Plain English with Derek Thompson - The News Media’s Dangerous Addiction to ‘Fake Facts’

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

What do most people not understand about the news media? I would say two things. First: The most important bias in news media is not left or right. It’s a bias toward negativity and catastrophe. Second: That while it would be convenient to blame the news media exclusively for this bad-news bias, the truth is that the audience is just about equally to blame. The news has never had better tools for understanding exactly what gets people to click on stories. That means what people see in the news is more responsive than ever to aggregate audience behavior. If you hate the news, what you are hating is in part a collective reflection in the mirror. If you put these two facts together, you get something like this: The most important bias in the news media is the bias that news makers and news audiences share toward negativity and catastrophe. Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast Good on Paper, joins to discuss a prominent fake fact in the news — and the psychological and media forces that promote fake facts and catastrophic negativity in the press. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jerusalem Demsas Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: "The Maternal-Mortality Crisis That Didn’t Happen" by Jerusalem Demsas https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/no-more-women-arent-dying-in-childbirth/678486/ The 2001 paper "Bad Is Stronger Than Good" https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf Derek on the complex science of masks and mask mandates https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/03/covid-lab-leak-mask-mandates-science-media-information/673263/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If somebody asked me to give a speech about what most people don't understand about the media, I would tell them I want to talk about two things. The first is that the most important bias in news media is not left or right. It's a bias toward negativity. It's a bias toward catastrophe. And number two, that while it would be convenient to blame the news media exclusively for this bad news bias, the truth is that the audience is just about equally to blame. The news has never had better tools or more sophisticated technology for understanding exactly what gets people to click on certain stories, certain headlines.

And that means that today what people see in the news is more responsive than ever to aggregate audience behavior. If you hate the news, what you are hating is in part a collective reflection in the mirror. And if you put these two facts together, I think you get something like this. The most important bias in the news media is the bias that newsmakers and news audiences share toward negativity and catastrophe. I think this cashes out in all sorts of weird ways that explain the world we live in. It cashes out in intense institutional mistrust and bias against incumbents. Pew Research surveys show that trust in government has never been lower in the U.S., and we are about to have a repeat election between two candidates that are broadly,

even historically unpopular. It's not just presidential candidates that Americans say they mistrust these days. It's big business, it's small business, it's finance, it's Hollywood, police and college and scientists, it would be an extreme example of me letting folks off the hook if I said that this entire sect-by-sector decline in trust was merely the result of media bias. That's not true. But I think I'm on firmer ground claiming that if we want to understand what's going on here, media bias, media behavior is an ingredient in the explanatory stew.

Another reason to care about this negativity bias co-produced by journalists and audiences is that it leads even respectable writers, podcasters, and activists to emphasize bad news when that bad news might not be strictly descriptive of reality. For example, when crime in America surged around 2021, it made front-page news across the country. Everybody knew about it. But when crime in America, violence and homicides declined in the last 12 months, it was much less frequently reported. When the supply chain crisis of 2021 caught fire, it was front page news everywhere.

Later in the year, in 2022, when people started getting their couches and chairs delivered on time, it was not front page news everywhere. Sometimes this thumb on the scale for catastrophe leads us to hold on to very wrong ideas. In a moment's Google, for example, you can probably pull up any number of articles claiming that millennials are poorer than their parents, that the promise of generational progress in America stopped in the 21st century. But according to the Federal Reserve, millennials and Gen Z, young Americans are on average wealthier than their parents and grandparents at the same age when you adjust for inflation. The point is not, of course, to say that there aren't many, many people struggling to buy a house or afford rent right now. The point is that there is statistical evidence of good news. But good news is systemically suppressed in today's media environment.

And if you want to understand the world, you should want to understand why. Today's guest is Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer at the Atlantic and the hope that of the new podcast, Good on Paper. Her new essay scrutinizes a fact that has been reported in just about every major media outlet I can think of, that America has the rich world's highest rate of maternal mortality and it's rising. This fact, this incredibly tragic and damning fact, is everywhere. It's easy to find any number of experts to repeat it. But it's not a real statistic. It's a fake fact. And the story of this fake fact tells us a lot about the biases of the news we consume and the biases of its consumers.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Jerusalem Demzes, welcome in the show. Thanks for having me. Glad to be back. I want to talk about the phenomenon of fake facts. facts that shape the discourse that in the passage of time and with increasing research, we realize aren't actually true. And I want to start with reporting that you did on something that I absolutely considered a fact for many, many years, which is the idea that maternal mortality in the United

States is much higher than in similarly rich countries and that it had meaningfully increased in the last few decades. I found this fact that. Actoid everywhere that I looked. A Commonwealth Fund, which is a healthcare-focused think tank that I've relied on for many articles, claimed many times that maternal mortality in the U.S. had risen. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal said maternal mortality was the highest in the event since 1965. Politicians talk about this a lot. Stacey Abrams made it a core blanket for policy platform.

U.S. Representative Emmanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri, recently hosted a roundtable of experts to discuss the ostensible rise. in maternal mortality, before we investigate the actual factfulness of this fact, was this a factoid that you were vaguely aware of as well? Oh, yeah. I feel like, I mean, as someone particularly like a young woman who's kind of entering when I'm starting thinking about having kids in my own and my friends are all starting to think about that too, I mean, this has just been a background fact, I feel like, of my life for the last

decade is like knowing that here in the U.S., maternal mortality is rising. It's rising across age groups. It's rising in comparison to our peer countries, that this kind of general sense of doom around it is sort of like we're getting worse. We don't really know why. We know the U.S. health care system has tons of problems. But it really has been just a background fact of my entire thinking about the problem. So is it true?

Is it true that maternal mortality in the U.S. is rising and that it has for decades been significantly higher than, as you said, our pure countries? So it is true that there is a line on a graph that goes up. when you look at from 1999 to like 2019, you will see that recorded deaths associated with maternal mortality have risen. And they've doubled, actually. There was a big study that came out about data from 1999 to 2019 that showed that maternal mortality had more than doubled over that 20 years. That's true. That did happen. But what's happening recently is that there are a bunch of researchers. And I think the one that I really want to call out here is having really put together a bunch of this is Salone Dutani at Our World and Data.

And what she really puts together is this picture that shows that a lot of the rise is due to a change in measurement and change in how we measure maternal mortality. Not that there are actually more women dying in 2019 versus 1999 from maternal mortality deaths, but that we're just measuring it differently. As specifically as you can, what is happening here? How is the different way that states are counting death certificates, creating what might be a false impression that maternal mortality is going up? So measuring maternal mortality is hard, right? Because this is just not, I mean, there's some clear-cut cases, right? If a woman dies in childbirth, it can be pretty clear to say, like, this is why someone died. But if you're thinking about someone who may have a ton of underlying health issues,

maybe they have HIV, maybe they have high blood pressure, maybe they have diabetes. There are a bunch of different things that can happen that pregnancy can exacerbate. And thus, doctors are often making kind of difficult calls around what is and isn't maternal mortality, what is related to the death, what is exacerbated. And at the end of the day, you have to pick one. There's not a world in which you can have multiple causes of death. And so what ends up happening is that there's a big push because there's a recognition that around the world, including in the United States, there's actually an underreporting

going on, that a bunch of women who clearly had been pregnant within the last year, you know, their health had deteriorated as a result. And so we needed to figure out a way to count those women's deaths as associated with their pregnancy. And so there was a change made to institute what's called a pregnancy checkbox. And this checkbox would be on death certificates in the United States and would be required for a, you know, the doctor, medical examiner, filling out that document to check that box if the woman had been pregnant. And these were just automatically coded as maternal deaths in many cases. And so what's really interesting what happens is it doesn't happen all at once, right? Because if you'd see like one massive jump in a year,

right, I think everyone would realize what had happened. But states sort of implemented this in a staggered fashion. So like four states here, a couple states here over the course of like two decades. You see a bunch of states implementing this change to how they're, um, uh, death certificates look. And so you see this really alarming but steady rise in maternal mortality in the United States as a result. And, you know, there are researchers that have looked into this and they're finding that the pregnancy checkboxes are definitely overcounting maternal mortality deaths. So there was a quality assurance study done of four states, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, and Louisiana. And they find that 21 percent of women who had been counted in

pregnant were not pregnant when they died or had not been pregnant in the year previously. 7% could not even be confirmed. And so nearly 30% potentially of women who had been counted as having been pregnant within a year of their death, you know, maybe not were not at all. And so that's not even, you know, entering into the kind of murky phase of like whether or not someone died related to pregnancy. That's just on the simple question of like, were you or were you not pregnant? And so this kind of measurement error, which really was born out of, like, you know, a correct

concern that we were undercutting maternal mortality pushed us in over-counting in many cases the maternal situation. So, and what's really important to note is that there are many countries outside of the United States who did not institute this pregnancy checkbox who have not been trying to address this undercounting in the way that we have. And so their numbers in many cases remain steady, remained low, probably because they're still undercounting the number of women who are dying in as a result of pregnancy. I really like the subtle thing that you said about this phenomenon, which is that the checkbox

change came from a reasonable fear that we used to be undercounting maternal mortality deaths, but that reasonable fear has now created a false impression that maternal mortality is increasing. And some of this is about time, if I understand you correctly, like if a mother tragically dies when her child is 10 or 11 months old, that wasn't considered maternal mortality under our old guidelines, but under new checkbox guidelines, it is counted as a maternal mortality. So that mechanically increases the amount of maternal mortality that we're seeing in the U.S. But it also seems like the checkbox broadens the definition of maternal mortality, such that if a woman dies when her child is six or seven months old from a disease, we might have previously considered that

a death from that specific disease, but now the checkbox folds that in to maternal mortality, and that also mechanically increases that basic number that we're looking at on a line on a graph and saying, oh, number goes up. Is that a correct summation of what's going on here? Definitely. I think that, like, especially what you're getting at here is that there's two different sorts of measurement error you can talk about. One is, like, just literally measurement error of things we know are maternal mortality that are either not being counted because we're not counting maternal mortality broadly enough or because we're missing

that women were pregnant. And the second kind of measurement error is sort of like, subject. Because it's not exactly clear why someone dies of something in certain cases. And so that is sort of a subjective decision that's being made by experts. And there could be arguments to either direction. Like I think there's really good arguments made that a lot of the mental health toll that some women face in the aftermath of pregnancy and of giving birth can lead to suicide. It can lead to worsening health conditions in other areas of their life.

And not including that as maternal mortality death can be misleading when we're thinking about the sum total of that woman's life, but there are tradeoffs there, right? Because it's not just, oh, like, why wouldn't you want to count this maternal mortality? That means not counting it as a death as a cause of depression. That means not counting it as a death as cause of HIV. So the question is not really clear about like which one, you know, which cause we should be necessarily, you know, waiting towards or which cause of death is like the most obvious one. And I think of that I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for researchers and for doctors that are trying to make these subjective determinations and trying to create really clear.

buckets where there's not really a lot of clarity. Salone Dutani writes this piece at our world in data. There's a new manual published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Christopher Zahn is the interim CEO of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynaecologist, and he wrote a lengthy statement in response to these articles coming out that are questioning the conventional wisdom about maternal mortality. Can you summarize what this lengthy statement said? Because this is really, I think, where this topic goes from an important consideration about health care statistics to a much broader conversation about news media and activism and the search for truth in the world.

And a much bigger conversation than what I have with you in the second half of this show. So summarize what Christopher Zahn said in response to the, correctives. Yeah, I mean, this statement when I came across it was really the moment where I became convinced that, like, I was not being harsh by publishing this article. And so Christopher Zahn, as he said, he's the CEO of the American College of obstetricians and a gynecologists. And he publishes the statement in response to that big study, finding that recent changes in maternal mortality surveillance have led to an overestimation of maternal mortality. And he basically says that it's an irresponsible study.

It's a, quote, irresponsible and minimizes the many lives lost and the families that have been deeply affected. And he says that, quote, it would be an unfortunate setback to see all the hard work of health care professionals, policymakers, patient advocates, and other stakeholders be undermined. And when you first hear this, like, this sounds like kind of like, oh, I mean, my reaction to this, I mean, honestly, a lot of people's reaction to my article was to say, this is, like, why would you try to undermine the cause of trying to make sure that women, women's health issues are taken seriously? Why would you push back on a narrative that is saying we need to pay more attention to the harm that's being caused, that is affecting women in these, you know, really vulnerable moments of their lives? And I think that there is like a, I'm sure we'll talk about this more later. We'll get into like that sort of thinking.

but think about the role that this person is supposed to play. Zahn is someone who is the head of an organization that is supposed to be expert opinion. They're supposed to be telling us the truth about our health, about science, about research. It's supposed to be giving expert opinion in a way that I as a journalist, I can look at studies and I can think about what someone is telling me and see what sounds more reasonable. But I don't have the medical background to say, you know, in one way or another that I can fully understand this issue from a scientific perspective. And that's why we rely on experts, especially as journalists, but the public at large,

policymakers, everyone really, really relies on, you know, organizations like this, like the AMA or other groups, to tell us the truth and to tell us that without trying to hide facts that may or may not be positive from a certain, you know, narrative perspective. And so to me, when I read this statement, I was really, I had to read a couple times, and you can go, you know, my article at the Atlantic, you can go read the whole statement yourself. But I was waiting for some sort of like large methodological flawed for him to point out that he was going to say, this study is wrong because of X, because they didn't consider this control or they didn't do the proper, you know, statistical analysis. And instead it's just, no,

you shouldn't have published this because this might hurt this activist cause. And to me, that seems really, really dangerous to hear that from a group that's supposed to be telling us what is true. Because it means that we're not able to make those determinations for ourselves. I interpreted his message in the exact same way. He seemed to be saying that it's wrong to publish the truth if the truth can be interpreted in a way that hurts my cause. And that is just not where we want science to be. And it's certainly not where we want journalism to be. Like, maybe expand on the idea that, like, do you feel like he's sort of arguing for this idea

that when you're arguing for something that is quote unquote good, then the most catastrophic narrative deserves to win. It is moral for people who have decided that they have the right cause to be catastrophic in a way that sacrifices a little bit of the truth. Yeah. You know, I obviously can't speak for a reason personally, but this is just a, this is a frame of thinking that I think is become very common to me as someone who often tries to get expert opinion,

who reports in the area of space between research and advocacy. And it is a sort of growing framework that crisis is the way to get change. And so anything that pushes against a crisis narrative is necessarily a part of the problem. So whether someone is saying, I don't care about women, I don't think women's health needs to matter, versus whether you're saying, hey, I'm not sure if these stats are correct, both of those are seen as a part of the problem if your perspective is that you need to create maximal sense of doom, maximal sense of chaos in order for people to feel like they need to take this seriously. And I think the really strange part of this is it's obviously true that maternal

mortality is a massive problem in this country. It's a massive problem in a lot of places. Women's health in general is not taken seriously. There are so many true things that you can say that should lead people to action. There's a massive racial disparity. It's a It's ridiculous. And in such a wealthy country, people are dying because we don't have the ability for them to get access to basic preventative care during childbirth. I mean, even when we think about what's happened recently in the country with the change to abortion care, I mean, you see well-reported, well-established facts about how changes to whether abortion care is provided can lead to serious illness, serious harm or death. I mean, there's no reason to rely on shoddy data. And I think that's part of why I find this so concerning, because to me, if there is a true harm, if there's a true problem, that means that the facts will lead in your direction.

And so if you find facts that push against what you're saying, that's either a good thing. It means less women or dying, which is, I think, you know, obviously positive. Or it means you need to go in a different direction to find what's going on here. Because the real thing here that I'm worried about, right, is that when you find that there's increase in maternal mortality, what happens is that researchers and policymakers are searching for what happened to cause that increase, right? Like the goal then becomes, hey, what happened in the last 20 years to increase the number of women dying?

We need to find that and reverse it. Instead of putting people on the path to saying, hey, there hasn't been an increase. There's just this chronic issue in America where women are dying. And maybe it's lower than we thought before, but we also don't think that's unacceptable. We need to find the cause of that issue. And that actually leads you on two different fact-finding paths. So this isn't just, I think, a sort of like, you know, me sticking my nose. in the air and going, ha, ha, you got this fact drug. It's like a deep concern that if people

kind of turn their backs on like truth and fact finding as their fundamental goals towards getting changed made, then like you actually will lead yourself towards bad directions. Like there is not something that happened in the last 20 years that explains the maternal crisis in this country. You are going to go down a bad rabbit hole and you're going to spend money going down a bad rabbit hole if that's what you think is happening. I was so interested in this argument because it clicks into a lot of my hobby horses, including what I consider to be the most prevalent bias in news media, which is not a bias toward the left or the right

or the powerful or the disenfranchised. I think the most powerful bias in news media is a bias toward negativity. I think it reflects a very fundamental bias, not just among headline writers, you know, if it bleeds it leads. I think it reflects a fundamental bias among audiences. If it bleeds, I will click it.

As I was talking to one psychologist about this phenomenon, he pointed me toward this paper that was published in 2001 by Roy Baumeister, Vos, and Thinkanauer, called Bad is Stronger Than Good. I mean, talking about a very simply named paper. Bad is stronger than good. And quoting from the abstract right now, quote, the self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.

And the paper goes on to point out just how across a bunch of different areas and domains, bad stimuli, get our attention more than positive stimuli. I can imagine that if someone's listening who is a writer, a podcaster, a lobbyist, an activist, a middle manager making a PowerPoint, they're going to say, you know, a certain kind of catastrophizing is important in order to get people's attention. And if you're an activist or if you're an op-ed columnist, you very clearly understand the fact that catastrophizing issues is a really good way to get people to click on your thing. What are the downsides of catastrophizing issues other than just, you know, you might lose your credibility if, you know, the boy cries wolf too often? Yeah. I mean, I think I took this really seriously because part of me is obviously people are doing this for good reason. And I don't think these people, like, you know, groups that choose to try to focus on catastrophization. I don't think they're doing this out of, like, kind of malevolent goals at all. I think often they're really, really focused on trying to help a population they think is desperately in need.

And what could be a better cause than reducing maternal deaths? Yes. Obviously, this is one of the most unobjectable causes one can imagine. Totally. And so I think that there's a few things here. One is that I think that the harm is you actually, as trying to sing this a little bit earlier, but like you get push. off course towards actually helping that group if you get committed to one frame of crisis, right? Like the reason we, and by we, I mean the medical establishment, journalists, the public

became convinced of a problem in women's health is because there literally is a problem in women's health. Like, that's not made up. So that actually exists. And I think that in many ways, like, people act like, oh, like, you can't, well, you're taking away a narrative that was really valuable to us. There are many narratives you can point to to point out that there's harms to a men's health that I kind of went into earlier. But I think, secondly, I think the real harm, I think that on credibility, it is really, really an issue. And I think credibility harms is in many ways. One is that there's audience fatigue, right? Like, there are people who get worried about stuff. I think many of the same people who are worried about maternal health are also people who are worried about mental

health crises. They're worried about the crisis of, you know, STDs. Maybe you're worried about monkeypox, or you're worried about the bird flu, or you're, you know, there's a lot of different things that people have, you know, multiple preferences and concerns about, and being maximally catastrophic in each direction means there's actually no prioritization happening. If you're just saying these are all crises, they are all equally dangerous and terrible, then you are actually saying that there's no action that anyone should take because there's a finite amount of time, there's a finite amount of attention, especially when we're talking about in our political system. So there has to be some way of ordering these concerns. And there have to be some way of providing information that

allows our political system, our public, to make those determinations. Because there's not an instant amount of money to go into research for any kind of goal or need. And so to me, I think it's undercutting your ability as a, I think, a fact-finding community in order to, like, help make those determinations in a way that helps the most people. And so I think that's a big problem with credibility. But I think, secondly, like, there are bad actors out there who want to discredit different kinds of causes. I don't think there's, like, a pro-maternal mortality death caucus.

But I do think there are a bunch of people who are not in favor of money being used in certain directions, whether it's folks who, you know, are more pro-life than I am and who are concerned about, you know, who want to keep that rolled back or who want to roll back contraceptive rights. And if they find out that you are actually working on shoddy data and they're the ones to public it, I think that actually reduces your credibility among the public. But it also reduces your credibility very clearly amongst lawmakers who themselves do not have the staff capacity in order. to evaluate every single scientific claim brought to them and rely on people to be actual arbiters of the truth or at least be reasonably not relying to them if you're quote on the same side. And so if they figure out that you're doing that, then they're going to distrust you in the future. And so that reduces your ability to actually make change in the long term, especially because, I don't know, like these facts will come out.

There are people who are just researchers, and that's literally what happened here. Like it wasn't a negative group. It was just researchers who were trying to figure out why this kind of increase in maternal more deaths was happening and realized this was an artifact to the change in measurement. But I think just finally, there is, there is like, and this is going to sound maybe a little bit lofty and heady or whatever, but like in general, I do think that when people turn against the idea of finding out the truth in a liberal democracy, you're kind of turning against the entire like enterprise of democracy because you're basically saying that I don't trust a system

to eventually get us to better outcomes. If people are given true facts, they're allowed to vote on those facts, their elected officials are able to make decisions, and then they go back to the ballot box. And that's not a perfect system, but it is literally the best system we have. And I don't trust a system in which basically various interest groups try to conceal truth and try to basically lobby and legislate from behind the scenes while they have a different set of research and data than the rest of us do. I think that breeds a lot of distrust. I think there's a reason why a lot of scientific communities have seen a declining rates of trust with the public. And so I do think that has a met a problem as well. COVID just seems like an incredibly rich example of how poorly aimed

catastrophic thinking can lead to real policy harms in the short term and real credibility loss in a long term. The two examples that just immediately come to mind are, number one, this idea that the virus spread through services. This was not a costless example of catastrophic thinking. You had people soaping their hands. I was, I was, chloroxing every single. The number of people who went to the hospital with chlorox poisoning surged during COVID. And it wasn't just that. It was that you had places like the New York City subway spending tens of millions of dollars just blasting their poles with, you know, antimicrobial spray. There was this absolute impression that the virus spread through surfaces and all sorts of

science communicators were spreading it, that you know, you're going to get sick if you went on public transit, you can get sick if you, you know, walked into a grocery store and, you know, didn't soap the chicken after you bought it. No, this was what I called hygiene theater. This was basically an aerosolized virus that was very, very rarely transmitted via fomites, that is via touching things. It was mostly aerosolized. And this catastrophic thinking, false catastrophic thinking about the virus, You know, it got people, I think, to become incredibly neurotic in the wrong direction. It got local governments to spend millions of dollars on the wrong policies. It got people to, you know, stop walking on the beach and, you know, wearing masks outside

when they absolutely did not have to. That was all short term. But in the long term, what it did, I think, is dramatically erode long-term credibility in scientific communicators and progressive government. Because if you're being told not to do all of these things and then you see, see Governor Newsom eating at French Laundry, and then you get this impression that you've been locked inside and lonely while at the same time the truth about how the virus actually spreads is being held from you. Well, then when there's complicated things to explain later on in the

health crisis, you're not going to trust experts. You know, I feel like the emerging reality of the vaccines was really complicated to explain in real time. I'm I don't think I did the perfect job, but I definitely think that the public lost faith when, for example, it was initially reported that the COVID vaccines blocked transmission, and then it became very clear from real-world evidence that the COVID vaccines were not very good at blocking infection, even though they were demonstrably effective at reducing mortality rates, especially for older Americans. It was a big, complicated picture.

It was hard to keep all those balls in the air at the same time, especially with the introduction of the variance. And I think that if you are used to, or if the way that you've started to think about scientific communicators is these are a bunch of catastrophizers who lied to me a year ago, so I'm never going to trust them again. Well, that just seems like a great example of your last point, that it's not just the short-term policy misdirections. It's the long-term loss of credibility that activists and scientists and communicators in the media

have when we put catastrophe and negativity bias on a pedestal over getting the facts right. Yeah, I mean, I think, and I think, I mean, obviously, I know you know this, but like there's obviously a distinction between like times where we have little information in science or scientists and doctors are trying to do the best they can with limited information and they make mistakes. And there are times when like they know better, but they don't trust the public to know as well as they do. And I think that masks were like a very clear example of this that did a lot of harm. Very early in the pandemic, the simple thing was they wanted to reserve masks for, you know, nurses, for doctors, for people who needed to be out there essential workers.

And instead of saying that, they said, oh, no, there's no evidence to show that masks will help you here. So don't wear masks. Don't buy masks. Don't buy that PPE. It's for, don't worry about that. And like, everyone knew that it was like kind of BS. But at the same time, it literally was when a lot of people were saying. And I think those kinds of decisions that are being made by public health communicators is what I find very concerning, just like in the specific case of maternal mortality, but also here, that they think that they can't trust the public with the truth. And I'm not here to say that the American public or any kind of public is perfect here or would have behaved well. I think it's probably true that if they said, hey, save this for nurses, a lot of people would have

still bought it up. But that did create problems in the long term. Like, even if on the short term, you were able to reserve some masks for some nurses or for some other medical professionals, that still created issues for you later on when it comes to what you said with this credibility problem. And I think that, like, it is, it is something that I think that a lot of people in public health are being much more reflective on in the aftermath of COVID. I see this a lot in my reporting when I'm talking to people, I think people really did get a bunch of backlash and pressure. And I think that in many ways, there was a desire to make it seem like the people who were pushing back on public health measurements were very fringe, selfish, unreasonable groups of

people. And at the time, I actually did not think that they were, you know, mainstream. I did not think of it as a mainstream opinion. I was living in, you know, Washington, D.C. I lived alone at the time. It was something where I was just like, oh, like, it was, you know, I was lucky. I worked in a remote job. So to me, it felt like, you know, this is just something that we're all doing. and like that's kind of the vibe. And, you know, I totally get there some people who are essential workers, but why are there people in militia, you know, gear showing up at state capitals? And there's actually a study that was done by Nicholas Papa George and a few other co-authors.

He's at Johns Hopkins University. He's a public health economist. And the study is about who protests and why. And they find that the people who were protesting in anti-lockdown measures were actually very representative of the public. These were, like, you know, there's actually a significant overlap with BLM protesters. 30% of protesters in summer 2020 attended both a BLM and an anti-lockdown protest. Parents were more likely to protest.

People who had jobs that they had to be in person for were more likely to protest. These are groups that had a ton of skin in the game. And interestingly, people who had, people who protested had a great degree of concern. They were going to catch and even die from getting. and COVID-19. And so these weren't people who were just underwriting the cost of the virus. These weren't people who didn't care about their, you know, well, being or didn't take seriously the fact that science may, well, not all of them. Like, you know, not all of them were completely just ignoring the facts on the ground here. And yet they were portrayed as being

this unreasonable, massive individuals who didn't believe the science, didn't believe doctors. And I really think that that also does a massive amount of harm because there were a bunch of people who were kind of sitting at home. And I mean, I talked this economist. recently. And he was just like, yeah, I mean, I was in Baltimore with my husband and my son. And I thought that, like, you know, I thought that I was maybe crazy because I was really mad at about the school closures. But I'm also, you know, he considered himself like, you know, a left-leading individual. And he felt kind of weird for having this belief and like this frustration. And then he realized through his own research that, like, there were very many people like him who believe the science, who were on the democratic side of a lot of issues and yet found themselves really upset by the way that the

establishment had treated their viewpoints and their ability to make decisions for themselves. I love the point that the reason to embrace care and nuance in communicating truths, and here I'm speaking on the part of the news media, is that we need to earn those credibility tokens when the truth is complicated, but really important. and therefore communicating it requires a lot of care and nuance. Like the mask discussion and the evolution of the mask discussion is such a good example, because if you start the clock in March 2020, the first narrative is that masks do nothing. Very quickly, the next narrative becomes, no, actually all masks work, and they're all essential,

and they should be mandated everywhere. And then later we say, no, wait, wait, maybe actually here's a, there's a difference between mask quality, and it matters very much how you wear the mask. And here's an expert meta-analysis that actually says that mask mandates don't do anything. And then later it turns out that, no, actually, good masks worn effectively are effective. Bad masks, of which there are many,

worn ineffectively, which is common, don't do anything. And therefore, mask mandates don't often work very well because they are exquisitely sensitive to both the quality of the mask and the way those masks are worn. That's an incredibly complicated thing to communicate, right? But it can be made relatively simple. Good masks worn effectively work. Bad masks

worn and effectively don't. But it requires enormous care and attention paid to an evolving truth that we're figuring out as we're doing all these randomized controlled trials and we're trying to figure out from the observational studies, what works, what doesn't. It's a really, really tough picture. And this is just the way that science sometimes evolves is that it takes a little bit of time for the truth being made clear. And if the public gets this impression that mainstream news and experts and scientific communicators are always going to bias toward a certain kind of catastrophe, they're going to tune out the nuance and care that is so important for the final communication of these ideas. I want to ask what advice you have for news consumers. I mean, very often, like the

way to end a podcast like this, I guess, is to give advice to journalists. But let's say there are a ton of different journalists, some of whom are very cautious and careful and some of whom aren't particularly interested in caution and care. But the people listening are certainly audience, are certainly members of the audience. Do you have advice for them in terms of how to fold in all of these truths, that negativity bias exists and catastrophizing bias exists, but also nuance exists too? And we need. need a certain amount of care to see the truth about the world. Yeah, I mean, I guess I can, the advice I would give is what I try to take myself when I'm reading news myself, which is,

I think there's like a real desire. And some people read my article and decided to, and many of them chose to view it as kind of like a, oh, like the left has a problem. Like the left has bad epistemics and that's the problem here. I think really the best way to view these issues is to really think about what people's incentives are when they're telling you something. Someone not a bad person. Like, I don't think of, like, you know, the, you know, the interim CEO of the American College of Statitions and Gyna College. I don't think it as a bad person who's doing a bad thing. I think it was an actor in a space who has incentives to tell me certain things and to care about certain things and to work towards certain things. And that's true of everyone, right,

whether there's someone writing a straight news story, whether there's someone who is, you know, a researcher at a specific lab, whether it's someone who's, and they're trying to get tenure, whether it's an individual who's, you know, talking about their own personal experiences. And I think that, like, there is a tendency to view the word bias as being inherently, you know, negative and sort of, like, embarrassing. But part of what I do a lot of my journalism and a lot of my work in public is just sort of, like, being very open and upfront about, yeah, this is kind of what I believe in how I think about the world. These are, like, these are, like, demographic facts about myself. Like, in the article I talked about how I'm someone who wants kids and has been frustrated by feeling like everyone's telling me that, like, I'm going to die if I have children.

Like, you know, like, I, and so, like, there are things that are in play when I'm telling you things and when I'm giving you things that I consider to be factual or to be data-backed opinions. And you should take those into account when you're reading anything. And I think that, like, particularly when it becomes something that there's a bunch of money behind, you should always expect some sort of corrective to happen at some point. And it may happen because we've learned more, which is great, fantastic. No one did anything harmful. Or it may happen because there are a bunch of interest. that were not interested in the truth. They were more interested in specific outcome, however you get there.

And so I think as a consumer, I spend a lot of time, especially when I come across an issue that seems kind of hot, where I'm just thinking like, okay, like, who is saying this? Like, who is this person? What are they trying to get out of this? And in a way that feels like less investigatory and less like, oh, who's paying you, which I think is usually the way this goes and more like, what is the interest that is pushing this idea? And so that's kind of like the only advice I would have. I would also say in general, people love to blame the media and that's fine.

Like, you know, we deserve it. Mayacolpa. But at the same time, like, exactly what you said earlier is important. Like, the media is often responding to incentives from readers. What kinds of things are you clicking on? What kinds of things are you demanding? And you're not bad for demanding those things. But I think it's important to recognize that we're all in an ecosystem and we all are playing a role here.

I love that. I like the idea that we should be more sensitive to. the incentives of the media that we're reading. I also think that we should be more reflective of and more honest about our own incentives and our own biases. I said, I wrote online the other day and this tweet did not get a particularly positive response,

but I think I agree with it. It'd be interesting if every once in a while people in criticizing the media replaced the word media with the word audience. So rather than say, oh, the media these days has such an anti-Biden bias, okay, what about replacing that with the audience these days has an anti-Biden bias? I mean, he is polling 18 points underwater. Rather than say the media has a negativity catastrophe bias, what if we said the audience

has a media and catastrophe bias? And that's right there in Baumeister. Bad is stronger than good. The point is not to let media off the hook, but rather to suggest, that we, the news media, are sensitive to and cannot help but be sensitive to the biases of and the behavior of the people whose attention we are desperately trying to get. And it's true of everyone. Everyone can be audience captured.

But I think being aware of that audience capture is important. And being aware of your own incentives and your own biases as a reader, I think is really, really important. Anyway, I love this piece, Jerusalem. I'm really glad that you came on this. Last bit, why don't you talk a little bit about this podcast? You got cooking at The Atlantic. Oh, yes.

So this week we have, well, I'm not sure when this is launching, but I have a podcast that just launched the first week of June, and it is called Good on Paper, and it's a policy show that sort of tries to investigate narratives like this, narratives where maybe there was some sort of fact at the beginning, but it's kind of spun out of control. And our first episode was about remote work and about the sort of broad narrative that exists. between, you know, people who say basically that just workers love remote work and bosses hate it and it's bad for workers and it's good for bosses and really complicating that. I know Derek is the king of talking about work and workism.

So you guys have heard about that a lot on this podcast. But, yeah, the goal of the show is to really be a policy show, to be a wonky show, to really investigate narratives that have gone past their skis and to bring narrative violations to the fore. So whether it's that maternal mortality crisis is not exactly as it seems, whether it's our narratives around immigration or around public health or around, you know, how we do the civil rights movement. All of these things are things that we're investigating. So I think that fans of this show will really like it.

You can get it wherever you're getting this podcast. So it's called Good on Paper. Good on Paper at the Atlantic, Jerusalem, Demosis. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Boraldi. Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode.

Minnesota week on Fridays. We'll see you next week.