Science Journalism à la Française
How French science journalists dealt with COVID, in their own words and language
Welcome, or bienvenue, back to TITLE-ABS-KEY(“science journalism“), a newsletter about science journalism research. It’s more than a day late, I know, and my apologies for that – the week got completely overtaken by COP28 and, um, the launch of my first podcast in Russian, so I couldn’t handle my usual workload. It also took me a little longer than usual to read today’s paper, for reasons that will become apparent shortly.
In the previous issue, I observed myself being computationally modeled and found it did not do much for my understanding of the profession.
This time, I am celebrating the modest end-of-year milestone of being able to read professional stuff confidently and to do light editing in French – and the science journalism paper I’ve picked for this issue is in French as well. We’ll see how it goes.
Today’s paper: Sebbah, B., Bousquet, F., et Cabanac, G. Le journalisme scientifique à l’épreuve de l’actualité « tout covid » et de la méthode scientifique. Les Cahiers du journalisme - Recherches, 2022, vol. 2, n°8-9, p. R119-R135. DOI: 10.31188/CaJsm.2(8-9).2022.R119
Why: First, I’m trying to use French not just for croissants and banking, but also for proper professional conversations. Second, as you can tell from the English abstract; the topic is 100% legit for this newsletter.
Abstract, in English: Two years after the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic in December 2019, what representations do science journalists express about their treatment of the pandemic? We analyze the way they define their practices and their professional identity in an "all Covid" context of the news, marking the dilation of their usual perimeter of editorial intervention. Our study thus questions the exercise of these journalistic practices in the face of an accelerated temporality of information processing and the increasing complexity of access to validated scientific sources and their possible reconfigurations. Based on five long interviews, this research traces how the science journalist has progressively occupied a central role in the processing of all information, while raising the question of the specificities of science coverage in relation to the "ways of doing" of mainstream journalism whose generalist identity is increasingly asserted.
I have to say that, even though the paper opens with a rather grim recollection of early 2020 and the onset of the pandemic, it was bizarrely refreshing and encouraging to read about the very same questions and concerns I had at the time – but in French and for French media. It wasn’t just me and my colleagues at the time, we were all instantly thrown to the forefront of a massive global emergency that was about to transform everyone’s lives purely on account of us being science journalists and viruses being science-y!
It took me a while to stop frantically trying to do justice to the pandemic as an ostensibly scientific story and consider the premise itself: is this about science as something separate, say, from politics? Thankfully I got to that thought in time to be able to hear the brightest of us say very similar things out loud and to start preaching this gospel.
Yes, viruses, vaccines, and medical statistics can make the bravest of us scream and run to smarter people – but science can offer very little when Donald Trump promotes bleach. His stunt is often framed as pseudoscience or anti-science or whatnot, but the problem is, there’s not and there will never be enough scientific evidence to convince his audiences not to listen to him. Because it is just not about science at all.
Anyway, back to the paper – another reason why I really enjoy reading stuff in French beyond menus and contracts is because, as it’s still relatively new to me, I am completely mesmerized by the occasional and effortless beauty of the writing. I am sure scholars writing in English also compare the pandemic to a photographic developer for the undercurrents and trends in media, but I’ve grown so used to it that I don’t even notice.
And just check out this pearl of a sentence –
C’est par l’intermédiaire de la plongée de ces journalistes scientifiques dans le bain de l’information brûlante que nous ferons apparaître les tensions existantes entre la science et son traitement rédactionnel.
“It is through these science journalists plunging into a bath of boiling information that we will reveal the existing tensions between science and its treatment in the newsrooms.” Plunging into a bath of boiling information is how I will exclusively call reporting from now on.
The paper goes on to describe all the trouble we’ve come to know and hate with writing about a huge and rapidly developing story where traditional structures such as academic publishing are struggling to adjust as much as journalists are. It points out that French journalists in Italy were quick to flag the scale of impending disruption in an op-ed addressed to Macron.
For the study, researchers talked to five French science journalists, of whom I strongly suspect I’ve actually met at least one. This probably counts as interference with my perception of the study as I will see their coded responses and know who’s behind the code, but oh well, can’t un-meet them anyway.
The authors augmented their qualitative data with analyses of publications in French media focusing mostly on how journalists dealt with preprints, aka also “studies“ but not peer-reviewed ones (quotation marks for using the same word in stories for things that are markedly different.)
The interviews describe a reality I remember too well: public officials reassuring everyone that the thing that was just about to take over our lives was not a big deal, and journalists and newsrooms stumbling into the eventual pandemic poorly prepared for what was to come. Those reassurances exacerbated the natural uncertainty around the emergence of a disease; the baseline answer then and there is typically “we don’t know“, so it is easy to tilt into optimism. In fact, I was a guest at a TV news program very early on in 2020, and I genuinely struggled to stick to the neutral and factual “we need more information.“
In terms of breaking news, there was no single breaking, or tipping point, even with the WHO declaration — and in fact the interviewees could not identify one even in retrospect. Personally I remember going to a fairly big data journalism event in Moscow in early March 2020, mildly frustrated by unexpected and odd cancellations and wondering whether I should stop going to the gym (Macron spoke to the French public about “being at war“ on March 12.). And then all of a sudden we are in a national lockdown — even though I had learned much more about the disease by then, that still felt like a wild escalation.
The scarier things were getting, the harder it was to just stick to “we don’t know,“ and French journalists describe this dilemma of covering the story or reassuring the audiences. In hindsight, the consequences of these choices — for instance, not sounding the alarm as loud as they could have early on — do look to them an awful lot like dereliction of duty (blood on our hands comes up too often), and that is heartbreaking. I am often asked about the failure of science communication writ large to steer humanity off the rather disastrous course we took into the pandemic; this is what I think of when trying to respond.
The paper goes on to talk about the role and place of science journalists in French media, prefacing this section with a wonderfully French quote from one of the interviewees that reads, “Science journalists finally sitting next to the editor-in-chief and not next to the toilets, this has never happened before.“ That is, there were very few science journalists in the newsrooms, and apparently they too were the weirdos doing their weird weirdo stuff — just as we were! That is weirdly encouraging. (Le Figaro and Le Monde were the exceptions, so I am proud to be a subscriber to the latter.)
This led, for example, to platforming people like Didier Raoult with his hydroxychloroquine nonsense, sometimes expressly against the judgement of the science and health news desk. I’d maybe add that this was never easy to deal with, and there is a tiny grain of legitimate debate there about journalistic independence and who gets to enforce what in a newsroom of peers. But let me just say that once upon a time it was really hard for us as the science desk to get our regional correspondent colleagues to stop filing stories about the yeti. (Don’t ask…)
Another notable point raised by the interviewees echoes what Ed Yong wrote in his Atlantic piece, already cited above: boom goes the pandemic, and suddenly science touches everything, and everything touches science. Even if your guidance isn’t followed, you keep getting questions that range from politics to food and culture; you are now a de facto generalist except without the editorial power, experience, or support. And your tools are not really fit for this purpose; again, there is no published and peer reviewed evidence on the efficacy or lack thereof of bleach against COVID-19.
Finally, all of this is happening in a 24-hour news cycle, online, where your stories (rushed from incomplete information under the pressure for clicks and views) stay live waaaaaayyy beyond their expiration date and get recycled and repurposed and weaponized. Oof.
The next part discusses the emergent online ecosystem of COVID experts, where there was just as little clarity on who could be trusted at first, and the irresistible pull of preprints offering at least some information in an emergency full of unknowns. And the paper notes something that was very true for Russia and Russian journalism as well: there was a “national prism“, or perhaps lens, for all French coverage, ie. it was a local rather than a global or glocal story — so the pool of experts effectively shrank further. (Not to mention that it’s definitely not how science journalism works these days, so the tools were again unfit for this purpose.)
All in all, this has been quite a trip down pandemic memory lane for me! Now is probably a good time to mention that COVID has not gone anywhere, and just as I am writing this, French media are reporting a big wave of new cases in the country. So this is, in effect, not a definitive story of how French science journalism dealt with the coronavirus — and what’s going on in the newsrooms right now, as COVID has retreated from the front pages into the health and science sections, is arguably even more intriguing.
Perhaps that will be my next paper in French. 🥐