Informed 09 Spotlight


people receiving AstraZeneca jabs would turn into monkeys. A study published in Nature in May


A shot in the arm for ethical journalism


Monkey memes, conspiracy theorists, Covid Recovery Group hardliners and a nasty dose of vaccination nationalism has made reporting of the pandemic complicated. Tis is bad news when geting trustworthy information is literally a mater of life or death. As those atending an event held by the Ethical Journalism Network (EJN) heard, journalists are crucial in tackling disinformation, the communicating of public health messages and checking the facts. Tanks to the efforts of specialist journalists in broadcasting, print and online, many of us have become armchair epidemiologists, expounding on R numbers and kept informed on the latest government advice even when the complicated tier systems each have their own rules. But, unfortunately, while most people


get their news from the regulated broadcasters, many also pick up dodgy information on the Wild West of social media platforms – from David Icke, from their WhatsApp group friends and from the presidents of America and France.


Donald Trump’s suggestion of injecting disinfectant as a virus treatment was one of his many jaw-dropping pronouncements Tis was clearly a very dangerous thing to say. But more recently, during the fall-out between the EU and the UK over the vaccination programmes, President Macron claimed the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was “quasi-ineffective” for the over-65s. A report in the German business


newspaper, Handelsblat, that the AstraZeneca vaccine had an efficacy of only 8 per cent among those over 65 swept the globe before the report’s mistake was revealed – the 8 per cent referred to the number of volunteers of a certain age not the efficacy rate. Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said older people in the UK should be reassured that the vaccine was both safe and that there was data showing a “strong immune response” in older people. Te vaccine info-wars are not new. Te Russian government, with its own Sputnik V vaccine to promote, was fingered by GCHQ for puting out a set of crude memes and video clips suggesting


showed 100 million individuals had expressed views on vaccines and vaccination – either positive or negative – while using Facebook. Yet, while the anti-vaxxers were a much smaller group, they were beter at reaching undecided individuals. Facebook was notoriously slow in shuting down this misinformation and disinformation. Research carried out last month by broadcasting watchdog Ofcom found one in three people said they had come across false or misleading claims about the coronavirus. At the EJN event, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, author of Te Art of Statistics, said the media had on the whole done well and the relationship between reporters and experts had matured, with the scientists geting beter at explaining and journalists “realising that science is a hotly disputed area”. Yet, however jab-tastic the press has been – Te Sun called for a “Jabs Army” of volunteers to help get millions of Brits vaccinated rapidly against Covid – many of the same organisations supporting the vaccine rollout are still happy to give space to rent-a-gob, anti-lockdown pundits, which inevitably creates confusion. Professor Chris Frost, chair of the NUJ’s ethics council, said: “While journalists are working with life-or-death stories that are guaranteed must-reads, a journalist’s number one ethical rule must be to report the truth as accurately as possible. “Tis can be difficult when reporting


on technical subjects with which few reporters are fully familiar. Choosing sources for their expertise rather than headline potential is vital. It is the journalist’s job to make stories atention grabbing and accurate and, tempting though it may be, avoid quoting that maverick headline-seeking contrarian, regardless of their expertise or entertainment value.”


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