‘It is exciting in a pandemic to hear that all the experts are wrong and that it has actually been made up than it is to hear, “No, the pandemic is exactly what we say it is, this number of people are dying and it is a drab, grim marathon which we will have to get through.” Science writer, Tom Chivers, on why some people are so eager to accept Covid conspiracy theories.
Tom is science editor for the digital news magazine UnHerd. His writing has featured in The Guardian, Telegraph, New Scientist and BuzzFeed. He covers an array of subjects, mostly science, but he also delves into politics, foreign affairs, sport, culture wars - pretty much anything that piques his interest. He's won two statistical excellence in journalism awards from the Royal Statistical Society, but he's not stopping there. He wants all journalists and consumers of news to share his appreciation for numbers and to learn how to use them.
In this episode of Research Comms Tom Chivers talks about the media during the pandemic, about the pre-requisites for journalism and the tension between attracting a readership and writing serious news stories and he discusses his book How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them)
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The below is a short excerpt. For the full interview download the podcast.
I'm curious to know how good a job you feel journalists have done in helping the public to understand this pandemic?
II think parts of the press, the BBC specifically, has been wonderful. It has stepped up to the plate on dispassionately presenting information in really accessible ways, and as a result I feel like everyone by this time last year was conversant in things like R values and infection fatality rates. There was a lot really good work done by other places as well. John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times, for instance, is a journalist who basically became a celebrity overnight by just presenting these really easy to understand charts showing growth and the course of the pandemic.
But there are also times - this is very much what we're talking about in the book - when you've got numbers in the news and it is very easy to present them out of context or to present a number that is technically accurate, but you can end up making that number look extremely misleading. And there has been a lot of that. But these sort of numbers are exciting and they are counterintuitive and the press, by its nature, is incentivised to tell you exciting things. And it is more exciting in a pandemic to hear ‘all the experts are wrong and actually this pandemic has been made up’ than it is to hear, ‘No, the pandemic is exactly what we say it is, this number of people are dying and it is a drab, grim marathon which we will have to get through’.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
Why do you think some journalists resort to sensationalism instead of reporting the science and facts in a more balanced way?
As a journalist you can be as worthy as you like and you can be constantly reporting on injustice and foreign affairs and poverty and starvation and all these massive global issues. But if no one reads it, then it's a total waste of time. So there is this sort of irresolvable, irreducible tension between the two. It sounds like I'm being dismissive when I say that in journalism the incentives are to get clicks or to sell papers. But it's not just an incentive from a financial point of view, it's an incentive if you want to do any good at all. You have to have people reading what you're doing, and that means more than just saying worthy things all the time. We kind of understand that journalists sometimes will select the most extreme or sensational kind of figures in order to get eyes on the page.
You’ve said that your book is primarily aimed at journalists. Why do you feel they need help understanding how to read numbers?
I genuinely think that journalists, on the whole, are really well-intentioned and they are people who think of themselves as doing a public service. Not a lot of people believe that. They think they're all scurrilous. And I think that is really unfair. Journalists, generally speaking, are out there to do good in the world. But I think that as a body, they're not very numerate.
The requisite skills are more to do with language skills, aren't they? And investigative skills; the ability to befriend or otherwise get hold of sources and get people to speak to you. All these skills are not necessarily the same as being able to put together numbers and find out whether they do what they expect them to do.
My hope is that this book could, if nothing else, just stop people from writing some bad or misleading stories. I think that would be really useful. For example, if you see that the number of people in poverty has gone up or something like that, it’s easy to think, ‘this is terrible’ and then write something like “Under this Government, the number of people in poverty has gone up and that is bad”. You could say, ‘Well, okay, but let's just quickly check before we run that story. Can we put that into context in some way? Has perhaps the number of people overall gone up? And has the ratio of people in poverty gone up with with the overall population size? Has it gone down? Is there more to the story?’ And when you do that, maybe the story goes away and then people don't write the bad or the wrong story.
What are some of the practical steps that the book gives about how to interpret numbers more effectively?
At the back of the book we've included a sort of style guide for journalists. For example, it encourages them to do things like give absolute rather than relative risk and put numbers in context. They should check that the study they are quoting is representative of the wider scientific literature, that sort of thing.
If a journalist goes through that basic checklist and says, ‘Well, I've done that now, I realise that this correlation that I thought looked exciting doesn't exist anymore. I probably shouldn't write the story,’ that is a good thing. We will have ended up putting out less bad news into the into the public sphere.
But then also, if someone says, ‘I'll check the context. Oh, I see the context is more complicated. I will now be able to write a more nuanced thing in which I can discuss more subtle aspects to this problem’. The problem may be very real, and it's the thing we're talking all the time about - there's a million very interesting stories to be told, but they're not as straightforward as the simple headline.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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