The Journalistic Harm of Superficial, Dumbed-Down Reporting
How should journalist report on the complexity of an issue? It appears journalist often either don't do the research necessary to dig into a rigorous in-depth understanding or they believe they must dumb down their understanding and writing to appeal to an elementary level reader. What should be a clear, concise explication of a challenging issue often is an over-simplified, folksy story-telling kind of writing. Let's look an example from the August 6 Washington Post. It is an opinion piece on choosing testing for Covid-19: " What type of covid-19 test should you use? It depends ." Largely, the reporter gives misleading facts as to the two testing choices and confuses the Covid-19 disease with having the SARS CoV-2 virus (its RNA present in the body). Detecting RNA fragments of the CoV-2 virus by the highly sensitive RT—PCR does not mean the person is going to get sick or that they are transmissible unless the viral load is high enough that they are sick and transmis...