President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as United States health secretary presents new challenges for how media will report on health matters. Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist and believes in various conspiracies about the COVID-19 pandemic. His nomination landed with a thud among health experts and the mainstream media.
This appointment, coupled with Trump’s frequent complaints about a liberal bias in the mainstream media that he claims exaggerate and distort the world around us, will make it difficult for media trying to maintain credibility when reporting health news. The pandemic provides a good place to draw some lessons.
Despite claims of the demise of mainstream media, there are still many people who refer to traditional news sources, particularly in uncertain times when accurate information is at a premium.
Based on a global study of the early stages of the pandemic, most people regardless of age ranked traditional media outlets (newspapers, television and radio) and the social media accounts belonging to these outlets as their primary sources of information during COVID-19.
The pandemic resulted in an increase in demand for traditional media. In Canada, an April 2020 survey found that less than 10 per cent of respondents relied on social media as their main source of information; 51 per cent relied on local, national and international news outlets, and 30 per cent relied on daily briefings from public health agencies and political leaders. All major daily television news programs nearly doubled their year-to-date, average-minute........