printable version5 questions: Grady on science and the media
Denise Grady
Denise Grady, a New York Times science and health reporter, was the keynote speaker April 20 at the medical school's annual Medicine and the Muse symposium. Her talk, "Bridging the gap: Communicating health knowledge," drew a standing-room-only crowd to the Cantor Center. Medical Center Report took the opportunity to ask her about issues in news coverage of health and medicine.
1. Some scientists are reluctant to talk to reporters because they feel their work will be misinterpreted or sensationalized. Do you think they have a point?
Grady: There is always a risk involved when you are talking with a reporter you don't know, or whose work you don't know. People who are concerned can always Google the reporter who is requesting an interview, and then decline if they don't like what they see.
2. Do you have suggestions for scientists and physicians about how to do a good interview?
Grady: I would ask for their patience and request that they tolerate reporters like me who seem to ask an endless number of detailed questions, because we almost always need to find out more than we can ultimately fit into an article, just so that we can understand the subject and its context. I warn people that they may feel they are being nibbled to death by ducks, but I don't know a better way to do it.
3. How can the media effectively cover science with shrinking news staffs, disappearing science pages and less space in newspapers? While the New York Times may not have reduced its commitment to science coverage, how do the problems at other outlets make your role more challenging?
Grady: A decrease in the amount of serious competition—newspapers committed to producing high-quality articles—threatens to lower the bar for everybody. It can also wind up giving too much power to the ones left standing. Everybody is better off if there are more voices, more chatter, more competition, more ideas. We rise to a challenge, so we want challengers.
4. In recent years, some initial reports (i.e. Cox-2 inhibitors, the South Korean claims of creating new stem cells) have later been shown to be untrue or greatly exaggerated. Has this affected the way you do your job?
Grady: We've become more cautious about how much weight we give to the findings of observational studies, as opposed to randomized controlled trials. I think we've also learned the hard way to avoid making too much of study results based on surrogate endpoints instead of outcomes like disease progression and death. And we are more careful about finding out and disclosing the sponsorship of studies of drugs and devices and potential conflicts of researchers.
Out-and-out fraud is another issue. I think it can be awfully hard to catch someone who is dishonest and who sets out to fake data. We've been taken in before and probably will be again. We need to be cautious, but not lose our goodwill and not start expecting the worst of everyone. I would hate to see these episodes breed cynicism and distrust and turn research and science writing into a police state.
5. Has explaining science to a lay audience become more difficult?
Grady: Our job as reporters has always been to distill information and give our readers what is important and meaningful in a way that is understandable to an intelligent and reasonable person who is not a scientist, or who may even be a scientist but is not an expert in the particular field we are writing about. That is a constant. The challenge for us as reporters is to keep up with enormous advances in genetics and molecular biology and drug development so we know what we're talking about. I think a lot of us are running like rats in wheels trying to do that.