Scott Alexander shows the conflicting agendas of journalists and the medical professionals they depend on for their background information in writing about medical issues:
I heard from a journalist yesterday after writing yesterday’s post on WebMD. They’ve been trying to write a coronavirus article worthy of Zvi or any of the other illegibly smart people writing on the pandemic. Apparently the bottleneck is sources.
In most journalistic settings, you can’t just write “here’s what I think”. You have to write “here’s what my source, a recognized expert, said when I interviewed them”. And the experts are pretty sparing with their interviews for contrarian stories.
The way my correspondent described it: sources don’t usually get to approve the way they’re quoted in an article, or to see it before it gets published. So they’re really cagey about saying anything that might get misinterpreted. Maybe their real opinion is that X is a hard question, there are good points on both sides, but overall they think it probably isn’t true. But if a reporter wants to write “X Is Dumb And All Epidemiologists Are Idiots For Believing It”, they can slice and dice your interview until your cautiously-skeptical-of-X statement sounds like you’re backing them up. So experts end up paranoid about saying potentially-controversial-sounding things to reporters. And since reporters can’t write without sources, it’s hard for them to write anything controversial about epidemiology.
The incentives for the journalist and their editor is to find a sensational angle to get as many people to read the piece as possible (“clickbait” works). The incentives for the “expert sources” are to avoid saying anything substantive that might provide such an angle (“don’t become a headline”). It’s no wonder that journalists with no specialized training in the experts’ area are unable to produce fully informative articles for public consumption.
