta-analysis (a complex statistical method that combines results across multiple studies) investigating the link between pancreatic cancer and processed meat. The authors found that most news reports were derived from secondary sources such as the journal press release and that the quality of the news reports was dependent on the quality of the secondary sources from which the news reports were derived [Taylor et al., 2015 ].

Framing is another technique that, when a news article is produced, will highlight and downplay certain elements of a story to promote a specific predetermined understanding [Entman, 2007 ]. News frames, therefore, can exert power over readers’ beliefs, attitudes and behaviours [Oliver, Raney and Bryant, 2019 ]. Furthermore, sense making theory suggests that readers consume news media portrayed in specific frames, as a short cut to understand complex topics [Scheufele and Lewenstein, 2005 ; Shih, Wijaya and Brossard, 2008 ]. Framing can therefore yield problematic representation and sense making interpretations of science if a study has been inaccurately portrayed for the purpose of newsworthiness for the benefit of media, scientists or both. Given that science needs to be both understandable and relatable to be newsworthy [Fuoco, 2021 ], it makes sense that there are shared motivations of scientists, public relations professionals and journalists that may result in techniques such as spin and framing to make scientific research more newsworthy. However, it also makes sense that, to garner interest in scientific research, research findings may be exaggerated and their implications inflated [Vinkers, Tijdink and Otte, 2015 ] via mechanisms such as spin and framing.

1.2 Science communication theory in the context of news media

The reasons that scientists increasingly prioritise public engagement are complex [Besley and Nisbet, 2013 ]. In addition to publishing in academic journal articles, there is an expectation that academics participate in public engagement [Glynn, 2016 ; Rawat and Meena, 2014 ]. Research from the U.K. has highlighted that the most important reasons for academics to engage with public audiences are to increase funding success by demonstrating research impact and to increase their institution’s competitiveness [Watermeyer and Lewis, 2018 ]. The relationships that exist between scientists and the public can be understood using the theoretical models of science communication [Metcalfe, 2019 ]. Over time, there have been many theoretical models of communication proposed, each based on different assumptions and definitions of communication [Burns, O’Connor and Stocklmayer, 2003 ]. The three main theoretical models of science communication described in academic literature include the deficit, dialogue and participation models [Metcalfe, 2019 ]. These three models underpin the communication strategies within two of the most commonly described paradigms of science communication. The deficit model belongs to the public understanding of science (PUS) paradigm and the dialogue and participation models belong to the public engagement with science and technology (PEST) paradigm [Schäfer, 2009 ]. The deficit model assumes that the public’s lack of understanding of science leads to the public being sceptical about science [Sturgis and Allum, 2004 ] and that public doubts and uncertainty about science are a result of ignorance about science [Gross, 1994 ; Sturgis and Allum, 2004 ]. In contrast to the deficit model, the dialogue and participation models emphasise informing and communicating diverse views and critical reflections about scientific issues to public audiences [Kamenova, 2017 ]. A PUS paradigm can oversimplify information in an attempt to facilitate public understanding. In contrast, the PEST paradigm does not assume the public are deficient in knowledge and thus seeks to communicate critical reflections about science. Evolving from the PEST paradigm, medialisation is a theory that seeks to understand the mutually beneficial relationship between science and the media, specifically; scientists’ awareness of the strategic benefits of direct media engagement and in turn, media’s increased science coverage [Rödder, 2011 ; Vestergård, 2015 ]. These models are idealistic and potentially also unrealistic in a world in which there are clear incentives for scientists, their institutions and news media organisations to generate newsworthy scientific stories that may be achieved through omission of risks and limitations and exaggerations and relevance of research findings.

Despite there being competing interests for newsworthiness, accuracy and relevance of scientific news stories [Cassels et al., 2003 ; Caulfield et al., 2014 ; Haneef et al., 2015 ; Schwitzer, 2013 ], the responsibility for the production of inaccurate reporting is not straightforward. Science communication researchers have attributed misrepresentation of scientific research to a complex relationship between scientists, science communicators and journalists [Caulfield, 2005 ]. Facilitating the dynamic between scientists and journalists are communication specialists who work at universities, research institutes, academic journals and other organisations. These professionals are responsible for the production of press releases and media engagement activities. As research findings are one of the main commodities for research institutions, they have the potential to impact the institution’s financial status and competitive rankings [Autzen and Weitkamp, 2020 ]. Additionally, institutions that publish the most press releases tend to have the highest rankings [Autzen, 2014 ]. There is a clear incentive for institutions to publish high volumes of press releases about research findings that garner as much news coverage as possible. Additionally, exaggerating research findings in press releases is incentivised when the outcome is increased news media coverage of scientific research which has the potential to benefit researchers, their institution and the news media. Furthermore, experts have noted that the reliance on one source of information, such as an institution press release, grants a level of control of the news agenda to the researchers and their institution [Weitkamp and Eidsvaag, 2014 ].

As the scientific research and media landscapes continue to evolve including the increasing pressures on scientists to engage with the public and the demands on journalists to publish newsworthy stories about science with fewer resources, the interactions between these two fields require continual investigation. Additionally, the interdependencies between scientists, science communicators and journalists, including the complexities of communicating positivist lab-based science in a socially constructed environment, there is a need to conduct a detailed examination of the process and consequences of translating scientific research from academic journal articles to press releases to news media reporting.

1.3 This case study

As a significant proportion of news media is derived from press releases [Lewis et al., 2008 ] and the press release impacts on the accuracy of scientific news, [Sumner et al., 2016 ], this study sought to investigate in detail, the communication process in a well-known case of significant misrepresentation of scientific research in news media. This study was published in one of the most highly cited scientific journals worldwide and was the subject of a substantial number of international news reports at the time; many of which had the potential to influence health behaviours. The study was the subject of media scrutiny and featured in ‘SBS News’ which reported it as harmful, “Vitamin B3 claims slammed by obstetricians” [SBS News, 2017 ].

The case at the centre of this paper is a journal article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2017 titled “NAD deficiency, congenital malformations and niacin supplementation” [Shi et al., 2017 ] and the press release published by the researchers’ institution “Historic discovery has the potential to prevent miscarriages and birth defects globally” [Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, 2017 ]. The journal article described a study that investigated the role of gene variations and niacin supplementation in the prevention of congenital malformations. Of note, mice bred with specific genetic mutations were used to assess the impact of niacin supplementation in the prevention of congenital malformations. The genetic mutations were modelled on genetic mutations found in human families that underwent genetic sequencing where there existed a history of congenital malformations.

While a major component of the study design was investigating the effects of niacin supplementation in mice, many news media reports implied the research had been undertaken in humans with direct health implications for women during pregnancy. As the niacin supplementation component of the study was undertaken in mice, the recommendations about vitamin supplementation in pregnant women were outside the scope of the findings of the research study. Additionally, recommendations made about niacin supplementation had potentially harmful consequences as an excessive consumption of niacin can be harmful to both pregnant women and their babies [The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, 2017 ].

To explore in detail, the communication process that resulted in this scientific study being misrepresented in news reports, we analysed the journal article, the corresponding press release and all of the subsequent online news reports available through Google News to address the following question: how and where did misrepresentation of the scientific study take place? Additionally, we sought to address one research question that was specifically related to the news reporting: what communication techniques were used in the news reports that resulted in misrepresentation?

We searched Google News for the online news reports for a five-month period from August 2017 to December 2017 using key words such as “niacin”, “vitamin B3”, “Vegemite”, “congenital malformations”, “birth defects”. The press release was issued on the 1 0 th of August and the vast majority of reports were published between 1 0 th and 1 2 th of August 2017. We restricted our search to Google News because it covers a vast range of news media sources [Filloux, 2013 ] and has been used previously in media analysis research as the single source of online news media coverage [Haneef et al., 2015 ; Young Lin and Rosenkrantz, 2017 ]. Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox were used to search for articles on Google News, all with refreshed browsers histories to ensure that all relevant articles were found and searching history did not affect the articles retrieved. After sourcing the journal article from the New England Journal of Medicine website [Shi et al., 2017 ], the press release from the Victor Chang website [Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, 2017 ] and the news media reports from Google News, each document was downloaded and imported into NVivo version 12. After reading each document, a preliminary coding framework was developed by the first author and refined through preliminary analysis and discussions with the other authors. The first author completed the quantitative and qualitative coding. For the quantitative coding, 10% of articles were double coded by another author (LK) and codes and coding definitions were adjusted until agreement reached 80%. For the qualitative coding, 10% of articles were double coded by LK and any disagreements were discussed and resolved and the same logic was applied to the rest of the qualitative coding by the first author.

2.1 Development of coding framework for quantitative content analysis

The coding framework involved developing preliminary codes to guide the analysis. This was based on reviewing the literature on the representation of scientific research in media (including the coding framework used by ‘healthnewsreview.org’ [HealthNewsReview.org, 2018 ] and by reading the journal article, press release and a subset of news media reports to tailor the coding to this specific study. An inductive approach followed the development of the preliminary codes and allowed for unexpected themes or the refinement of codes that developed during the analysis.

2.2 Quantitative coding and analysis

The coding framework included the following items: spin, buzz words, framing (positive, negative, balanced), a description of the study design, a description of the study population (mice and humans), description of the niacin supplementation trialled in mice, description of genetic sequencing undertaken in humans, a statement that study findings could not be translated to humans, clinical recommendations about vitamin supplementation, advice to consult a doctor for further information, the use of independent and non-independent expert commentators, the use of a patient narrative, the inclusion of funding information and a link to the journal article. Each of these items was coded either yes or no.

Spin has been defined in multiple ways in academic research [Bero, Chiu and Grundy, 2019 ]. We chose to use the following definition of spin: a way of reporting, for any motive whether intentional or unintentional, that emphasises that the beneficial effect of the intervention is greater than the actual results [Haneef et al., 2015 ]. We chose to use the following definition of buzzwords from the Oxford Dictionary: a word or phrase, often jargon, that is trendy in a particular context or at a specific time [Oxford English Dictionary, 2020 ]. Examples of buzzwords and phrases used in the press release and news media reporting included; ‘historic medical breakthrough’, ‘landmark discovery’, ‘Australia’s greatest ever medical achievements’. Framing can obfuscate objective reporting by highlighting and downplaying certain elements of stories in media which can impact the way readers interpret and relate to information [Birnbrauer, Frohlich and Treise, 2017 ; Entman, 1993 ] and impact readers’ understanding of a story [Caulfield et al., 2014 ]. We chose to analyse whether each article was framed positively, negatively or in a balanced way.

For each article we also recorded whether there was a description of the study design, a description of what component of the research was undertaken in mice and what component was undertaken in humans and whether these specific research findings could be translated to humans. The type of clinical recommendations regarding vitamin supplementation that we analysed were both those that were directly related to this study and those that related to pregnancy in general. We chose to include both types of recommendations as they both have the potential to impact readers’ health behaviour. We also recorded whether there was advice for readers to contact their doctor for more information and health advice about vitamin supplementation during pregnancy. Additionally, we recorded whether each article had independent expert commentators (i.e., those that were not involved with the study but who are experts in the area) or non-dependent expert commentators (those that were involved with the study either as authors or representatives from the researchers’ institute). We counted information about the funding sources as any information about what organisations funded the research. Information about how to access the journal article was coded as ‘yes’ if a link to the article was included, not just mentioning the name of the journal. We also coded whether news reports used a patient narrative. Narratives are important for storytelling and for readers’ understanding of the relevance of an issue.

2.3 Qualitative analysis

The qualitative analysis investigated in more depth, the data coded for the quantitative content analysis. The coded data was further analysed to determine, for example, in what context and for what effect: spin, buzz words and framing were used, whether the omissions or inclusions about the study design, the study population and what components of the research were done in mice and humans resulted in misrepresentation, the extent to which: information about study findings could be translated to humans, clinical recommendations about vitamin supplementation during pregnancy and advice to consult a doctor may contribute to potentially harmful clinical behaviours or outcomes for readers. The impact of independent and non-dependent commentators, patient narratives, funding information and access to the journal article were also reviewed to understand the role these played in relation in the subjectivity of the story.

We identified 60 unique news reports from 48 separate news organisations and websites. The news sources included organisations such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), as well as lesser-known technology-focused and health-related websites such as Gizmodo and Body and Soul. The journal article, the press release and the news reports were coded by the first author. The results of content analysis are presented in four groups of themes that emerged in the qualitative analysis. Table 1 summarises findings from the content analysis. The qualitative analysis is presented as themes and illustrated with quotes.

3.1 Content analysis

3.1.1 theme 1, sensationalism.

The journal article did not include spin in its title, or in the article itself, nor did it include buzz words and presented a balanced frame. The press release used spin in both the headline and body of the press release, included buzz words from experts and introduced positive framing. The majority of news reports included spin in the body of the article (68%) and buzz words (87%). The majority (71%) of news reports were framed positively.

3.1.2 Theme 2, Misrepresentation

The journal article contained a description of the: study design; study population as including both mice and humans; niacin supplementation being undertaken in mice and genetic sequencing being undertake in humans. The press release contained a description of the study design but did not describe the study design as including both mice and humans. It described the niacin supplementation as being undertaken in mice but did not describe the genetic sequencing being undertaken in humans. The majority (87%) of news reports described the study design and most (62%) described the niacin supplementation being undertaken in mice. Around half (57%) of the news reports described the study population as including both mice and humans. A similar proportion (56%) described the genetic sequencing being undertaken in humans.

3.1.3 Theme 3, Clinical recommendations

The journal article did not explicitly state that study findings could not be translated to humans and included clinical recommendations relevant to human health. The press release did not state that findings were not directly transferrable to humans. Clinical recommendations were made about human health and there was no advice for people to seek professional advice if readers wanted more information. In the news reports, while most (60%) stated that the study findings could not be translated to humans, the vast majority (88%) of articles included clinical recommendations about vitamin supplementation. Few news reports (7%) advised readers to consult their doctor for more information.

3.1.4 Theme 4, Subjectivity

The journal article did not contain commentary or patient narratives and there was a disclosure about study funding. The press release included non-independent commentators only (i.e., those with a direct connection to the study), no patient narrative, disclosure of study funding and a link to the journal article. In the news reports, around half (47%) included both independent and non-independent expert commentators. A similar proportion (45%) included non-independent expert commentators only. Seventeen percent of news reports included a patient narrative. The same proportion (17%) included funding information and a quarter (25%) included a link to the journal article.

Table 1 represents the results of the content analysis. The results of the content analysis were grouped into themes that were explored in more detail in the qualitative analysis.

3.2 Qualitative analysis

In the qualitative analysis, we explored each theme in more detail based on further analysis of the coded quantitative data.

3.2.1 Sensationalism

In the translation of information from the journal article to the press release to the news media reporting, the use of spin, buzzwords and positive framing were introduced in the press release and were in many cases, directly translated in news media reports. This direct translation is evident by the direct quoting of slabs of text from the press release to the news reports. In the example below, the extrapolation of the research findings to reduce miscarriages and birth defects in the press release is an example of spin. The word ‘landmark’ is an example of a buzz word and the general positivity without any discussion of limitations, such as the study being undertaken in mice, is an example of positive framing.

“The ramifications are likely to be huge. This has the potential to significantly reduce the number of miscarriages and birth defects around the world, and I do not use those words lightly,” says Professor Dunwoodie. The landmark study found that a deficiency in a vital molecule, known as NAD, can prevent a baby’s organs from developing correctly in the womb. (Historic discovery has the potential to prevent miscarriages and birth defects globally, Victor Chang press release, August 2017) “The ramifications are likely to be huge,” said the study’s senior researcher Professor Sally Dunwoodie at the Victor Chang Institute… “This has the potential to significantly reduce the number of miscarriage and birth defects around the world, and I do not use those words lightly.” (Sydney Morning Herald, 17 August 2017)

However even with spin, buzzwords and positive framing used in the press release, not all news media reports employed these literary techniques. Some news articles (32%) presented information with no spin and roughly half (47%) of articles had both non-independent and independent expert commentators. The news reports that were framed negatively focused on the potentially harmful health consequences of the misleading information. Below is an excerpt from a news report with negative framing.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists says the “extraordinary” suggestions by researchers at the Victor Chang Institute were based on a small mouse study and have the potential to do more harm than good. (SBS News, 11 August 2017)

3.2.2 Misrepresentation

The description of the study design in the journal article was clear and included both the human and mouse components of the research. The journal article described the human and mouse components of the research:

We used genomic sequencing to identify potentially pathogenic gene variants in families in which a person had multiple congenital malformations. We tested the function of the variant by using assays of in vitro enzyme activity and by quantifying metabolites in patient plasma. We engineered mouse models with similar variants using the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)–Cas9 system. (NAD deficiency, congenital malformations and niacin supplementation, New England Journal of Medicine 2017)

However, the description of the study design in the press release did not reflect the journal article as the human component of the research was omitted. Additionally, the press release included information about how the study would have direct human health benefits without describing any limitations of extrapolating mouse research to humans. The press release indicates that the findings from mouse research will have human translations:

Scientists at the Victor Chang Institute have discovered simply boosting levels of this nutrient during pregnancy can potentially prevent recurrent miscarriages and birth defects. (Historic discovery has the potential to prevent miscarriages and birth defects globally, Victor Chang press release, August 2017)

One news report indicated that niacin supplementation may reduce birth defects in humans:

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that deficiency in a key molecule among pregnant women stopped embryos and babies’ organs from developing correctly in the womb, but could be treated by taking the dietary supplement vitamin B3, also known as niacin. (Business Insider, 10 August 2017)

However, despite the implied direct translation of mouse research to humans, more than half of the news media reports included information about both the human and mice components of the research. Additionally, more than half of the news media reports included information about how the research findings cannot be directly translated to humans.

The study was a preclinical trial, and the results will need to be replicated in humans before doctors can recommend vitamin B3 supplements to pregnant women, but the results are certainly promising. (IFL Science, 10 August 2017)

3.2.3 Clinical recommendations

Toward the end of the journal article, there is a “theorisation” made about the use of vitamin supplementation, but it is clearly relating to the specific families who were involved in the genetic sequencing component of the research rather than the population more generally.

We theorize that supplementation with high-dose niacin (140 mg per day, which is 10 times the U.S. recommended daily allowance for women) before and during pregnancy might prevent recurrence of disease in these four families. It is also possible that niacin supplementation may benefit the speech and developmental delays in the surviving patients. (NAD deficiency, congenital malformations and niacin supplementation, New England Journal of Medicine 2017)

However, the information in the press release about vitamin supplementation could be interpreted as relevant to the population more broadly and could be interpreted as immediately applicable to human health.

Just like we now use folate to prevent spina bifida, Professor Dunwoodie’s research suggests that it is probably best for women to start taking vitamin B3 very early on, even before they become pregnant. (Historic discovery has the potential to prevent miscarriages and birth defects globally, Victor Chang press release, August 2017)

Although most reports made recommendations of some sort about vitamin supplementation, other reports did make it clear that this research study could not be translated directly into recommendations about vitamin supplementation.

Although this is a potentially exciting finding in a very emotive area, it is important to bear in mind that this result is based on studies in mice, and we will need a full research project in women to evaluate the cause and effect of any lack of this vitamin in humans. (Huffington Post U.K., 10 August 2017)

However, like the press release, some news media reports did make recommendations that could have harmful consequences.

The results published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested giving women niacin supplements before and during pregnancy could significantly cut the risk of miscarriage and congenital defects. (Irish Times, 12 August 2017)

3.2.4 Subjectivity

As with framing, patient narratives can add weight to certain aspects of a story which can resonate with the reader. Patient narratives can be helpful if they assist readers to understand issues, but they can be misleading if they do not accurately represent the facts of a story. In this case study, the use of a patient narrative might assist readers in understanding the types of congenital malformations potentially prevented with niacin supplementation. However, because this research was undertaken in mice and not directly translatable to humans, a patient narrative might be misleading, suggesting to readers that all congenital malformations are prevented via niacin supplementation. Additionally, subjectivity was present in news reports where journalists used comments from non-independent experts. Without independent expert commentary, there is a lack of objectivity and critical reflection about the potential translation of the research findings.

Charlotte Scaife was just one day old when her parents found out the heartbreaking news — the middle part of their baby’s heart hadn’t formed properly and there were multiple holes in her heart… [parent of child (Charlotte) with congenital birth defect] “I wish they’d known about it and the information had been released two years ago or three years ago, and then maybe we wouldn’t be going through this.” (Huffington Post Australia, 11 August 2017)

Despite the press release only including non-independent expert commentators, both non-independent and independent expert commentators were included in almost half of the news media reports, providing evidence that journalists sought additional information to that which was provided in the press release and original journal article.

The press release provided a comment from a non-independent expert:

“We believe that this breakthrough will be one of our country’s greatest medical discoveries. It’s extremely rare to discover the problem and provide a preventive solution at the same time. It’s actually a double breakthrough,” said Professor Graham. (Historic discovery has the potential to prevent miscarriages and birth defects globally, Victor Chang press release, August 2017)

Some news reports sought independent experts to comment on the study:

Dr Katie Morris, an expert in maternal foetal medicine at the University of Birmingham, said: “While exciting, this discovery cannot be translated into recommendations for pregnant women, who at most may be deficient in vitamin B3. (BBC, 10 August 2017)

4 Discussion

In this study, we used quantitative and qualitative content analysis to investigate the translation of information from a scientific journal article, to the corresponding press release to the subsequent online news reporting of a known case of misrepresentation of scientific research in news media. Specifically, we sought to understand how and where misrepresentation of the scientific study took place and what communication techniques were used by journalists in media reports.

Results showed that sensationalism was present in the press release and was reflected in a large proportion of the news reporting via the use of reporting techniques such as spin, buzz words and positive framing. Misrepresentation of information in the form of inadequate descriptions of the study design and the study populations was translated from the press release to the news reports. In addition, potentially harmful clinical recommendations that featured in the press release were present in a large proportion of the news reports by way of unrealistic extrapolation of findings from mice to humans, a lack of discussion around the limitations of the research and a lack of further advice to consult a doctor for additional information.

The press release included commentary by non-independent experts, and this was reflected in many of the news reports. However, many journalists also sourced independent expert comment. Additionally, given the press release contained spin, buzz words, positive framing, non-independent expert commentators, a brief and inaccurate description of the study design, implied that the study findings in mice could be translated to humans, it is noteworthy that many journalists sought additional information and presented a more balanced account of the research than what was contained in the press release. Therefore, some journalists made deliberate efforts to avoid the misrepresentation that was present in the press release.

These findings highlight that in this case, mechanisms that may result in exaggerations and misrepresentation of scientific research can be directly traced back to the press release. The findings were that the press release and a proportion of the news reports had exaggerated the benefits via the extrapolation of a mouse study to humans and the absence of limitations such as the need for further research in humans and discussion about the potential risks resulting from excessive consumption of vitamin supplementation during pregnancy. This is in line with prior science communication research which has highlighted that scientific studies when written about it media, often exaggerate findings and downplay risks and limitations [Cassels et al., 2003 ; Caulfield et al., 2014 ; Haneef et al., 2015 ; Schwitzer, 2013 ]. Although exaggeration of findings and downplaying limitations and risks are unsurprising, the instances of journalists seeking diverse views and critical reflections of the study from independent sources are noteworthy.

In the context of research findings being a core commodity that impacts an institution’s financial and ranking successes [Autzen and Weitkamp, 2020 ] it is significant that the press release was produced by the scientific researchers’ institution and that this press release is where the exaggerations about findings and lack of information about risks originated. When thinking about the medialisation of science, there is both a clear and mutually beneficial relationship between scientists and the media. As the study findings were exaggerated, the story was able to be framed as a “breakthrough” garnering significant media attention for the potential benefit of the researchers, their institution and the media with the publication of many “click-bait” articles with headlines such as “Vegemite and pregnancy: niacin could prevent miscarriages” (Daily Telegraph, August 2017). As the public look to media to make sense of complex topics [Scheufele and Lewenstein, 2005 ], the framing of this scientific research in the press release and in the news media yielded some potentially harmful sense making interpretations followed by responsive backlash from experts in the field who labelled the researchers suggestions as having “the potential to do more harm than good” [SBS News, 2017 ].

From a theoretical perspective, both the press release and those news reports that used non-independent commentators and omitted key information required to understand the study were in line with a PUS paradigm of science communication. As an example, in some cases the description of the study was oversimplified to the point where it was not possible to understand how the study was conducted or what the implications might be for pregnant women. Despite the omission of information about the research study, specifically the lack of description of the study design and how both mice and humans were used, it is important to note that a proportion of the news media reports did seek information from sources outside of the press release to achieve a more informed, objective and accurate account of the scientific study. For example, some news media reports included both independent and non-dependent commentaries in addition to a detailed explanation of the study design that explained the role of both humans and mice in the study in addition to an explanation about how the study cannot yet be translated to human health and that further research is needed to before advice about niacin supplementation can be made. A portion of journalists wrote news reports in line with PEST theory by providing readers with sufficient and objective information which gave them the opportunity to understand the scientific study and make their own judgements about what the findings could mean. This more investigative and critical work by the journalists added a more objective and contextualised aspect to the story. These journalists were not just informing audiences about the ‘wonders of science’ but communicating diverse views and critical reflections. This is especially remarkable given that journalists have a strong trust in science, their scientific sources and are pressured to adhere to scientific values [Vogler and Schäfer, 2020 ] which is in addition to being under resourced and there being few science journalists with specialised skills to critique a scientific study [Barel-Ben David, Garty and Baram-Tsabari, 2020 ]. However, just as journalists critique politicians and policy, they too can critique scientists and science [Rensberger, 2009 ]. This would be made easier if journalists regained some of the scientific expertise and resourcing that has been lost as newsrooms have declined in overall staff including science journalists [Brüggemann, Lörcher and Walter, 2020 ].

A challenge exists in communicating via news media the relevance to human health of positivist lab based pre-clinical science where the scientific environment is highly controlled, and the research subjects are animals. Pre-clinical research can have direct relevance to human health in the long-term otherwise it would not be undertaken. However, making this relevance obvious without explaining all the caveats and further steps in the research process would likely result in pre-clinical discoveries becoming less newsworthy. Pre-clinical lab-based studies are an essential step in the formulation of evidence and are imperative to building the case for the next phase of research which, in this case study example, could be in humans. Therefore, if pre-clinical lab science is to be reported in news media, there exists a challenge whereby the findings need to be comprehensible and accurate but at the same time, relatable to readers. It is this tension, that could in part, be responsible for some of the misrepresentation of the study in the press release. On one hand, the researchers need to demonstrate ‘real-world’ impact to make their future research possible and therefore, an incentive to minimise the caveats of their research findings to make their research newsworthy. Conversely, demonstrating ‘real-world’ impact could be more difficult if press releases include detailed information about the limitations of the research and the additional research required to determine the relevance of findings to human health. Therefore, a potential interpretation of the motivations of the researchers in the misrepresentation of the findings in the press release, is that they may not have been aware of the dangers of misleading the public that can occur whilst trying to communicate the future potential of their research. In other words, attempting to strike a balance between the conservative language of scientists and the importance of media attention for the goal of generating further research funding and opportunities.

Additionally, the medialisation of science is important amidst the current global pandemic with COVID-19 receiving extensive and ongoing media coverage across the world since January 2020. COVID-19 has seen the world’s population rely on media for the dissemination and sense making of constantly evolving scientific information with news reports about the pandemic having major impacts on readers’ beliefs about its origins and their country’s policy responses and crisis politicisation [Pearman et al., 2021 ]. Some changes to scientific publishing that have ongoing consequences for science journalism that have occurred since January 2020 include: a dramatic increase in the number of published academic journal articles (not just on COVID-19 but on all topics and especially those in health related disciplines) and a significant increase in articles being made available prior to peer review [Else, 2020 ]. Both of these outcomes add more challenges for journalists who are overloaded with information to report on and who are now critiquing research that has not yet been through peer review.

5 Limitations

The use of one case study as a means of investigating a phenomenon provides rich data but means that the results may not be generalisable for understanding where and how misrepresentation of scientific information occurs in communication pathways in all cases. The use of Google News as a single source of online news means that some online news reports about this study may not have been captured. Whilst we developed the coding framework collaboratively and double coded 10% of reports and reached an 80% agreement, there is still some subjectivity to interpretation of the variables that were coded.

6 Conclusion

Science communication, and especially science journalism is about reporting truthfully. It is about going beyond hypotheses, data and breakthroughs and looking at the scientists, their conflicts, their funding and other issues that impact the production of science [Borel, 2015 ]. In an ideal world, there should be no need for scientists, science communicators or science journalists to oversell research findings, exaggerate benefits, omit limitations and risks and fail to describe scientific research in a way that readers can understand. However, there are pressures on scientists to demonstrate the ‘real-world’ impact of their work, on science communicators to generate media attention and on journalists to produce newsworthy content about science. This ‘pressure cocktail’ can result in misrepresentation of science that could lead to harmful health behaviours and public misunderstandings and distrust in science. It is for these reasons that those producing the science, the press releases and the news must work together to communicate truthful and objective science to society. Utilising the PEST paradigm, journalists would synthesise and scrutinise research findings, interview independent experts and present science in more than one simplistic science-dominated side to a story but in a contextualised-scientific way in which readers have enough information to judge the scientific research for themselves. However, given the constraints on journalists in both time and resources, it is unrealistic to expect this to be possible for every scientific study that is reported in news media. Given that it is a reality that journalists will need to rely, at least in part, on press releases, it is imperative that press releases are written with the same level of journalistic integrity as the PEST paradigm idealises.

This case study highlights the implications of what can happen when the translation of science from a journal article to a press release to the news media reporting is confounded by pressures faced by scientists, their institutions and news media. We hypothesise the lack of objectivity in this case to be a result of the pressures on journalists, scientists and their institutions which has led to a mutually beneficial relationship between these actors that can prioritises newsworthiness ahead of scientific objectivity to the detriment of public health. There must be an ongoing priority for scientific information to be represented in media in a way that is helpful, not harmful as entire populations try to make sense of the constantly evolving scientific advice related to COVID-19 and future public health crises. In the current scientific, science communication and journalistic climates, in combination with the way that populations are relying on media for their sense making of COVID-19, we acknowledge the following tensions faced by scientists, science communicators and journalists: not to exaggerate, oversimplify and or omit essential information for the sake of media attention and to equip the audience with the information required to understand a scientific study including contextualised information and independent commentary. This approach is especially important in areas of public mistrust such as those that have serious consequences for public health for example, COVID-19 vaccinations. Scientists, science communicators and journalists have an obligation to frame science as interesting and newsworthy without jeopardizing the truth.

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Georgia is a Ph.D. candidate and Research Assistant at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Georgia’s Ph.D. is in the fields of science communication and public health. E-mail: [email protected] .

Georgina is a Senior Research Fellow at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Georgina has a background in health psychology with a major focus on social epidemiology. She has extensive experience in quantitative research across a broad range of content areas including disability, women and children’s health, public health law, mental health and wellbeing, suicide prevention and violence against women. E-mail: [email protected] .

Louise is a Professor at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Louise is a health sociologist researching lay and expert perceptions of risk and health decision-making, particularly in relation to the use of health technology. She is an expert in qualitative research methodology and the translation of evidence to clinical practice. E-mail: [email protected] .

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Media Bias Case Studies

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The previous case studies have shown that biases in the news might arise from news coverage and that lower news coverage might lead to less objective news. The following case studies seek further evidence for this working hypothesis and aim to exploit this finding to detect biased, tendentious, and probably fake news.

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How to write a social media case study (with template)

Written by by Jenn Chen

Published on  October 10, 2019

Reading time  8 minutes

You’ve got a good number of social media clients under your belt and you feel fairly confident in your own service or product content marketing strategy. To attract new clients, you’ll tell them how you’ve tripled someone else’s engagement rates but how do they know this is true? Enter the case study.

Social media case studies are often used as part of a sales funnel: the potential client sees themselves in the case study and signs up because they want the same or better results. At Sprout, we use this strategy with our own case studies highlighting our customer’s successes.

Writing and publishing case studies is time intensive but straight forward. This guide will walk through how to create a social media case study for your business and highlight some examples.

What is a social media case study?

A case study is basically a long testimonial or review. Case studies commonly highlight what a business has achieved by using a social media service or strategy, and they illustrate how your company’s offerings help clients in a specific situation. Some case studies are written just to examine how a problem was solved or performance was improved from a general perspective. For this guide, we’ll be examining case studies that are focused on highlighting a company’s own products and services.

Case studies come in all content formats: long-form article, downloadable PDF, video and infographic. A single case study can be recycled into different formats as long as the information is still relevant.

At their core, case studies serve to inform a current or potential customer about a real-life scenario where your service or product was applied. There’s often a set date range for the campaign and accompanying, real-life statistics. The idea is to help the reader get a clearer understanding of how to use your product and why it could help.

Broad selling points like “our service will cut down your response time” are nice but a sentence like “After three months of using the software for responses, the company decreased their response time by 52%” works even better. It’s no longer a dream that you’ll help them decrease the response time because you already have with another company.

So now that you understand what a case study is, let’s get started on how to create one that’s effective and will help attract new clients.

How to write a social marketing case study

Writing an effective case study is all about the prep work. You’ve got to get all of the questions and set up ready so you can minimize lots of back and forth between you and the client.

1. Prepare your questions

Depending on how the case study will be presented and how familiar you are with the client to be featured, you may want to send some preliminary questions before the interview. It’s important to not only get permission from the company to use their logo, quotes and graphs but also to make sure they know they’ll be going into a public case study.

Your preliminary questions should cover background information about the company and ask about campaigns they are interested in discussing. Be sure to also identify which of your products and services they used. You can go into the details in the interview.

Once you receive the preliminary answers back, it’s time to prepare your questions for the interview. This is where you’ll get more information about how they used your products and how they contributed to the campaign’s success.

2. Interview

When you conduct your interview, think ahead on how you want it to be done. Whether it’s a phone call, video meeting or in-person meeting, you want to make sure it’s recorded. You can use tools like Google Meet, Zoom or UberConference to host and record calls (with your client’s permission, of course). This ensures that your quotes are accurate and you can play it back in case you miss any information. Tip: test out your recording device and process before the interview. You don’t want to go through the interview only to find out the recording didn’t save.

Ask open-ended questions to invite good quotes. You may need to use follow-up questions if the answers are too vague. Here are some examples.

• Explain how you use (your product or service) in general and for the campaign. Please name specific features.
• Describe how the feature helped your campaign achieve success.
• What were the campaign outcomes?
• What did you learn from the campaign?

Since we’re focused on creating a social media case study in this case, you can dive more deeply into social strategies and tactics too:

• Tell me about your approach to social media. How has it changed over time, if at all? What role does it play for the organization? How do you use it? What are you hoping to achieve?
• Are there specific social channels you prioritize? If so, why?
• How do you make sure your social efforts are reaching the right audience?
• What specific challenges do organizations like yours face when it comes to social?
• How do you measure the ROI of using social ? Are there certain outcomes that prove the value of social for your organization? What metrics are you using to determine how effective social is for you?

As the conversation continues, you can ask more leading questions if you need to to make sure you get quotes that tie these strategic insights directly back to the services, products or strategies your company has delivered to the client to help them achieve success. Here are just a couple of examples.

• Are there specific features that stick out to you as particularly helpful or especially beneficial for you and your objectives?
• How are you using (product/service) to support your social strategy? What’s a typical day like for your team using it?

The above quote was inserted into the Sprout Lake Metroparks case study . It’s an example of identifying a quote from an interview that helps make the impact of the product tangible in a client’s day to day.

At the end of the interview, be sure to thank the company and request relevant assets.

Afterwards, you may want to transcribe the interview to increase the ease of reviewing the material and writing the case study. You can DIY or use a paid service like Rev to speed up this part of the process.

3. Request assets and graphics

This is another important prep step because you want to make sure you get everything you need out of one request and avoid back and forth that takes up both you and your customer’s time. Be very clear on what you need and the file formats you need them in.

Some common assets include:

• Logo in .png format
• Logo guidelines so you know how to use them correctly
• Links to social media posts that were used during the campaign
• Headshots of people you interviewed
• Social media analytics reports. Make sure you name them and provide the requested date range, so that if you’re using a tool like Sprout, clients know which one to export.

4. Write the copy

Now that the information has been collected, it’s time to dissect it all and assemble it. At the end of this guide, we have an example outline template for you to follow. When writing a case study, you want to write to the audience that you’re trying to attract . In this case, it’ll be a potential customer that’s similar to the one you’re highlighting.

Use a mix of sentences and bullet points to attract different kinds of readers. The tone should be uplifting because you’re highlighting a success story. When identifying quotes to use, remove any fillers (“um”) and cut out unnecessary info.

5. Pay attention to formatting

And finally, depending on the content type, enlist the help of a graphic designer to make it look presentable. You may also want to include call-to-action buttons or links inside of your article. If you offer free trials, case studies are a great place to promote them.

Social media case study template

Writing a case study is a lot like writing a story or presenting a research paper (but less dry). This is a general outline to follow but you are welcome to enhance to fit your needs.

Headline Attention-grabbing and effective. Example: “ How Benefit turns cosmetics into connection using Sprout Social ” Summary A few sentences long with a basic overview of the brand’s story. Give the who, what, where, why and how. Which service and/or product did they use? Introduce the company Give background on who you’re highlighting. Include pertinent information like how big their social media team is, information about who you interviewed and how they run their social media. Describe the problem or campaign What were they trying to solve? Why was this a problem for them? What were the goals of the campaign? Present the solution and end results Describe what was done to achieve success. Include relevant social media statistics (graphics are encouraged). Conclusion Wrap it up with a reflection from the company spokesperson. How did they think the campaign went? What would they change to build on this success for the future? How did using the service compare to other services used in a similar situation?

Case studies are essential marketing and sales tools for any business that offer robust services or products. They help the customer reading them to picture their own company using the product in a similar fashion. Like a testimonial, words from the case study’s company carry more weight than sales points from the company.

When creating your first case study, keep in mind that preparation is the key to success. You want to find a company that is more than happy to sing your praises and share details about their social media campaign.

Once you’ve started developing case studies, find out the best ways to promote them alongside all your other content with our free social media content mix tool .

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Expert Commentary

Racial bias and news media reporting: New research trends

2015 research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign published in Communication Research highlighting how portrayals of racial minorities are changing in television news.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by John Wihbey, The Journalist's Resource May 20, 2015

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/race-and-gender/racial-bias-reporting-research-trends/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

As issues of crime and race again came into the national spotlight during the 1990s, many social scientists and communications scholars sought to study the portrayal of racial minorities within news media. Numerous studies documented the high rate at which persons of color were typically portrayed as violent or dangerous in newspapers and television.

For example, in a 2000 paper published in the Journal of Communication — which has been cited hundreds of times subsequently — Travis L. Dixon, then at the University of Michigan, and Daniel Linz of U.C. Santa Barbara sampled local television news broadcasts in Los Angeles and Orange counties in California and found that, when compared against relevant crime data, “African-Americans were overrepresented as perpetrators, and Latinos and whites were underrepresented as perpetrators.” Further, the study showed that whites were overrepresented as police officers on television, despite significant numbers of racial minorities in law enforcement in the counties examined.

This fit in with other research findings that suggested these problems were long-standing. In 1996, Martin Gilens, then at Yale, published an  important paper in Public Opinion Quarterly that looked at portrayals of African-Americans with regard to poverty. He examined news magazine coverage in the late 1980s and early 1990s and concluded:

If 560 people were selected at random from America’s poor, we would expect 162 to be black. But of the 560 poor people of determinable race pictured in newsmagazines between 1988 and 1992, 345 were African-American. In reality, two out of three poor Americans are nonblack, but the reader of these magazines would likely come to exactly the opposite conclusion. Although the newsmagazines examined grossly overrepresent African-Americans in their pictures of poor people as a whole, African-Americans are seldom found in pictures of the most sympathetic subgroups of the poor. I found that the elderly constitute less than 1% of the black poor shown in these magazines (compared with 5% of the nonblack poor) and the working poor make up only 12% of poor blacks (compared with 27% of poor nonblacks).

Gilens noted that, long ago, the journalist Walter Lippmann wrote that societal feelings, beliefs, opinions and actions are responses to “pictures in our heads,” not to the world itself. Mass media now provide most of these pictures, giving news outlets a substantial responsibility for shaping discourse and the context for policy — and a strong ethical imperative to ground their reporting in the best available knowledge .

Culminating in seminal books such as Robert Entman’s and Andrew Rojecki’s The Black Image in the White Mind (2000), this line of academic inquiry continued into the 2000s, but there have been relatively fewer major updates in the research literature on race and media (although journalism institutions such as the Maynard Institute have continued to audit and monitor media content in this way). However, Travis Dixon, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has revisited these core questions in a 2015 study published in Communication Research , “Good Guys Are Still Always in White? Positive Change and Continued Misrepresentation of Race and Crime on Local Television News.”

The study examines a sample of news broadcasts in Los Angeles between 2008 and 2012, including Spanish-language broadcasts (Univision), to evaluate how representations may be changing. Dixon notes the following with respect to the study’s methodology:  “Television portrayals are compared with the perpetration and victim rates contained in data published by the California Department of Justice (CDOJ) and the Los Angeles Times . In addition, television portrayals of Los Angeles officers are compared with employment records published by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.” News media reports were coded according to the racial portrayals within them.

The study’s findings include:

• The data indicate some progress in terms of how frequently different races are portrayed in various roles in the context of crime: “Black depictions have greatly improved in this investigation compared with prior research. Blacks are accurately portrayed across all roles including as perpetrators, victims and officers.” This is an “unexpected set of findings” given that “African-Americans were greatly overrepresented as criminals in prior work.”
• Dynamics with regard to Hispanics have also changed: “Latinos have previously been underrepresented as criminals; however, they were accurately presented as perpetrators in the current study. They also remain underrepresented in more sympathetic roles as officers and victims.” One explanatory hypothesis is that demographic shifts “have led the Los Angeles news stations to focus more on Latino crime and less on African-American criminality.”
• Whites, however, continue to be given a dominant role as representing authority and police on television in this news market: “Whites were more likely to be portrayed as police officers on television (73%) than to be employed as officers in Los Angeles and Orange counties (53%). Given the confidence interval of 6% on either side of the estimate of white television officers on the news, this is a statistically significant 20 percentage-point difference.”
• “Conversely, Latinos were less likely to be portrayed as officers on television news (16%) than to be employed as officers in Los Angeles and Orange counties (30%). There were no statistically significant differences for Blacks or for “Others” on these programs. Blacks comprised 9% of the officers portrayed on television news and 12% of those employed as officers according to county records.”
• Further, “whites were more likely to be depicted as homicide victims on local television news (35%) than to be victimized by homicide according to crime reports (13%)”; and “‘Others’ (e.g., Asians) were more likely to be portrayed as homicide victims on television news (18%) than to be victimized according to crime reports (4%).”

Dixon acknowledges that a “larger sample of news shows and topics need to be explored in future work” to help confirm these apparent changes in patterns of coverage. Further, he notes that “perhaps the focus of the news media has moved on to external threats such as immigration and terrorism, neither of which was directly explored in the current study…. Recent studies on both of these issues suggest that Latinos are linked to undocumented immigration while Muslims are linked to terrorism in the news.”

A parallel 2015 study published in the Journal of Communication and also authored by Dixon as well as Charlotte L. Williams of the University of Arkansas, “The Changing Misrepresentation of Race and Crime on Network and Cable News,” looked at a wider sample of national news broadcasts. It found that African-Americans are now actually being underrepresented as both perpetrators and victims, while new, troubling dynamics were apparent for Latinos and Muslims.

Related research: While social media and other newer technologies are changing overall information consumption patterns , television is frequently the primary way Americans still get local news, and even the audiences for national network evening news broadcasts have grown in the past couple of years.

Keywords: crime, Latino, Hispanic, African-American

About The Author

John Wihbey

Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Robert Faris

Hal Roberts

Bruce Etling

Nikki Bourassa

Ethan Zuckerman

Yochai Benkler

Executive Summary

In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign.

We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.

Our data supports lines of research on polarization in American politics that focus on the asymmetric patterns between the left and the right, rather than studies that see polarization as a general historical phenomenon, driven by technology or other mechanisms that apply across the partisan divide.

The analysis includes the evaluation and mapping of the media landscape from several perspectives and is based on large-scale data collection of media stories published on the web and shared on Twitter.

Overview of Methods

Cross-linking patterns between media sources offer a view of authority and prominence within the media world.

The sharing of media sources by users on Twitter and Facebook provides a broader perspective on the role and influence of media sources among people engaged in politics through Twitter and Facebook.

The differential media sharing patterns of Trump and Clinton supporters on Twitter enable a detailed analysis of the role of partisanship in the formation and function of media structures.

Content analysis using automated tools supports the tracking of topics over time among media sources.

Qualitative media analysis of individual case studies enhances our understanding of media function and structure. 

Key Takeaways

Donald Trump succeeded in shaping the election agenda. Coverage of Trump overwhelmingly outperformed coverage of Clinton. Clinton’s coverage was focused on scandals, while Trump’s coverage focused on his core issues.

Read the Introduction

Related press coverage: Down the Breitbart Hole  ( New York Times ) Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda  ( Columbia Journalism Review ) Researchers Examine Breitbart's Influence On Election Information  (NPR) The great divide: The media war over Trump  (CBS)

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The State of Science Reporting in Today’s Digital Media Landscape: Interviews with Journalists Who Use SciLine’s Service

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Researchers

Josh Anderson

Graduate Research Assistant

Anthony Dudo

Program Director of Science Communication, Knight Faculty Fellow

River Terrell

Undergraduate Research Assistant

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The Center for Media Engagement conducted in-depth interviews with 19 journalists to explore the experiences and challenges of reporting on science in the current media environment. Additionally, the interviews examined journalists’ experiences using the expert matching services of SciLine, an organization based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

We identified ten key findings from the discussions that suggest the following recommendations for science reporters and for the SciLine organization:

• Journalists should maintain their focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in science reporting as there is an urgent need for science journalism to increasingly focus on people that have traditionally been left out of science journalism
• Journalists should leverage their resources, skills, and interpersonal contacts to cope with challenges in the industry
• Journalists should prioritize curation of their personal credibility in a reality marked by mistrust
• SciLine should emphasize its value and commitment to expertise and DEI and should consider the addition of services to benefit journalists

These insights lay the groundwork for future research focused on science journalists.

During the last two decades, the journalism industry has experienced a massive shift largely driven by the rise in prominence of digital media technologies and their related opportunities and challenges. These changes include a breakdown of traditional media profit models, a decline in the role of legacy media organizations as critical mediators of information, the use of social media platforms to enable individuals and entities not associated with legacy media organizations to garner large followings, a general fracturing of a once largely unified media ecosystem across political lines, and an explosion of attention to misinformation. 1

Despite science journalism receiving increased attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2 the negative consequences of these changes have been especially evident within this domain of journalism. To start, changes in the profit structure of mass media mean that legacy media organizations have experienced profit losses generally coped with by reducing funding to specialized news desks, including those focused on reporting about science. 3 As a result, science news is largely covered by general assignment journalists who may not have the technical backgrounds necessary to cover these issues effectively. 4 Additionally, even science-specialized journalists in the contemporary media ecosystem may need to freelance, which often means they take on more assignments for less pay and must manage personal credibility without institutional backing. 3

Although journalists can use social media platforms to enhance their personal credibility, these platforms have their own suite of negative consequences. For instance, these digital platforms are largely responsible for the profit structure changes that make the “gig economy” of journalism necessary by allowing individuals and organizations not associated with legacy media to produce and widely distribute information online. 1 This affordance of social media has also been cited as a cause for the mass proliferation of political, and often misinformed, information about science. This has become a particularly salient issue as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been marked by high political polarization of attitudes and an abundance of misinformation. 5 The spread of misinformation is likely made worse in an environment in which non-specialist journalists may be more likely to unintentionally spread misinformation about science issues. 3

The vast racial reckoning taking place in the United States is also shaping changes in the media ecosystem. This reckoning has been centered on disproportionate state violence directed at Black individuals as well as general inequalities of experience between white and Black individuals in the United States — it is also evident in related movements in the natural sciences and their news coverage. One major thread in this movement includes renewed concerns about environmental justice, which examines how environmental issues have often had a disproportionately negative impact on racial and ethnic minorities. 6 Another includes concerns about inclusion in science institutions themselves, which have traditionally underrepresented non-male and non-white individuals; a trend that has been present within science journalism. 3 These representational disparities have led to calls for scientific institutions to be more accessible to scientists who belong to racial and ethnic minority groups, and for science journalism to give more coverage to this issue and to scientists who have been traditionally underrepresented.

These extensive, impactful, and ongoing changes to the enterprise of science journalism highlight the need for research that examines the lived experiences of the individuals who are producing science news. The research presented in this report addresses these major points through semi-structured interviews of journalists who have reported on science issues and have used the expert matching services of SciLine, an organization based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The services provided by SciLine allow journalists to request to be matched with a domain-relevant expert for their stories. This study was funded through a grant from AAAS and provides insight into the modern science media ecosystem from the perspective of those that create science news, particularly with an eye toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); changes wrought by the rise of social media; and pressing issues, such as science misinformation.

KEY FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Key findings.

• SciLine helps journalists find and sift niche experts quickly and could improve assistance by adding more quick reference services and by employing self- promotion
• Journalists share similar perceptions of their audiences and commonly express desires to connect with broader readerships through increasingly localized, representative, and action-oriented reporting
• Journalists source experts for the backbone of their science stories and prefer experts who align with the story topic, are skilled communicators, and can reflect diverse audiences
• Journalists view science as having vast societal value but perceive challenges in reporting science news that stems from its norms and structure
• Journalists regard their profession as a rigorous endeavor that seeks to serve and improve society
• Journalists’ typical work extends well beyond the act of producing a story
• Journalists emphasized that previous experience, data literacy, and a professional reputation help them more effectively report about scientific issues and successfully connect with expert sources
• Journalists perceive an erosion of trust in journalistic institutions — intensified by misinformation — that disproportionately affects science journalism
• Contemporary structural aspects of the journalism industry are of great concern to journalists, especially when it comes to reporting about science

Recommendations

• Journalists should leverage their resources, skills, and interpersonal contacts to cope with a challenging industry

FULL FINDINGS

Finding 1: sciline helps find and sift niche experts quickly.

One fundamental goal of this study was to attain feedback about the SciLine matching service from its journalist user base. We found, quite overwhelmingly, that journalists have had positive experiences with the SciLine service. Journalists uniformly emphasized how SciLine’s services are especially valuable for reporters who may not have specialty experience covering science issues or networks of scientific experts from which to identify sources. One journalist noted:

“I think that SciLine is almost more valuable for people who aren’t science journalists or don’t regularly cover science and health reporting … and so I would hope that more folks who are like education reporters or government reporters, when they come across something science in their beats, that they know about this resource.”

Numerous other themes emerged when we asked journalists to describe specific SciLine traits they found particularly useful. Journalists uniformly lauded SciLine’s consistent ability to maximize goodness-of-fit between journalists and expert sources. Each interviewee described being able to count on SciLine to connect them with sources who possess appropriate expertise, even for topic areas that are especially niche. One journalist said:

“[The SciLine service is very effective] when I get really stuck when I’m, you know, like I need an outside expert source on this really specific area, like a soil chemist that specializes in the tropics.”

This goodness-of-fit issue is especially important; journalists consistently emphasized how the specificity of an expert’s knowledge area is the key consideration in their sourcing.

Interviewees also uniformly identified SciLine’s speed-of-response as being especially consistent and important. Given their need to produce work on tight deadlines, journalists emphasized how much they value Sciline’s dependable responsiveness to their requests for expert sources. Additionally, many journalists described how, critically, SciLine connects them to expert sources who are responsive to the time sensitivity that typically accompanies their interview requests:

“I think [SciLine’s value comes from] the fact that they are pretty quick to respond and that they reach out to the [source] ahead of time. So, when they get back to you, they are coming back to you and saying, ‘Here’s Dr. so-and-so, who’s an expert in this topic and has agreed to speak to you by your deadline. Here’s their contact information.’ “

Many journalists noted a deep appreciation for SciLine’s steady ability to connect them with expert sources who have personal characteristics that are helpful for their interviews. For example, journalists often described how SciLine consistently made efforts to connect them to sources with appropriate topical expertise who also have specific demographic characteristics (e.g., gender, race, etc.) that they requested.

Additionally, journalists commonly detailed how SciLine consistently connects them with expert sources who, in addition to being sensitive to time deadlines, are generally clear and effective communicators. Only one interviewee described a negative experience with respect to the communication skills of an expert sourced by SciLine.

Finding 2: SciLine Could Improve with More Quick Reference Services and Self- Promotion

Although journalists’ views of SciLine were overwhelmingly positive, most journalists suggested ways in which SciLine could potentially improve its services and offer more value. Most of these suggestions described different services that SciLine could offer. One service mentioned by a handful of journalists was a sort of “quick reference tool” that could keep journalists up to date with background information about timely scientific and health issues. One journalist, for example, stated:

“I could see a resource for SciLine to do just ‘Hey, you know you have misinformation that’s circulating in your community [about science topic x] … here are the things you should do right now, and here are the things you shouldn’t do right now.’ “

In addition, a handful of journalists suggested that SciLine could curate and share reference lists that provide deeper contextual information about their expert sources:

“I think maybe you know, [if] SciLine [were to] give you a little summary of who the expert is and what kind of research the person does, maybe their previous interactions with the media. So, for example, one of the ones I got — they put me in touch with [state name of exert], who’s done a ton of media stuff on Covid but she’s kind of controversial.”

Other journalists mentioned similar desires for SciLine to provide more information about expert sources, especially when it comes to flagging experts who have a track record of expressing their personal opinions in previous media interviews:

“I think the big problem that we’re facing right now is how do you find experts who can speak well about an issue without seeming like they’re taking a side?”

Journalists also suggested that SciLine consider organizing conference-style events designed to bolster journalists’ professional development (e.g., expanding science reporting skills, building more expansive networks among science journalists), and designing collaborations with other expert databases that exist within the journalist ecosystem.

Many interviewees expressed a desire to see SciLine improve its marketing as they were concerned that not enough journalists know about the service. Journalists discussed how they wish they had known about SciLine sooner and that they wanted SciLine to consider how it can more effectively promote itself across the journalism community.

Although less explicitly described, interviewees frequently expressed curiosity about the extent to which SciLine could help them better connect with STEM experts from traditionally under-represented groups and, likewise, provide transparency with respect to the ways in which SciLine is currently thinking about inclusion in how they structure their service. One journalist remarked:

“[I’m] hoping that they get what I’m talking about without me saying ‘stop giving me white men to do these interviews’. So, I would say that it would be great if I had a better sense of how SciLine took [source diversity] into account.”

Finding 3: Journalists Share Similar Perceptions of Their Audiences and Commonly Express Desires to Connect with Broader Readerships through Increasingly Localized, Representative, and Action-Oriented Reporting

When asked to recount the core characteristics of their audience, many journalists described their audience members as having an intrinsic interest in scientific information. This interest was often specified as being connected to individuals who have some sort of science-related background, be that direct (e.g., working within STEM) or indirect connections (e.g., reaching a level of education that conveyed an understanding of the scientific method):

“I would like my audience to be people who aren’t already super interested in science or steeped in the science world or people who don’t have a scientific background …, but in reality … I think it’s really more scientists who are reading it or people who are pretty well educated already.”

Journalists often described their core audiences in terms of age, often reflecting on what they perceive to be a skew toward an older audience:

“So, I think the main characteristic that my newspapers’ owners want is somebody who can afford and will take out a subscription to the newspaper, and who will pay for the journalism consistently, and then that in general tends to be older folks.”

Most journalists mentioned the skew as a cause for concern, sometimes emphasizing their employer’s continued efforts to attract more youthful audiences. Even journalists who did not describe their audience in terms of age commonly discussed a broader, ongoing challenge among traditional journalism institutions to connect with younger audiences.

In terms of race, some journalists described their audience as being racially homogeneous, while others mentioned having a more racially diverse audience. Similar to their concerns with the age of their audience, journalists commonly emphasized the need to cultivate an increasingly diverse audience for science news:

“Our audience tends to skew highly college-educated white liberal. And so, I’ve, especially in the last few years, really tried to look beyond that… we’re doing a lot more, you know, like community engagement to try to reach out to, you know, beyond just our standard audience.”

When subtly prompted to elaborate on possible methods to achieve more diverse audiences (in terms of interest, race, age, etc.), many journalists mentioned a similar subset of tactics. One of these tactics was the importance of anchoring their reporting on a local angle:

“We always like to think, [mentions name of news outlet] is gonna have all kinds of like big, high-level news. But what can we do to localize it and kind of give our listeners a sense of how it matters to them?”

More specifically, journalists commonly described connecting science issues to their impacts — or potential impacts — on local communities, especially by “shining light on medical issues” and relevant health implications. Related to the localization of science issues, journalists mentioned attempting to connect with broader audiences by writing/ producing stories that include actionable takeaways (i.e., behaviors) related to the topic.

Journalists often mentioned presenting science issues in terms of social justice related to racial minorities and disadvantaged communities. They described news institutions as having historically underplayed social justice, especially related to issues of science and the environment. Some journalists mentioned a reorientation toward issues of social justice:

“I think it’s just a better story the more voices you get. That’s a better, richer story. I mean one example I encounter a lot is let’s say there’s a project that’s happening. I’m thinking of one where they captive-reared Scarlet Macaws and release them back in the jungle. The head of the organization wanted to talk to me and he had a lot of big picture things to say, but I really wanted to talk to the person, the group of people who lived in Guatemala that were feeding the parrots every day… I just think, yeah, different perspectives make it a stronger story, and maybe also relatable to a wider audience.”

Finding 4: Journalists Source Experts for the Backbone of Their Science Stories and Prefer Experts Who Align with the Story Topic, are Skilled Communicators, and Can Reflect Diverse Audiences

In addition to asking journalists about their audience, we also sought to learn about the sources they incorporate into their stories. Simply put, journalists uniformly regard expert sources as fundamental to their reporting about science news. As one journalist stated:

“[Including experts] adds a lot — it’s an essential component of the story. It adds credibility for one thing. It gives a stamp of legitimacy to the story, like this is, you know, endorsed by someone who knows what they’re talking about.”

Although the inclusion of expert sources is seen as an absolute necessity, the interviewees prioritized sourcing experts who have specific attributes. The attribute mentioned most often is the need for a source’s expertise to closely align with the topic covered in the story (i.e., the goodness-of-fit issue discussed in Finding 1). Maximizing the synchrony between story topic and source expertise is the most fundamental and widely sought-after requirement for the journalists we interviewed.

Also important is using sources who are skilled, fluid communicators. When asked to elaborate on what they mean by ‘skilled communicators’, journalists commonly described preferring source experts who excel at distilling the complexities of scientific research and issues and who can explain them to non-experts — journalists and, by extension, the audiences of their reporting — in ways that are understandable and compelling. Many journalists expressed how critical it is for an expert source to be able to speak clearly and provide usable soundbites during interviews:

“Can [the expert source] speak in complete sentences? … You’d be surprised how many times you get to the end of the interview sometimes and you feel like ‘I could write about this in a compelling way, but I’m not going to be able to use any of these quotes.’ “

Journalists discussed how these communicative skills are even more acutely important for projects that are on tight deadlines or are being broadcast live.

The preference for communicative experts was followed closely by a desire to use diverse expert sources, specifically in terms of race (i.e., non-white) and gender (i.e., non-male). Although journalists often shared frustrations about ongoing institutional homogeneity within science and how that contributes to suppressing diverse voices, they also reflected on their personal efforts to find and incorporate more diverse voices into their work:

“I think I do not do as good a job with this as I’d like. But I do try to not quote white men in my stories when possible. And sometimes on deadline, I do end up doing that and that’s not ideal, but I would always choose a woman or somebody who is underrepresented in their respective field.”

Additionally, journalists who emphasized the issue of cultivating diversity among expert sources stated that they did so both because it makes their reporting more compelling and because it represents a personal and professional ethical standard. To this end, these journalists often described their commitment to supplement expert voices with voices of individuals or groups whose experiences have previously been scant — or altogether absent — in media coverage. Functionally, journalists said this means making extra effort to ensure their reporting includes sources with previously undervalued or unexplored connections to science and health topics. It also means making extra effort to incorporate viewpoints from sources who are being negatively impacted by some aspect of a scientific issue.

Journalists also mentioned two additional attributes they seek in their expert sources: an ability to communicate without outwardly voicing personal opinions (i.e., conveying objectivity) and having a direct attachment to the journalist’s geographic media market.

Finding 5: Journalists View Science as Having Vast Societal Value But Perceive Challenges in Reporting Science News That Stems From Its Norms and Structure

Journalists interviewed for this study uniformly regard the scientific enterprise as being highly valuable. Not only do each of the journalists regularly report on science issues, but, as mentioned in Finding 4, they see scientists as the backbone of stories involving science. Additionally, many journalists spoke directly about the vast societal value of science and how including science enhances the quality of their reporting. For example, one journalist described how science can make smaller stories connect with broader societal trends. Another interviewee shared an example illustrating how science enables them to unpack complex and/or widespread issues for their readers in helpful ways, in this case, to explain the specific mechanisms behind a weather crisis:

“We had this historic week of incredible cold in Kansas, in February and really across the Midwest last year … And suddenly somebody in Little Rock is turning off the lights in Kansas City, and people are freaking out about it. You know, I reached out to SciLine. They put me in touch with a scientist at a university in Kansas who knows more about the power grid than anybody who could explain to me what’s happening and why.”

Beyond this widely held, macro-level appreciation for science, journalists cited challenges they face in their science reporting that stem from institutional and normative issues within science. The most common of these challenges was raised in earlier sections of this report: scientific institutions and workforces are traditionally homogeneous when it comes to racial and gender identities, which, in turn, makes it hard for journalists to find diverse expert voices. To wit, one journalist stated:

“Like I was recently doing an atmospheric chemistry story, and I really couldn’t find anyone to talk to who wasn’t an older white male, aside from the postdoc who was lead author on the study I was covering, but he was just a younger white male.”

A subset of journalists, however, perceived that scientific institutions and workforces are becoming more diverse and that it therefore may become easier for journalists to include more diverse expert sources in their science stories. Still, one journalist pointed out an ongoing trend that may attenuate that shift: journalistic attention to individual scientists still tends to snowball to a few well-established and already well-covered scientists simply because they have earned a reputation for being ‘good’ interviewees:

“I think that there’s this, there’s this tendency in the world of journalism to talk to people who get talked to, and I think that we’re all susceptible to it because I’m, you know, we’re looking for an expert on X, Y, or Z and we see that someone’s been quoted in the New York Times or the Washington Post or this or that. And then we think, ‘Okay, they’re a good talker. They give a good quote. Let me reach out.’ “

Another challenge journalists encountered was their ability to navigate the scientific norm of peer-review, specifically because of the recent challenges many faced while figuring out how best to report issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. One journalist, for example, described with exasperation their ongoing struggle to determine how to accurately cover COVID-19:

“It’s just these rapidly changing recommendations and what you should do, how we treat the virus, how we know to treat the virus … The virus is changing, too. So, kind of what we know, and how the virus acts changes, too.”

This struggle was commonly experienced among the journalists, although a number of them also mentioned how parsing uncertainty related to scientific issues is just part of their job, even though it has been especially challenging lately.

We also asked interviewees for their thoughts about the increased availability of pre- press studies — scientific results shared publicly before they have undergone peer-review. Although many journalists were unaware of them, those who were expressed concern that generalist reporters use information from pre-print studies without realizing that this information has not undergone the same rigorous review of a conventional, peer-refereed scientific publication:

“I think, for the most part [pre-prints] are a good thing, but they do give rise to, you know, irresponsible journalism … I think people should know what to do with the preprint and maybe treat it a little more gingerly than something through review.”

Finding 6: Journalists Regard Their Profession as a Rigorous Endeavor That Seeks to Serve and Improve Society

Among the journalists we interviewed, rigor and quality were held as uncompromisable attributes of the profession. One interviewee, for example, emphasized their commitment to accuracy and reporting the truth:

“… but legitimate mainstream media is reporting the truth and they are recording accurately. And they’re doing a hell of a job … the job that I see being done by my colleagues that I work with every day, and people that I know at other papers we work really hard to make sure that things are accurate.”

When it comes to communicating science information, several themes emerged about the key roles journalists seek to fulfill. The most common of these themes is to successfully make science accessible to non-technical audiences. Journalists also described their commitment to conveying scientific information in ways that connect it to bigger-picture issues (e.g., centering science within broader social contexts). Conversely, many journalists emphasized their aim to personalize science issues when possible:

“Keep humans in your stories, and it will revive you as a journalist. It will help you from burning out, and it will also guide you. And I think it’s really easy to become overwhelmed by all the things you don’t know if you don’t have a science background … so just stay focused on people. And at the end of the day you should always be asking …‘What does this mean for the average person?’ And that will ground your reporting, and it will ground you.”

Journalists commonly cited how journalism is not simply a means of conveying information accurately, but also an endeavor that fulfills pro-social roles that have traditionally been seen as functions of journalism. One example includes speaking truth to power:

“I’m always writing to like raise awareness of issues that I want people at the top to read and be like, ‘Oh, wow! They know about this now.’ … like the pregnancy piece, I was like, ‘I hope that somebody at the FDA reads this, and it lights a tiny fire under their butt to actually prioritize this task force that they’ve been ignoring for 2 years.’ “

Another example is giving voice to disadvantaged individuals:

“I think it varies a little bit, but usually, I cover public health and healthcare for my city and county and with a focus on vulnerable populations and people who are most at risk.”

Overall, this collection of themes suggests that journalists see their profession as serving a unique and valuable role, not just in the conveyance of scientific information, but also in how their reporting of science and health issues can be done in ways that have the potential to help positively transform society.

Finding 7: Journalists’ Typical Work Extends Well Beyond the Act of Producing a Story

When asked about their typical routines, journalists described not only practices directly involved in writing science stories but also practices leading up to and following the production of these stories. Many interviewees gave insight into their research process, detailing the media they consume to become familiar with the topics they are writing about:

“Well, if I’m going to be writing the news, and I have to write stuff that’s relevant to today, and that is important in the whole landscape of things, then I need to know that landscape and know what’s going on, especially in my niche…Therefore I can come up with ideas of like, you know, like what’s the latest, and where are the questions still?”

Some noted how this process of collecting background information can be especially important for science stories because of the high requisite of technical knowledge required to write them.

After immersing themselves in the background required to understand the context and significance of the story, many journalists next discussed interviewing the scientist sources whose contributions would serve as the backbones of their stories. This is when many journalists first mentioned their experiences working with SciLine, as discussed at length in Finding 1. Several journalists emphasized the importance of speaking to multiple expert sources rather than just one. As one interviewee explained, this process allows journalists to verify that the information is relevant and accurate across a broad scientific community:

“A new study comes out by a researcher at The University of [redacted] and as a reporter, not a classically trained scientist, you know that this is a just a common thing in science journalism where you know the reporter will want to reach out to at least one source who wasn’t connected to the study but does have some ability to evaluate the study what the researchers did, what they found. To ask: ‘are these people full of baloney?’ “

In addition to their function as hype detectors, journalists commonly noted the steps they regularly take to ensure they spot and disclose any potential conflicts of interest between researchers and their work.

Many interviewees also discussed the work they do on their stories following publication. These post-publication practices generally revolve around using online media to promote the visibility of their work; something that seems especially critical to freelancers:

“[My website] is a very basic website. But it has my work on it, and there have been some people that find me through that, you know, if they read an article. They look at my website. They say, ‘okay, she’s got some experience here,’ and they’ll email me and say are you looking for work? And I’m on Twitter … I’ll tweet when my article comes out and I’ll maybe retweet something once a week.”

Not all of the social media work that journalists do is positive, however, as a major point of discussion regards journalists’ ongoing struggle to effectively engage with the often misinformed — and sometimes aggressively inflammatory — comments that users leave in reply to their work. The journalists we spoke with generally said that they do not engage with these types of online commenters, and some discussed the struggle to resist natural urges to counter-argue and defend their work. Previous Center for Media Engagement research has suggested that while journalist comments may be effective at reputation management, some are more effective than others, particularly comments that acknowledge the commenters’ emotions. 7 Journalists often discussed how emotionally taxing it is for them — and for journalists more broadly — to see their work become distorted online. This represents a critically important key form of undesired, detrimental, and invisible labor that all contemporary journalists must do: consistently manage strong negative emotions and pressures associated with simply doing their job:

“I have had some pretty big episodes of burnout during the last 2 years. And yeah, I mean it just honestly, it is, I mean, kind of demoralizing to just look at our, you know vaccination numbers, and just to be out in the city, and just see, you know, people who are pretending like this [the Covid-19 pandemic] just didn’t exist. … But yeah, I mean, just in order to be a sane journalist right now you kind of have to, I don’t know, have to not pretend that you can solve all the world’s problems, and to recognize that this is, you know, a team effort. And yeah, the work of journalism, you know, is an ongoing thing. And yeah, any single one of us is not going to be able to kind of change the world through, you know, just one piece of reporting or even though you know 2 years of working on a beat.”

It became clear that modern journalists find it difficult to separate their professional identities from their personal lives. The standard professional practices of a modern journalist are value-laden and connect directly with issues that are often intensely politicized and aggressively debated. In a sense, journalists are on the front lines of sense making about these issues. And, as our interviews suggest, they are aware of that status and are regularly trying to manage the fallout — both emotional and physical — of their professional mandate to infuse rationality into discussions of modern issues. Taken together, these findings suggest that the work of contemporary journalists is regularly following them home, often in ways that are not healthy.

Finding 8: Journalists Emphasized That Previous Experience, Data Literacy, and a Professional Reputation Help Them More Effectively Report About Scientific Issues and Successfully Connect with Expert Sources

It was common among interviewees who had previous professional experience in the sciences — either direct or indirect — to describe how that background gives them an advantage in producing high-quality science reporting:

“I do feel like [my Ph.D. in a STEM field] gave me confidence, and it gave me a base of understanding where I can kind of come into reading a lot of these studies and talking to scientists where there’s like a shared vocabulary and things are easier in some ways.”

Although journalists with this previous experience generally regarded it as an asset when interviewing experts, they also discussed how they sometimes downplay their science credentials because they found that experts gave better interviews when they believed they were talking to someone without specialized science knowledge:

“Sometimes I like to not tell a source … that I have a Ph.D., or even a background in science, because if they know they’re talking to another science person, they’ll immediately use a lot of jargon and complicated language.”

Independent of their professional background, many interviewees emphasized the professional value of data literacy. They described how having high data literacy allows them to better vet the significance of scientific information:

“I really like to interrogate data pretty aggressively. I think that’s another thing that we saw during the pandemic; that our data systems at the local, state, and federal levels were deeply fraught. And so [for example] dealing with the number of Covid cases that, say, Texas is reporting on a given day. I thought it was really important that reporters understand where that number came from, how it was developed, and what caveats we had with that number.”

The journalists consistently emphasized how possessing adequate data literacy enables them, crucially, to avoid being deferential to scientific data that underpins their reporting.

Beyond these aspects of scientific experience and savviness, many participants highlighted the importance of amassing their own networks of trusted and responsive expert sources, and of carefully developing their own professional reputations. One journalist, for example, explained how their carefully curated professional reputation is vital when trying to speak with expert sources who may be otherwise reluctant to speak with journalists:

“[Experts] knew when they talked to me they weren’t just gonna get cut down to a 30-second sound bite from like a 30 min interview.”

All told, most journalists we spoke with feel that better science reporting is correlated with reporters who have some level of familiarity with the scientific process and who are comfortable evaluating, to some degree, the data on which scientific findings — and their implications — rest. These views dovetail with other findings in this report that highlight journalists’ shared concerns about the increasing number of generalist reporters tasked with covering scientific and health issues.

Finding 9: Journalists Perceive an Erosion of Trust in Journalistic Institutions — Intensified By Misinformation — That Disproportionately Affects Science Journalism

Journalists expressed a sense of intense and pervasive concern regarding recent developments in the industry of journalism, especially related to the domain of science journalism. One of the strongest areas of concern stems from a commonly held perception that trust in journalistic and scientific institutions is declining. Regarding this perceived decline in trust in journalistic institutions, one interviewee said:

“I think the biggest issue right now is just simply the trust, the trust of the public. How do you win it back when you didn’t lose it in the first place, right? It’s not that we’ve lost it, it’s that it’s kind of been taken from us. How do you get that back? And honest to God I’m really not sure what the answer is to that. You know so many people say, ‘fair and balanced.’ But again, you can’t give balance to crazy ideas, you know, or to conspiracy, you just can’t.”

Another journalist spoke about how conveying the trustworthiness of their work has become a defining feature of their job:

“And so [my] challenge is to come from facts and science, and, you know, cut through the noise and just tell the truth. But also to not to talk down [to the public] and to maintain credibility.”

Our interviews suggest that the journalists overwhelmingly perceived this erosion of trust in journalistic institutions as both new and intensely acidic. Interviewees commonly described the lack of trust in journalistic institutions as being connected to — and compounded by — a contemporary lowering of trust in scientific institutions. Many of these journalists recounted, with palpable angst, the ongoing and complex challenges they face to report about science amid what feels like a growing trend toward distrust in authorities and experts.

Interviewees were quick to attribute these perceived declines in trust to one key factor: misinformation. Every journalist we interviewed described misinformation as rampant and as representing what feels like a seemingly intractable challenge. Said one interviewee:

“[Us reporters] find that people have a different set of information than we do. And I don’t always know where they’re getting their information, but there’s a clear divide, about the COVID-19 stuff and vaccines especially, you know. These are people who have not had the briefings with the hospital administrators and the state health officials that I have. They’re not signing up for the CDC reports that I’m looking at and reading. They’re not looking at the SciLine webinars, and they’re certainly not reading my stories, except for when I write about an anti-vaxxer being wrong on a bunch of things then suddenly somebody will engage with us. But the information that they have is very different. And I don’t know how to bridge that divide.”

Moreover, some journalists think related trends, such as a rise in conspiratorial thinking about science, are creating higher demands for misinformation. Several identified various online personalities as being key sources of misinformation. Other interviewees, however, reflected on how journalists themselves may worsen this problem by unintentionally boosting science misinformation. One way they may be doing this, they suggested, is through employing ‘false balance’ — producing news stories that convey equal ‘balance’ across two sides of an issue regardless of when one side or argument is demonstrably incorrect. Beyond this issue of false balance, other interviewees expressed concerns that some journalists may simply not know the scientific facts necessary to make informed decisions about their coverage, especially when reporting on supplemental items like press releases:

“The first thing I say [to other reporters] is read the study. Yeah, do not, for God’s sake, do not rely on the press release, because the press releases are always wrong. They’re written by well-intentioned people. I used to write press releases for science. I can tell you, yeah, they’re always wrong so read the study. Talk to the author.”

Overall, it was striking how emotive journalists became when they discussed the topics of misinformation and diminished trust in science and expertise. Many journalists described how thinking about the contemporary state of science journalism instills in them feelings of doom, existential crisis, and/or professional burnout:

“Yeah, you know, like I’m feeling burned out. I know a lot of my coworkers — anybody who’s had covered fracking and climate change for like 10 years — and to just see nothing ever happen. And, you know, people I follow are like, you know, disconnecting their newsletters or taking a step away to deal with mental health.”

Indeed, a notable subset of journalists we spoke with mentioned a colleague who has, or plans to, leave the journalism profession because they are tired of fighting against what feels like a rising, insurmountable tide of misinformation and antagonistic distrust of expertise. Some of these same journalists admitted that they, too, wonder about their professional future and ability to maintain a healthy, sustainable balance between their journalist and personal identities. Overall, it is evident that the perceived lack of public confidence in journalism and science — and the accompanying surfeit of misinformation — represents a serious challenge to the journalists that participated in this study.

Finding 10: Contemporary Structural Aspects of the Journalism Industry are of Great Concern to Journalists, Especially When It Comes to Reporting About Science

In addition to concerns related to misinformation and distrust, journalists described another subset of challenges stemming from the contemporary structure of journalism. Most interviewees expressed concerns about financial aspects of the industry, in particular, those related to inadequate compensation and benefits:

“I have a real problem with how journalists are paid. I think we are mostly underpaid, except if you have these sort of few, rare staff positions, you know.”

It was a generally shared sentiment among journalists that the profit structures that previously supported the journalism industry are no longer sufficiently lucrative. Although interviewees elaborated on that sentiment in numerous ways, one primary reason stood out: a shift wherein audiences are no longer willing to pay for news:

“… [young people] all get their news from scrolling through social media, and just from the headline, they don’t actually click on anything, because a lot of things have a paywall But we have a paywall because we have to stay in business. I’m scared of a world without newspapers. You know, I’m scared of that world, and it seems like it’s coming hard and fast at us, you know. I mean [newspapers] are shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and they are your best source, your best source for accurate information. They just are. There’s just nothing else that terrifies me. That’s the one that keeps me up at night.”

Additionally, several journalists mentioned an accompanying trend wherein financial hardships are substantively eroding the quality of reporting, particularly when it comes to covering complex science and health issues. They expressed concerns about how news organizations have downsized and replaced specialized science reporters with general assignment reporters who are less able to effectively understand and therefore accurately cover scientific topics. For example, they described fears about an increased propensity among general reporters to be overly deferential to press releases about scientific topics:

“I know that, like in professional spaces with other science journalists, that seems to be kind of the norm. Just treat everything in the press release with a grain of salt, or just ignore the press release entirely. But outside of science journalism, I don’t know if that’s the case … I get the sense that skepticism isn’t shared universally.”

Notably, after describing these challenges, the journalists we spoke with often turned the conversation back to SciLine, noting, without prompting, how it is precisely the type of service needed to help address them.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Sciline should emphasize its value and commitment to expertise and dei and should consider the addition of certain services.

The interviewees suggested that journalists view SciLine not only as an important part of their own work but also as an essential public service to the broader ecosystem of science journalism. Journalists emphasized this point by consistently suggesting that SciLine proactively expand its effort to reach more journalists writing about science issues, especially those who do not specialize in science journalism. As discussed within this report, journalists believe SciLine has some clear, compelling, and unique selling propositions that should be emphasized in future marketing efforts: their ability to find highly niche experts who possess strong communication skills and their ability to deliver these experts on quick turnarounds that help journalists meet deadlines. SciLine may improve its user experience by making it easier for journalists to connect with expert sources who have identities traditionally under-represented within STEM. The journalists we interviewed all expressed a desire to boost diversity within their sourcing and an appreciation for anything the SciLine service could do to make it easier for them to integrate more diverse sources and perspectives into their reporting. Part of this, journalists suggested, could include SciLine making it clearer on the back end what they are doing to maximize diversity within their broader network of expert sources.

The interviews also conveyed that science journalists may be experiencing especially challenging times. These challenges — caused by a multitude of factors including misinformation, politicization, polarization, the pandemic, and online media — are wearing down journalists and, in some cases, causing them to switch careers. As an important part of the science journalism landscape, SciLine should consider what role it can play in facilitating the availability of new structures and opportunities for science journalists to access expanded and effective professional support.

Other suggested areas for SciLine expansion centered around additional services, such as the creation of reports or best-practice guidelines on how to efficiently handle common pieces of science-related misinformation and access to more background information about expert sources.

Journalists Should Maintain Their Focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Science Reporting

There was a near consensus among the interviewed journalists that there is an urgent need to increasingly focus on people that have traditionally been left out of science journalism. For our interviewees, this meant both addressing the issues of disadvantaged individuals and communities in science reporting as well as including their voices in interviews and as expert sources. Although there are significant challenges in fulfilling this latter point due to structural inequities in STEM, most journalists noted that with enough time and effort they can find diverse expert voices for most science issues. One key way they accomplish this is by making dedicated efforts to interview scientists who are early in their careers and who have not yet received extensive media coverage. Overall, the journalists we spoke with emphasized that centering DEI enables reporting that is both of higher quality and of a higher ethical standard.

Journalists Should Leverage Their Resources, Skills, and Interpersonal Contacts to Cope with Challenges in the Industry

Previous research has suggested that, as a result of a wide swath of developments in the journalism industry, non-specialized reporters are more commonly tasked to write science stories, especially stories related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This issue arose in our interviews and, in fact, many of the journalists we spoke with are general assignment reporters experiencing this shift in their daily work. While the specialized science journalists we spoke with emphasized the value that their specialty adds to their reporting ability, many journalists shared successful strategies for science reporting that were independent of specialty. Services like SciLine were found to be especially valuable for non-specialists. Additionally, the use of professional contacts and the development of professional networks were seen by many as valuable, and, while it may take some extra effort, others emphasized the importance of developing basic data literacy among specialist and non- specialist reporters.

Journalists Should Prioritize Curation of Their Personal Credibility in a Reality Marked by Mistrust

It was a widely held perception among the interviewed journalists that both journalism and science institutions are facing a crisis of public confidence. To manage this perceived shift, many journalists are increasingly sensitive to ensuring unimpeachable standards of accuracy in their work and are more frequently mindful of their audiences’ values and lived experiences. This increased awareness of audience orientations comes with benefits, such as producing stories that are more relevant to readers and producing stories that include perspectives from previously overlooked communities, but it must be balanced with an imperative to resist giving space to misinformation. Journalists need to be increasingly careful to not share misinformation unintentionally, and, likewise, to not treat scientific information as overly certain. Stakeholders who seek to support quality science journalism must continue to ask themselves what they can do to help reporters more easily report scientific issues accurately at a time when the stakes have become especially high.

METHODOLOGY

We conducted semi-structured interviews in March and April of 2022 with 19 journalists who report on science and related issues. Journalists were selected from a list of journalism professionals who have used the SciLine expert matching service. From this list, we contacted potential interviewees with an eye toward maximizing variance in terms of the journalists’ primary medium (e.g., print, audio, or video) and self-identification as a specialized science (or related) journalist. Of those we interviewed, 13 journalists worked in print, six worked in an audio medium, and none worked in a visual medium. Additionally, 13 journalists self-identified as specialists of science or related reporting. All interviews were conducted online using video conferencing software with the exception of one interview that was conducted through email to accommodate the participant’s disability needs.

Prior to conducting interviews, journalists completed an online form that affirmed their consent to be interviewed and were asked a short set of demographic questions. From this intake survey, we observed that nine journalists identified as cisgender women, six journalists identified as cisgender men, two journalists identified as gender-fluid, one journalist identified as cisgender nonbinary, and one journalist identified as queer. Additionally, 16 journalists identified as white, one journalist identified as Asian and Caucasian, one journalist identified as Hispanic, and one journalist identified as South Asian. The intake survey also revealed that 12 journalists have a master’s degree, five have an undergraduate degree, one has a Ph.D., and one has a graduate diploma.

We developed the protocol for our semi-structured interviews after conducting an extensive literature review of relevant peer-reviewed research that examined science reporting. The core research questions focused on the following topics:

• What journalists most value about the SciLine expert matching service
• How journalists think the SciLine expert matching service could improve
• What journalists think expert sources add to science reporting
• The characteristics of sources that journalists value most, and how diversity factors into these assessments
• What journalists consider to be the characteristics of their audiences
• Journalists’ views of the state of science misinformation and how science misinformation affects their work
• Journalists’ experiences working in a predominantly digital ecosystem

Interviews were designed to obtain qualitative insights and lay the groundwork for future research focused on science journalists.

SUGGESTED CITATION: Anderson, J., Dudo, A., and Terrell, G. (July, 2022). The state of science reporting in today’s digital media landscape: Interviews with journalists who use SciLine’s service. Center for Media Engagement. https://mediaengagement.org/research/the-state-of-science-reporting-in-todays-digital-media-landscape

• Jamieson, K. H., Kahan, D., & Scheufele, D. A. (2017). The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication.  Oxford University Press. [ ↩ ][ ↩ ]
• Bogomoletc, E., Goodwin, J., & Binder, A. R. (2021). Masks Don’t Work but You Should Get One: Circulation of the Science ofMasking During the Covid-19 Pandemic. In Pandemic Communication and Resilience (pp. 213–244). Springer InternationalPublishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77344-1_14 [ ↩ ]
• Dunwoody, S. (2021). Science journalism: Prospects in the digital age. In Routledge handbook of public communication of science and technology (pp. 43-55). Routledge. [ ↩ ][ ↩ ][ ↩ ][ ↩ ]
• Ashwell, D. J. (2016). The challenges of science journalism: The perspectives of scientists, science communication advisors and journalists from New Zealand. Public Understanding of Science , 25(3), 379–393. https://doi. org/10.1177/0963662514556144 [ ↩ ]
• Muddiman, Ashley, Budak, Ceren, Romas, Bryan, Kim, Yujin, Murray, Caroline, Burniston, Mary Margaret, Geiger, Jessica, Purcell, Alex, Ludzenski, Jordan, Turner, Meg, Duchovany, Marley, & Stroud, Natalie Jomini. (December, 2020). Cable and nightly network news coverage of coronavirus. Center for Media Engagement. https:// mediaengagement.org/research/coronavirus-network-coverage ; Ho, S. S., Goh, T. J., & Leung, Y. W. (2020). Let’s nab fake science news: Predicting scientists’ support for interventions using the influence of presumed media influence model. Journalism , 1464884920937488. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884920937488 [ ↩ ]
• Čapek, S. M. (1993). The “Environmental Justice” Frame: A Conceptual Discussion and an Application. Social Problems , 40(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/3097023 . [ ↩ ]
• Masullo, Gina M., Riedl, Martin J., Ziegele, Marc, Naab, Teresa, Jost, Pablo, and Huang, Q. Elyse. (2021, March). Journalist engagement in Facebook comments: Try acknowledging commenters’ emotions. Center for Media Engagement. https://mediaengagement.org/research/journalist-engagement-in-facebook-comments/ [ ↩ ]

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Case Studies

Genesys Levels Up Its Media Analysis Reporting by Consolidating Global Coverage and Adding Deep Value Metrics

Explore how Fullintel revolutionized Genesys’s media monitoring by consolidating global coverage and implementing quality metrics like the Media Impact Score. This partnership transformed overwhelming data into strategic insights, enhancing Genesys’s global communications strategy.

Building Deep Competitive Analysis Across Traditional and Social Media for Medical Device Maker

Why a major medical device maker chose Fullintel to help it understand the impact of its public relations and communication efforts, benchmarked both against its past performance and that of its competitors.

Measuring Everything: Contextual Tagging Drives Success for Medical Technology Firm

After an exponential increase in coverage, a multinational medical company chose Fullintel to measure content across regions and sub-brands while providing seamless navigation between top-line and sub-brand content. Here’s why.

National Trade Association Implements Monthly Competitive Media Measurement Driven by Impact Metrics

When a national industry association needed to up its media monitoring and analysis game, it approached Fullintel to design a more comprehensive monitoring and measurement program. Here’s what we did.

Keeping a U.S. University Secure via Real-Time Social Media Monitoring and Threat Assessment

When a U.S. university became concerned about threats on campus, it asked Fullintel to implement an advanced Issues Management monitoring system to gauge sentiment and alert stakeholders in real-time around potential security threats.

Helping Major Entertainment Company Understand Audience Reaction to its Latest Film Release Through Human Curation

A deep dive into how Fullintel helped one of the largest and most established film studios in the world track the success of a highly anticipated major motion picture in traditional and social media in as close to real-time as possible.

Fullintel Moves Multinational Construction Company to Human-Curated Measurement for a Better Understanding of Media Impact

Learn how Fullintel helped a multinational construction company evolve to a human-curated reporting strategy, over its previous (and ineffective) automated approach, to more effectively measure PR efforts around its many North American communities and other projects.

Fullintel helps Global Pharmaceutical Company Track and Engage Influencers on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

Discover how human curation and analysis allowed our client to track important LinkedIn content – a platform not readily available on SaaS platforms – while classifying influencers by type and providing up-to-date contact information.

New Multi-Market Strategy Results in Improved Benchmarking for Major Medical Client

A look at how Fullintel’s centralized data curation and annotation, combined with data broken down by geographic region, provides a crystal-clear view of a global client’s regional performance – allowing its executive team to make adjustments quickly and invest in areas providing the most value.

Guiding a Global Pharmaceutical Company and Drug Brand Through an Acute Safety Crisis

Learn how Fullintel’s crisis management team helped a global pharmaceutical brand dealing with a wave of bad publicity track key themes and topics in real-time, while providing invaluable runway for the PR team to plan and craft its response.

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How Retailers Became Ad Platforms

• Sebastian Gabel,
• Duncan Simester,
• Artem Timoshenko

It’s a major growth opportunity — if companies can navigate the strategic challenges.

Major retailers are today, most notably Amazon, are creating and operating their own advertising platforms — and they’re making millions doing it. McKinsey estimates that by 2026, retail media will add $1.3 trillion to enterprise values in the U.S. alone, with profit margins between 50% and 70%. In this article, the authors introduce readers to the main kinds of retail media, discuss three strategic challenges that they present, and provide guidance for effectively managing those challenges.

A rapidly growing number of major retailers are today creating and operating their own advertising platforms — a phenomenon widely referred to as retail media.  Nobody has had more success in the space than Amazon, which in 2023 earned $46.9 billion from advertising, comprised primarily of sponsored ads on its site. This figure exceeds the annual global revenue of Coca-Cola and makes Amazon the third-largest advertising platform in the United States, behind only Google and Facebook.

• SG Sebastian Gabel is an assistant professor of marketing at Erasmus University. His research focuses on developing deep learning for targeting applications in retailing. Prior to his academic career, Sebastian co-founded a retail-media services company that was sold to the Schwarz global retail group.
• DS Duncan Simester is the NTU Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on marketing strategy, go-to-market strategies, and the use of artificial intelligence and experiments to improve business decisions. He regularly consults with companies on these topics.
• AT Artem Timoshenko is an assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern University. His research focuses on applications of AI to marketing analytics and customer insights.

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Global audiences suspicious of AI-powered newsrooms, report finds

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Activist investor Starboard Value is seeking operational and governance changes at Autodesk after losing a bid to appoint its nominees to the design software firm's board ahead of its annual meeting next month.

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The 2024 Amazon & Commerce Media Marketing Guide

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The world of retail media has greatly expanded in size, scalability, and importance in your marketing mix since Amazon launched their retail media network (RMN) in 2012, with retail media spend expected to grow to ~$45B in the US this year. In addition to changes driven by Amazon’s own growth and enhanced advertising capabilities, dozens of other retailers (and growing) have also launched RMNs of their own, including Walmart, Target, Kroger, and others we explore in this guide.

With so many retail media advertising options—each fueled by their own robust first-party insights, which are only increasing in importance as cookies crumble and signals go dark—how are brands to know where their dollars will be best spent? We aim to break that all down in our guide, providing actionable insights and top considerations to make as you launch or expand your retail media marketing efforts.

In this guide, we will cover:

• The ‘3 Lanes’ of Retail Media in 2024 – starting with Amazon & Walmart
• Areas We’re Watching for Growth
• How to Drive Traffic to Amazon Stores in 2024
• 2024 Amazon & Retail Media Predictions from the Experts

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HHS Publishes First Round of Inflation Reduction Act Case Studies on Health Sector Climate Investments

The HHS Office of Climate Change and Health Equity highlights safety net health care providers using Inflation Reduction Act funds and tax credits to decarbonize their communities and protect patients

The HHS Office of Climate Change and Health Equity (OCCHE) published two case studies today highlighting how Boston Medical Center and OhioHealth, a pair of nonprofit safety net health care providers, are using the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to reduce carbon emissions. The case studies are meant to offer health organizations in similar situations a roadmap to use the IRA to serve their core mission, reduce climate-related health impacts and advance health equity.

One case study explains Boston Medical Center’s creation of a pilot program providing solar energy credits to patients. The other highlights OhioHealth’s decision to use IRA tax incentives to fund electric vehicle charging stations that offer free charging to residents in a rural area.

The case studies are part of OCCHE’s Catalytic Program on Utilizing the IRA, an ongoing effort to connect safety net health care providers to the billions of dollars the IRA makes available for energy efficiency, sustainability, and environmental justice. IRA funding opportunities help providers make investments that allow them to stay open before, during, and after emergencies and reduce their own pollution levels.

The case studies explore Boston Medical Center’s Clean Power Prescription and OhioHealth’s charging station infrastructure to help providers consider how they might successfully plan a project leveraging IRA funding to support their community. Both providers also share key lessons learned from their processes and advice for pitching a similar project to organizational leadership.

In addition to the new case studies, the Catalytic Program features more than two dozen hours of rewatchable, free-to-access webinars with experts from across the federal government and health sector, as well as a Quickfinder tool summarizing key IRA programs and policies.

“Boston Medical Center and OhioHealth are showing their peers the power of the Inflation Reduction Act to save hospitals money and reduce environmental health burdens at the same time,” said ADM Rachel L. Levine, MD, Assistant Secretary for Health. “The law offers unprecedented opportunities for health care providers and other nonprofits to make long-term investments that reduce their climate impact and protect public health. OCCHE’s work to educate safety net health care providers is vital to meeting our overall climate goals, and I look forward to seeing many more success stories in the months and years ahead.”

“The IRA is the most significant climate legislation in our country’s history, but it didn’t come with a roadmap telling the health sector where to plug in,” said John M. Balbus, MD, MPH, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate Change and Health Equity. “The health sector offers crucial support for frontline communities and also contributes about 8.5 percent of US carbon emissions, which is why it needs to reduce its own impacts as much as possible. The Catalytic Program is crucial to promoting health equity and a green energy economy, and I hope more health care providers take advantage of these opportunities.”

Many providers, including Boston Medical Center and OhioHealth, presented on their plans to use the IRA as part of the Catalytic Program’s webinar series over the summer. All previous sessions are recorded and available online. OCCHE will roll out new case studies over the course of this year.

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Hhs releases new data showing over 10 million people with medicare received a free vaccine because of the president’s inflation reduction act; releases draft guidance for the second cycle of medicare drug price negotiation program, biden-harris administration furthers medicare drug price negotiations, releases new data on how the president’s historic law lowers health care costs for women, hhs announces savings for 41 prescription drugs thanks to inflation rebates from the biden-harris administration’s lower cost prescription drug law, media inquiries.

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Research/Study Research/Study

Inside Project 2025's attack on reproductive rights: Mifepristone and alternative abortion pills

Special Programs Abortion Rights & Reproductive Health

Written by Sophie Lawton , Jacina Hollins-Borges & Jack Wheatley

Published 06/24/24 1:30 PM EDT

At least 31 partner organizations of the Project 2025 initiative have published written content, supported legal efforts, or had organizational leadership make comments against the use of safe and effective abortion pills, specifically mifepristone, according to a Media Matters review. 

Project 2025 is organized by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, and has laid out a radical plan for governance during the next Republican administration. The initiative's wide-ranging policy proposals, including extreme anti-abortion policies, are laid out in its “ Mandate for Leadership .” 

The policy book includes a chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services written by Roger Severino, husband of anti-abortion figure Carrie Severino. The chapter lays out policies against the use and distribution of abortion pills, advising the next Republican administration to heavily restrict access to mifepristone and so-called “mail-order abortions” through various means. 

Later in the policy book, America First Legal’s Gene Hamilton recommends that the Department of Justice should take steps to enforce the Comstock Act as a way to limit the distribution of abortion pills. In these passages, Project 2025 lays out a plan for the next Republican administration to criminalize the shipment of abortion pills and cut off huge swaths of Americans from accessing this lifeline of reproductive healthcare. 

Anti-choice organizations have been waging a legal battle against mifepristone for years, culminating in the ongoing Supreme Court case, U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , in which anti-choice groups challenge the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in 2000 and attempt to reinstate stricter rules around prescribing the drug that were in place prior to 2016. 

Project 2025 partner the Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF) is behind the anti-choice “Alliance” along with Project 2025 partner, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG). A number of other Project 2025 partner organizations have signed letters, filed amicus briefs, or otherwise supported these efforts. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case in March, and reportedly appeared skeptical of the plaintiffs’ right to sue, which would suggest the justices could rule in a way that allows mifepristone to remain broadly available. 

Organizations affiliated with Project 2025 use misinformation and scare tactics to push for restrictions, if not outright bans, of abortion pills despite evidence that they are safe and effective , even after regulations on prescribing the medication were eased in 2021. Some of the organizations argue that expanded access to abortion pills will result in the use of the drug by abusive partners or sex traffickers. Mother Jones recently  debunked the claim that telehealth abortion facilitates intimate partner violence. There has also been pushback against the idea that access to abortion pills negatively impacts victims of trafficking.

At least seven of the organizations partnered with Project 2025 have also promoted and helped advance legislation to force doctors to offer bogus “abortion reversal” treatment. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states , “Medication abortion ‘reversal’ is not supported by science. 

For the full report on Project 2025's attack on reproductive rights, click here .

Select a Partner Organization

The heritage foundation, 1792 exchange, alliance defending freedom , american association of pro-life obstetricians and gynecologists, aclj action, the american conservative, american family association, america first legal, american principles project, americans united for life, amac action, california family council, center for family and human rights, center for renewing america, concerned women for america, discovery institute, eagle forum, ethics and public policy center, family policy alliance, family research council, first liberty institute, the frederick douglass foundation, the heartland institute, dr. james dobson family institute, media research center, the national center for public policy research and project 21 black leadership network, students for life of america, susan b. anthony pro-life america, texas public policy foundation, turning point usa, young america’s foundation.

• In an article about the Supreme Court case on the FDA’s mifepristone regulations, senior legal fellow Thomas Jipping claims abortion pills are “dangerous drugs.” Jipping opened the piece saying that “abortion poisons everything it touches,” and goes on to argue that the FDA violated the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law considered “dead” by some in Congress who support its repeal. [The Heritage Foundation, 1/17/24 ; The Hill, 4/2/24 ]
• In a post on X, The Heritage Foundation wrote, “Think the abortion pill is safe? Think again.”  [Twitter/X, 12/13/23 ]
• The Heritage Foundation hosted a panel on abortion pills moderated by Perry that included Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), ADF senior counsel Erik Baptist, and CEO of AAPLOG Christina Francis. Francis claimed that mifepristone users visit the emergency room more often than those who get surgical abortions, even claiming up to 35% of chemical abortions result in an ER visit. These claims are the same as those from a retracted 2021 study. Francis repeated this claim later in the panel stating abortion drugs have “high complication rates.” [YouTube, 11/13/23 ,  11/13/23 ; Salon, 3/20/24 ]
• In a piece celebrating the U.S. District Court ruling against both the initial approval of the drug and the FDA’s relaxation of mifepristone regulations, Perry called Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion a “recognition of the dangers of mifepristone to both mother and child.” [The Heritage Foundation, 8/13/23 ]
• In a 2023 post on X, Heritage stated “FACT: The abortion pill poses serious health risks to women. The FDA should never have authorized it.” [Twitter/X, 3/20/23 ]
• In another article by Perry on the Heritage site, she claimed states can use “police power to restrict or prohibit abortion—including particular methods of abortion, such as by pill.” [The Heritage Foundation, 2/22/23 ]
• Perry wrote in a 2023 article that states should be working to ban abortion drugs, despite the FDA calling them “safe and effective.” She also claimed the Supreme Court overturning Roe means “states can close off chemical abortions altogether.” [The Heritage Foundation, 1/11/23 ]
• In an article on the Heritage site about the Biden administration allowing pharmacies to distribute mifepristone, visiting fellow Melanie Israel wrote that “abortion pills aren’t safe.” [The Heritage Foundation, 1/6/23 ]
• In 2022, The Heritage Foundation published a coalition letter to members of Congress in an effort to “legislate abortion policy at the federal level.” The letter called on the federal government to “limit the interstate flow of dangerous abortion drugs” and falsely claimed abortion pills put “women’s health and safety at risk.” The letter was also signed by other Project 2025 partner organizations including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Concerned Women for America. [The Heritage Foundation, 12/4/22 ]
• Right-wing nonprofit 1792 Exchange wrote in its corporate bias rating report on CVS Health that the company is “high risk” because it continued to dispense mifepristone at some pharmacies in spite of a related wrongful termination lawsuit from a former employee. 1792 Exchange also criticized CVS Health because it supposedly “pushes for the use of abortion-inducing drugs across the country.” [1792 Exchange, accessed 4/16/24 ]
• Along with other anti-abortion medical groups and doctors, Alliance Defending Freedom is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the FDA to limit access to mifepristone. [The Guardian, 5/17/23 ]
• ADF has defended plaintiffs in at least 22 cases in 10 states and the District of Columbia which challenged the Obama-era requirement for employers to provide insurance that covers mifepristone and other reproductive care. [ADF, accessed  4/18/24 ]
• ADF intervened to defend a nurse practitioner named Chelsea Mynyk who offered abortion pill reversal in Colorado in spite of a state law barring the protocol, arguing that “by banning Chelsea from providing this care, Colorado is violating her religious freedom.” [ADF, 4/12/24 ]
• In a piece that criticized retail pharmacies dispensing mifepristone, ADF senior counsel Erin Morrow Hawley wrote that looser restrictions on the medication “all but ensure the abortion drug will be unsafe for many women, ubiquitous, and routinely mailed into states where it is unlawful.” She added that CVS and Walgreens have removed “important safeguards on abortion drugs.” [ADF, 3/26/24 ]
• ADF CEO Kristen Waggoner said that the data on mifepristone “suggests that it endangers women.” [Politico, 3/25/24 ,  11/18/22 ]
• In an article titled “The FDA’s Unforgivable Deceptions on Chemical-Abortion Drugs,” Hawley wrote that “no one should be okay with the FDA leaving pregnant women to take these high-risk drugs all alone.” She then urged the Supreme Court to “put the health and well-being of pregnant women first by reinstating necessary safeguards for abortion drugs.” [ADF, 3/15/24 ]
• In a piece titled “What the FDA Hasn’t Told You About Mifepristone,” ADF senior counsel Erik Baptist claimed that “the FDA has ignored” that abortion pills “can cause significant and serious complications.” [ADF, 3/14/23 ]
• The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists is a plaintiff in the Alliance Defending Freedom’s lawsuit against the FDA to suspend the use of mifepristone. [Washington State Standard, 2/6/24 ]
• AAPLOG runs a program called “Abortion Pill Reversal” that invites “pro-life medical professionals” to “provide urgent care to women who regret starting medication abortions.” The idea of reversing an abortion pill’s effect with progesterone is not supported by science. A 2012 study on the protocol had just six participants and no control group, and was not supervised or reviewed. A later 2020 study was ended early “due to safety concerns among the participants.” In its statement on abortion pill reversal, the organization included statistics on serious complications from abortion medication and referred to reversal as “another reproductive choice for women facing the abortion decision.” It repeatedly emphasizes that abortions are reversed with a “natural hormone.” [AAPLOG, accessed  4/17/24 ,  2019 ; ACOG, accessed 4/19/24 ]
• In response to efforts to ban abortion “reversal” treatments in Colorado, AAPLOG released a statement which said: “Efforts by abortion proponents to outlaw progesterone therapy after mifepristone consumption are not based on science or good medical ethics.” [AAPLOG, 9/27/23 ; Reuters, 10/23/23 ]
• AAPLOG often attacks mifepristone as a way for “abusers and traffickers” to easily coerce patients into abortion. In a response to the Fifth Circuit of Appeals ruling to reinstate restrictions on mifepristone, AAPLOG wrote that the previous “deregulations have placed women and girls at greater risk of life-threatening complications, as well as coerced abortion by abusers and traffickers.” [APPLOG, 8/16/23 ]
• In a “Myth vs. Fact” piece on “maternal medical care,” AAPLOG wrote that “the dangerous push in recent years to dispense abortion pills through the mail or without a doctor’s visit presents a grave threat to women’s health.” [AAPLOG, 8/29/22 ]
• Now-CEO Christina Francis warned in 2021 of “mounting evidence of significant adverse events and maternal deaths” from mifepristone in a piece originally published by Deseret News. [AAPLOG, 5/18/21 ; Salt Lake Tribune, 11/18/23 ]
• Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, AAPLOG argued through letters, press releases, and articles that mifepristone is dangerous. [AAPLOG, 1/25/10 ]
• ACLJ’s Jay and Jordan Sekulow called mifepristone “deadly abortion pills” while describing the organization’s position in U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. [ACLJ, 6/22/23 ]
• In a piece explaining why the organization filed an amicus brief in that case, ACLJ senior counsel Walter M. Weber wrote that “mailing abortion pills is an act of racketeering that violates the federal RICO statute.” The ACLJ’s brief asked the court “to uphold an injunction against federal approval of abortion pills and against federal loosening of restrictions on abortion pills.” [ACLJ, 5/12/23 ; U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , Brief of Amicus Curiae, 5/09/23 ]
• The American Conservative celebrated U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , saying that banning access to mifepristone would be “a major blow to abortion activists’ cause” and would create precedent to change “an untouchable federal agency.” Contributing editor Carmel Richardson wrote that the anti-abortion movement “has been all but apologizing for” overturning Roe v. Wade “at the ballot box ever since,” but the possibility of a mifepristone ban is a “positive step forward.” [The American Conservative, 5/19/23 ]
• After the Supreme Court said that mifepristone should stay broadly available as the case is litigated, Richardson called on Congress to ban abortion, “including a ban on drugs prescribed for the purpose of inducing the death of a pre-born child.” [The American Conservative, 4/28/23 ]
• Richardson has also claimed that mifepristone is dangerous for patients, writing that “the lives of unborn babies, and those of several of their mothers” are at stake in the mifepristone case. [The American Conservative, 4/14/23 ]
• American Family Association’s news outlet, American Family News, published an article on the Louisiana law categorizing mifepristone as a controlled dangerous substance that called the drug “Fetus-killing abortion pills” and failed to include that the law will likely inhibit access to the drug and ensure harsher penalties for people who obtain it without a prescription. The piece misleadingly implies the new law would mainly be used to punish people for “misusing” the drugs by coercing a pregnant person to take them or slipping it unknowingly to a pregnant person. [American Family News, 5/28/24 ; CNN, 5/24/24 ]
• Jordan Chamblee, a writer for American Family Association’s publication The Stand, claimed that the Biden administration paving the way for retail pharmacies to dispense abortion pills is “prioritizing the interests of the abortion industry over women’s health and safety.” He claimed that “chemical abortions are dangerous,” as they “can result in serious complications such as sepsis, hemorrhaging, and even death.” Chamblee also promoted The Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN), which offers abortion pill reversal. [American Family Association, 4/10/23 ]
• After the FDA allowed mifepristone to be dispensed by mail, AFA Executive Vice President Ed Vitagliano said that this promoted “an agenda of wanton destruction eliminating tens of thousands of people who would become innovators and creators.” [American Family Association, 12/20/21 ]
• An AFA article criticized abortion clinics for not advertising the existence of abortion reversal, and claimed that they “fail to inform their patients about what to expect after they take the pill and leave the clinic.” [American Family Association, 7/15/19 ]
• Project 2025 contributor and vice president of America First Legal Gene Hamilton, who wrote the section of Mandate for Leadership on the Department of Justice, pushed in that section to enforce the Comstock Act, which could be used to restrict abortion medication nationwide. [Rolling Stone, 12/22/23 ; Teen Vogue, 2/7/24 ]
• The American Principles Project backed the bill of Reps. Diana Harshbarger (R-TN) and Kevin Hern (R-OK) to tighten restrictions on mifepristone, with the APP's President Terry Schilling arguing that easier access to abortion pills means dispensing “dangerous pills online” and “empowering abusers by making it even easier for them to get their hands on abortion drugs.” [Website of Rep. Diana Harshbarger, 1/18/23 ]
• On Twitter, APP shared an article promoting abortion pill reversal: “#Abortion Pill Reversal: When ‘Pro-Choicers’ Don’t Support a Woman’s Choice.” [Twitter/X, 9/14/17 ]
• During the Obama administration, APP celebrated the fight against what it calls “the abortion pill mandate,” the Department of Health and Human Services requirement for employers to provide insurance that covers abortion pills. [Twitter/X, 3/6/13 ,  7/10/12 ]
• Americans United for Life federal policy director Jesse Southerland told Politico that fighting against “chemical abortion” is a “priority” for the organization. [Politico, 3/27/24 ]
• AUL drafted a model law for anti-abortion lawmakers to restrict or ban telehealth prescriptions for abortion pills. [Politico, 3/27/24 ; Stateline, 1/30/23 ]
• In February, AUL filed two amicus briefs in support of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in its case against the FDA. [Americans United for Life, 2/29/24 ]
• AUL listed the court battle to re-restrict mifepristone as one of its “top ten developments in the Life arena of 2023.” [Americans United for Life, 12/20/23 ]
• Chief legal officer and general counsel of AUL Steven H. Aden said that loosening regulations on mifepristone “has been a healthcare disaster for women and has normalized the wholesale destruction of human life.” [Americans United for Life, 12/13/23 ]
• AUL filed multiple amicus briefs to the Fifth Circuit asking the court to uphold the U.S. District Court’s suspension of mifepristone’s approval. Aden, the counsel of record on the brief, explained that abortion pills are “dangerous drugs,” and suspending them “is in the interest of patient welfare.” AUL has made similar arguments in several pieces on its amicus briefs regarding this case. [Americans United for Life, 5/16/23 ,  4/18/23 ,  4/12/23 ]
• Carolyn McDonnell, litigation counsel at AUL, accused the FDA of “promoting its radical abortion agenda at the expense of patient health and safety” by relaxing mifepristone restrictions. [Americans United for Life, 2/13/23 ]
• AUL submitted testimony in support of Wyoming’s attempt to ban abortion pills partially because it was “consistent with the American legal tradition on abortion.” In its related explainer on mifepristone, AUL emphasized possible complications resulting from consumption of the drug. [Americans United for Life, 2/9/23 ; The Associated Press, 6/22/23 ]
• AUL wrote that receiving mifepristone through the mail is the “new back-alley,” as patients are receiving pills “from a stranger on the internet.” The piece emphasized that “women have died taking chemical abortion pills.” [Americans United for Life, 12/17/21 ]
• In 2021, AUL celebrated South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s executive order to ban abortion pills from being prescribed via telemedicine, calling it a measure “to protect South Dakota women from the threat of chemical abortion drugs.” [Americans United for Life, 9/7/21 ]
• In the same piece, the organization attributed relaxed restrictions on mifepristone to “corporate greed.” Similarly, in 2016, AUL said that “abortion industry profits” were the motivator behind the updated guidelines. [Americans United for Life, 9/7/21 ; 11/1/16 ]
• After the FDA loosened restrictions on mifepristone in 2021, AUL accused the agency of “playing politics with women’s health.” In another piece on the issue, it said the FDA was “abandoning women to suffer through the physical and psychological impact of chemical abortion without medical supervision or support.” [Americans United for Life, 4/13/21 ,  1/12/21 ]
• In 2017, AUL’s vice president of legal affairs, Denise Burke, testified in favor of a Colorado law that would require abortion providers to tell patients about abortion reversal, which it calls “informed consent.” According to Burke, because they are not told about so-called abortion reversal, “many women are physically and psychologically harmed by the abortion process.” [Americans United for Life, 2/9/17 ]
• AUL called on state lawmakers to repeal what it called a “discriminatory rule” and an “unconstitutional abuse of power” from the Washington State Board of Pharmacists that required pharmacists to keep abortion pills stocked. The organization joined an amicus brief in support of pharmacists against “drugs misleadingly called ‘emergency contraceptives,’ specifically Plan B and ella.” [Americans United for Life, 6/28/16 ]
• AUL has been involved in multiple cases related to state laws seeking to restrict mifepristone, with AUL's president referring to looser restrictions as “patient abandonment.” In a press release celebrating an Arkansas law restricting mifepristone, AUL wrote that “the abortion industry consistently puts profits over people.” [Americans United for Life, 3/23/15 ,  10/4/13 ]
• The organization filed amicus briefs in support of embattled North Dakota and Oklahoma bills that restricted access to mifepristone. [Americans United for Life, 10/4/13 ,  8/21/13 ,  10/9/12 ]
• In a 2023 article on the Association for Mature American Citizens website, author Ben Solis repeated false claims made by Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy that “40 percent of abortions are chemical abortions that are likely to end with complications.”  More than 60% of all abortions are performed with the abortion pill and around 2% of all abortions have complications. [AMAC, 4/8/23 ; Guttmacher Institute, 3/19/24 ; Pew Research Center, 3/25/24 ] 
• AMAC hosted an interview with Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, to talk about how chemical abortions are supposedly “dangerous.” In the interview, AMAC CEO Rebecca Weber claimed the expansion of abortion pill access is really pro-abortion activists “taking advantage of frightened young women.” Mancini argued that access to mifepristone is “dangerous in a lot of different ways” claiming the drug is “actually much harder on women's health than surgical abortion.” [YouTube, 11/9/22 ]
• In a story on its site, the California Family Council (CFC) wrote about the recent Supreme Court case regarding mifepristone, saying that “true reproductive freedom includes access to comprehensive information about fertility, pregnancy, and the support available for women experiencing a crisis pregnancy.” CFC Vice President Greg Burt remarked, “This case is not merely about regulatory oversight; it’s about reaffirming the foundational values that respect life and prioritize genuine healthcare that serves both mothers and their children.” [California Family Council, 3/29/24 ] 
• On its Instagram account, the group declared, “The abortion pill is not a form of contraception; rather, it is an exceedingly hazardous drug, particularly when used without medical supervision.” The post added, “The abortion pill leads the death of an unborn baby and potential dangers to the mother.” [Instagram, 12/13/23 ]
• The group fearmongered that “Mifepristone and misoprostol put women at risk for infection, injury, loss of fertility, depression, and other life-threatening complications.” It concludes that “women deserve to know about their options and have access to life-saving medication,” referring to abortion pill reversal. [California Family Council, 9/25/23 ]
• In at least two other publications on its website, the group pushed misleading information about the safety of the abortion pill, calling it “dangerous,” and “highly controversial.” [California Family Council, 11/29/22 ,  2/7/22 ] 
• In a 2023 article on the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) website, director of research Rebecca Oas wrote that “period pills” or medication used to “induce menstrual bleeding or early pregnancy loss” are used for “the intentional destruction of an unborn life.” [Center for Family and Human Rights, 2/10/23 ; PeriodPills.org, accessed 5/15/24 ]
• In an article complaining about expanding access to abortion pills during the COVID-19 pandemic, Oas called use of mifepristone a “dangerous procedure.” [Center for Family and Human Rights, 5/8/20 ]
• C-FAM published multiple articles condemning the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders for supporting the distribution of abortion pills. In one piece C-FAM argues “mail-order abortion pills” put patients at risk of getting an abortion “without [their] consent by abusive partners, parents, or others, such as human traffickers.” [Center for Family and Human Rights, 6/28/19 ; 2/28/20 ]
• In an article for Pacific Standard on the WHO’s endorsement of mifepristone, Oas is quoted repeating her argument that expanding access to abortion pills will result in the use of the drugs by “abusive partners” for nonconsensual abortions. [Pacific Standard, 7/15/19 ]
• In a policy issue primer published on Center for Renewing America’s site, the organization supported the Fifth Circuit's ruling against the FDA’s interpretation of the Comstock Act, and claimed the “weaponized agency is willing to violate the law to advance its abortion agenda.” CRA also suggested Congress attempt to “prohibit chemical abortions at the federal level.” [Center for Renewing America, 5/2/23 ]
• In a piece on its website, Concerned Women for America noted its support for stricter abortion pill regulations alongside other anti-abortion groups, against the FDA in the ongoing Supreme Court case. The piece describes the agency’s actions as “reckless disregard for women’s safety.” [Concerned Women for America, 3/25/24 ] 
• CWA wrote a piece directly focused on the case heading to the Supreme Court, calling mifepristone “dangerous” and the FDA’s approval of it “reckless.” CWA CEO and President Penny Nance said, “Let’s be clear; there is nothing safe or effective about allowing people to perform their own DIY abortion.” [Concerned Women for America, 12/13/23 ]
• On CWA’s podcast, Nance said supporters of the medication “want there to be abortion, as I’ve said before many times, any time, any reason, in any number, all paid for by you.” She continued, “They don’t want a girl to even leave her dorm room to have it. They’re happy for her to struggle for several days to actually miscarry this baby alone and to be traumatized and maybe, you know, have consequences that render her sterile later or maybe even death.” Later on, she added, “This is not nearly over. We have a lot of work to do. We are winning.” [Concerned Women for America, 4/19/23 ,  4/19/23 ] 
• CWA’s Deanna Drogan wrote for the website, “We can see that increasing the ability to perform DIY abortions results in many health risks for mothers (known and unknown) and an increasing number of babies innocently murdered from abortion.” [Concerned Women for America, 4/23/21 ]
• In an opinion piece for Newsmax, Nance wrote that there is “nothing safe about DIY abortion.” She added, concerning the Texas case, “Americans who are concerned for the safety and well-being of young women should be grateful that this judge had the courage to make this decision.” [Newsmax, 5/15/23 ]
• Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism fellow Arina Grossu Agnew appeared on The Lars Larson Show to discuss “How many babies do abortion pills like Mifepristone kill?” In the interview, Grossu claimed the FDA “looked at flawed studies, irrelevant studies” when approving the drug “and there are a lot of complications that can happen.” She went on to call mifepristone “a very dangerous abortion drug.” [KXL, Lars Larson Show , 5/1/23 ]
• Senior fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence Michael Egnor wrote in an article for The Stream that abortion drugs “cause significant physiological and behavioral harm.” Egnor’s article is based on a study by Dr. Stephen Sammut, whose research also pushes the unsupported science of “abortion-pill reversal.” [The Stream, 7/10/19 ; Franciscain, Accessed 5/15/24 ]
• President of Eagle Forum Kristen A. Ullman published an article in March arguing against use of the abortion pill. In the article, Ullman called mifepristone “dangerous” and repeated unverified claims that the abortion pill has a notably high number of documented negative effects. [Eagle Forum, 3/24/24 ]
• Eagle Forum joined a coalition of anti-abortion groups who called on Congress to send cease-and-desist letters to pharmacies mailing abortion pills. [Eagle Forum, 3/12/24 ]
• In an article fearmongering about mifepristone titled “Danger Lurks in Local Drug Stores,” Ullman called the drug a “dangerous pill that not only kills an unborn child but causes serious side effects and even death to countless women.” [Eagle Forum, 3/4/24 ]
• Ethics and Public Policy Center fellows submitted two amicus briefs for the Supreme Court case on mifepristone supporting Alliance of Hippocratic Medicine in its case against the abortion drug. The briefs claimed the FDA and Biden administration are in “violation of federal and state law” by expanding access to mifepristone. [EPPC, 3/1/24 ]
• President of EPPC Ryan T. Anderson, previously a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, published an article with National Review titled “Making Abortion Illegal and Unthinkable,” in which he argued, “We’ll need laws to prevent cross-state transportation of abortion pills.” [National Review, 6/11/22 ; The Heritage Foundation, accessed 4/19/24 ]
• Focus on the Family's lobbying arm, Family Policy Alliance, submitted an amicus brief for the Supreme Court case on mifepristone in which it argued the FDA’s current mifepristone guidance is “dangerous for women” and claimed, “Medical Emergencies Caused by Mifepristone are Increasing” and cites the declaration of Dr. Christina Francis, the AAPLOG CEO. [U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , Brief of Amicus Curiae, 2/28/24 ]
• After Biden supported access to mifepristone in January, FPA called on its audience to push back against the dispensing of abortion pills in pharmacies, seemingly citing a now-retracted study that led FPA to falsely claim that “women who use abortion pills are 50 percent more likely to visit an ER than with a surgical abortion.” [Family Policy Alliance, 1/24/23 ; National Library of Medicine, 11/9/21 ]
• FPA also called on pharmacies to refuse to distribute abortion pills. The FPA director of government affairs claimed in the statement, “Abortion drugs are a health and safety threat to women and their children.” [Family Policy Alliance, 1/6/23 ]
• In an episode of Family Research Council’s Washington Watch with Tony Perkins , Senior Vice President Jody Hice interviewed Louisiana state Sen. Thomas Pressly about his legislation to classify mifepristone as a dangerous substance in Louisiana. Hice called the passing of the law “good news” and called it a “model” for other states. Hice went on to congratulate Pressly and claimed the “abortion industry” is “fearmongering” over the legislation. [Family Research Council, Washington Watch with Tony Perkins , 5/24/24 ]
• FRC’s affiliated blog The Washington Stand published a piece similarly praising the Louisiana law, which claims abortion pills “are not safe.” [The Washington Stand, 5/28/24 ]
• FRC filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case over mifepristone claiming that the FDA was “reckless” in approving the drug and that use of mifepristone creates “long-lasting psychological and spiritual distress.” [Family Research Council, 3/5/24 ]
• In 2022 FRC published an issue analysis on medication abortion, which it called “The Next Abortion Battleground.” The analysis summarized FRC’s issues with abortion pills, leveling claims that there are “profound dangers such poorly supervised medical care poses to women’s health” and that “the abortion industry” is pushing abortion pills for “political, ideological, and financial goals.” [Family Research Council, 2/22 ]
• Also in its analysis on abortion pills, FRC argued that easing regulations of mifepristone would “complicate the detection of sexual abuse and sex trafficking.” In a section on “Sexual Abuse and Sex Trafficking” FRC claimed, “Abusers, along with those in the sexual exploitation industry ... would love an environment in which they can compel women to repeatedly have abortions.” The section also claimed that Planned Parenthood is aiding sex traffickers by providing abortions. [Family Research Council, 2/22 ]
• The analysis also laid out policy suggestions, such as “complete removal of the chemical abortion regimen from the market,” forcing manufacturers of the drug to “report all adverse events” from mifepristone, and prohibiting the prescription of abortion pills over telehealth. FRC claims its final goal is “to see the sale and the approval of drugs meant to intentionally kill life in the womb eliminated from our society.” [Family Research Council, 2/22 ]
• In a 2021 report, legislative assistant Chantel Hoyt claimed expansion of access to mifepristone means “the abortion industry seems willing to gamble with women's lives and health” in order to expand access to abortion. [Family Research Council, 7/19/21 ; FRC, accessed 5/15/24 ]
• Starting in 2013 First Liberty Institute represented Joe Holland in a case against the federal government challenging the so-called  “Abortion Pill Mandate.” First Liberty argued he should not have to provide insurance coverage for abortion pills because of his faith. [First Liberty Institute, accessed, 4/16/24 ]
• ForAmerica president David Bozell joined a Washington Times podcast to attack the use of mifepristone, calling it “unfathomable.” He went on to claim, “The left will not stop until there is abortion on demand funded by the United States taxpayer up to and perhaps even including the moment of birth." [The Washington Times, 3/29/24 ]
• Liberty Counsel, an anti-abortion legal organization, filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Frederick Douglass Foundation to the Supreme Court asking it to uphold the Fifth Circuit’s decision to reinstate restrictions on mifepristone. [World News Group, 3/12/24 ]
• Ashley Bateman, a policy writer for the Heartland Institute, wrote a piece for The Federalist regarding anti-abortion activists protesting at the Supreme Court about the FDA case, describing mifepristone as a “high-risk drug.” [The Federalist, 3/27/24 ]
• Heartland Daily News, a publication affiliated with the Institute, has been attacking abortion medication for years. Recently Bateman published an article where she labeled mifepristone a “high-risk drug” and a different piece by Harry Painter attempted to raise concerns about the safety of telemedicine prescriptions for mifepristone while conflating the use of the medication with “back-alley abortions.” [The Heartland Daily News, 4/15/24 ,  3/27/24 ,  12/6/22 ,  9/18/21 ]
• The James Dobson Family Institute in a piece titled “Baby-Killing Pills” claimed the Biden Administration wants to distribute mifepristone “like candy,” and said it continues to “use every tool it has to keep the number of abortions in America as high as possible.” Later on, the author describes the medication as a “killer abortion pill.” [Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, 4/14/23 ]
• The institute was one of many organizations to sign an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on the FDA battle over the drug. [U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , Brief of Amicus Curiae, 2/29/2024 ]
• A commentary piece for the organization described mifepristone described as “death by mail,” and attacked pro-choice organizations, writing, “See you in court, NARAL! JDFI proudly signed onto an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and we look forward to making the case for life before the U.S. Supreme Court.” [Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, 8/30/23 ] 
• A 2021 piece by Dobson himself endorsed a bill that aimed to strip universities of their federal funding if they distribute reproductive medication to students. [Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, 8/3/21 ]
• Media Research Center’s affiliated news outlet, NewsBusters, published an article claiming NBC “fear mongers” about Louisiana’s new law classifying mifepristone and misoprostol as dangerous substances. The piece said an NBC correspondent stating the new law will create confusion around the safety of the drugs is “fear-mongering” and tries to rebut the idea by claiming the law “isn’t banning the drugs.” [NewsBusters, 5/22/24 ]
• The right-wing “media watchdog” organization has been releasing content railing against abortion and mifepristone for years. In many pieces, the titles refer to the drugs as “harmful,” dangerous”, and “deadly.” [NewsBusters, 3/20/24 ,  4/24/23 ,  4/22/23 ,  3/24/23 ,  11/18/22 ]
• The organization has also cherry-picked stories to bolster its fearmongering about the pill. In one example, it describes a “chemical abortion nightmare” where a woman on YouTube described witnessing the heartbeat of the fetus and the health issues she faced afterward. The Media Research Center used the story as an opportunity to attack Planned Parenthood for what it describes as “its prioritization of killing babies over keeping women out of harm's way.” [Media Research Center, 1/5/24 ]
• In a commentary piece for its parent organization, the National Center for Public Policy Research, Project 21 member Patrina Mosley described mifepristone as a “lethal regime,” and compared the fight to end abortion with the fight to end slavery. She went on to claim the medication “has led to untold physical and psychological harm” to patients. Mosley also went on to claim drugs like mifepristone are an easy way for pharmaceutical organizations to make quick profits, and allow for “sexual abusers and partners who are unwilling fathers” to coerce people into taking the drug. [The National Center for Public Policy Research, 4/20/23 ] 
• Both groups also signed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking it to reverse the approval of the drug. In a concurring statement, Project 21 chairman Horace Cooper said, “Project 21 supports ending the FDA’s attempt to radically expand the use of mifepristone into some sort of ‘morning after’ abortion pill.” He went on to call the medicine “dangerous” and claimed that pro-life doctors should be exempt from prescribing the medication as it would make them “an accessory to an evil act.” [The National Center for Public Policy Research, 3/26/24 ]
• Students for Life of America has been a leading force behind a push to prohibit reproductive medication — the organization’s website even has a “chemical abortion” landing page, which fearmongers about the safety of mifepristone. [Students for Life of America, accessed 5/15/24 ; Politico, 4/19/23 ] 
• Students for Life Action, the political arm of the organization, released a statement praising Louisiana’s new law categorizing mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled dangerous substances. The statement called the drugs “dangerous” and repeated claims that chemical abortions result in significantly more complications and death than surgical ones. [Students for Life Action, 5/23/24 ]
• Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins posted on X praising the Louisiana law and calling abortion pills “dangerous” and, in another post, claimed Vice President Kamala Harris was “protecting sexual predators” by speaking out against the law.  [Twitter/X, 5/22/24 , 5/23/24 ]
• I n a press call reported on by NPR, Hawkins described the process as tantamount to “death by mail delivered to your doorstep.” [NPR, 12/16/21 ]
• The group has spread debunked claims about medication abortion having a harmful impact on wildlife and the environment, and filed a petition with the FDA to require providers of the medication to be responsible for the disposal of fetal tissue similar to medical waste. Hawkins was quoted in an organization blog saying that “tainted blood, tissue, and human remains have been flushed away, without any hard look at what happens next, or what happens to us and the environment.” [Media Matters, 3/12/24 ; USA Today, 12/12/22 ; Students for Life for America, 11/23/22 ] 
• A different blog post focused on the supposed dangers of using abortion medicine and the “abortion pill myths perpetuated by the abortion industry.” It argued that it is a “myth” that the majority of patients who take the medication don’t experience “serious complications,” and claimed that it is illegal and unsafe for the medication to be sent through the mail. Additionally, the group said abortion medicine is “uniquely traumatic” to patients. [Students for Life for America, 4/26/23 ] 
• Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America released a statement congratulating Louisiana for the The Catherine and Josephine Herring Act categorizing abortion drugs as controlled substances. The statement, by Southern Regional Director Caitlin Connors, claims “pro-abortion Democrats have enabled abusers to coerce and poison mothers with dangerous abortion drugs,” seemingly referencing the FDA easing restrictions on the drugs. The organization repeated these claims in a blog posted to Substack. [Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, 5/21/24 ; Substack, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, 5/23/24 ]
• In March of 2024, SBA published a piece on its site titled “Five big lies about the Supreme Court mail-order abortion drug case” in which it focuses on potential harmful side effects of the drug and the effects on patients. [Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, 3/25/24 ]
• Notably, two publications cited as key studies in the Texas lawsuit against the drug, produced by the research arm of SBA, the Charlotte Lozier Institute, were retracted from a medical journal for issues regarding flaws and conflict of interest. [The Associated Press, 2/7/24 ]
• The SBA was also one of several organizations to sign an amicus brief in support of reinstating the rule requiring an in-person visit to be prescribed mifepristone. [ U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , Brief of Amicus Curiae, 2/24 ]
• According to Vox, SBA has been reaching out to right-wing governors in numerous states to discuss restrictions on the shipment of abortion medication. The organization’s state director of affairs told Vox that she expects states to be “creative” in finding ways to enforce restrictions against reproductive rights. [Vox, 1/9/23 ]
• SBA has released numerous press releases following the litigation of abortion medication, in many cases describing the pills and their distribution as “dangerous” and “reckless.” [The Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, 4/13/23 ,  2/8/23 ,  1/25/23 ,  1/19/23 , 1/3/23 ,  11/18/22 ]
• In January 2022, SBA, alongside a coalition of other organizations, released a letter to the Senate arguing against the nomination of Dr. Robert Califf for commissioner of the FDA due to his support of abortion pills. The letter claimed Califf approved “unsafe mail-order abortion.” The letter was also signed by other Project 2025 partners such as Concerned Women for America, Americans United for Life, Family Policy Alliance, and The Ethics and Public Policy Center. [Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, 1/12/22 ,  2/14/22 ]
• In 2023, The Texas Public Policy Foundation filed an amicus brief in  U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, defending other Project 2025 partners' effort to limit access to mifepristone.  [ U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , Brief of Amicus Curiae, 2/29/24 ]
• Turning Point USA has published several opinion pieces from contributors attacking mifepristone. In one piece titled “NY Passes Law Requiring Public Universities to Provide the Abortion Pill to Students,” Turning Point USA contributor Morgan Zegers highlighted mail-ordered pills, writing, “Recently, some states have approved the sale of these abortion drugs via online order and mail delivery, a move that has been called reckless as it endangers not just the pre-born child, but also the life of the mother.” [Turning Point USA, 5/3/23 ]
• Turning Point USA contributor Erin Elmore took aim at mifepristone again in a piece asking, “Did the FDA Classify Pregnancy as an Illness to Approve ‘Abortion Pill?’” Elmore said the drug is “has several side effects, doesn’t always work as intended, is linked to the deaths of nearly 30 women, and has caused life-threatening illnesses in hundreds of women.” [Turning Point USA, 4/20/23 ]
• In another blog, Morgonn McMichael wrote about FDA regulations allowing for mifepristone to be sold at retail pharmacies, heavily accentuating the negative side effects of the medication. She writes, “Despite the innumerable side effects, some tolerable, others life-threatening, Plan C, a medical abortion pill provider, still claims that abortion is ‘safer than continuing a pregnancy and having a baby.’” She goes on to add, “Making the abortion pill more accessible is not the win for women that the left is branding it as.” [Turning Point USA, 1/4/23 ]
• Young America’s Foundation published a blog on its website in July 2023 attacking a seminar at Texas A&M University which included information about mifepristone, titled “Pregnant Woman Teaches Texas A&M Students How to Perform Illegal Abortions.” YAF wrote, “Universities should never allow students or guest speakers to use official resources to promote illegal activity. Hopefully, the investigation will result in consequences for the leftist student organization as well as the administrators who approved the all-school invitation.” [Young America’s Foundation, 7/19/23 ]
• In April 2023, YAF filed an amicus brief alongside several other right-wing organizations, which argued that the “FDA abused its own regulation in approving mifepristone in 2000.”  [ U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , Brief of Amicus Curiae, 4/18/23 ]