COVID revealed the profound misunderstanding of scientific subjects throughout Canadian society, including conventional news media. In the wider discussion of both the value of and problems with conventional news media, highlighted recently by the financial problems of the Saltwire chain, we should consider more carefully the interplay between the quality of the conventional media and the role it plays in society not so much as a reliable source of impartial information but as a source of misinformation that reinforces cleavages in society.
“Cardiac arrests at home have nearly doubled,” screams the CBC headline on a story by Corner Brook-based Colleen Connors, “and this Corner Brook man is one of the lucky few who survived.”
Colleen’s story recounts Kevin McCarthy’s myocardial infarction, commonly known as a heart attack.
Cardiac arrest is when the heart stops beating.
Not the same as a heart attack.
Not the same at all.
As the British Heart Foundation explains:
A heart attack is when one of the coronary arteries becomes blocked. The heart muscle is robbed of its vital blood supply and, if left untreated, will begin to die because it is not getting enough oxygen. A cardiac arrest is when a person's heart stops pumping blood around their body and they stop breathing normally.
The Heart and Stroke Foundation’s fundraising brochure takes a whole page to explain in plain English the difference between heart attack and cardiac arrest. There are pictures. It notes that while a heart attack can lead to an arrest, a heart attack is a problem with the plumbing to the heart that cuts off blood flow to part of the heart while a cardiac arrest is a problem with the electrical system that shuts down the heart completely. Boom. Stopped.
The second problem in the story comes a few sentences later when the online version of the CBC story gives us what it says are the results of new “findings” by the Heart and Stroke Foundation. There’s even a link to the Foundation’s fund-raising piece, which we’ve left active.
“The Heart and Stroke Foundation's newest findings show there are 60,000 cardiac arrests outside hospitals each year in Canada, up from 35,000 in 2020.”
There are a few problems with that sentence.
First of all, the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s fundraising piece doesn’t say that there’s been a near doubling of cardiac arrests since 2020. Not at all.
It says merely that there are “approximately 60,000” arrests outside hospitals each year. The new number is based on a recounting of numbers in 2021. One year.
There’s also an explanation - a not very clear one, mind you - about where HSF got the information and how they came up with the number. There’s mention of a report but no link to a copy of the report nor any mention of who the experts were who supposedly reviewed it.
There’s also no mention of 2020 in the document linked by CBC. That comes in the news release that accompanied the start of the HSF fundraising campaign. In a paragraph you find by following an asterisk in the main text of it, you see that HSF took a look at data for a single year - 2021 - and used that to get the new number. They noted that the old number - used the previous year - was 35,000.
Here’s the whole explanation paragraph with an added link not contained in the HSF materials so you can see the data source itself is reliable:
*Using 2021 data from the Canadian Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (CanROC), a nationally representative analysis was carried out by Heart & Stroke and reviewed by leading Canadian resuscitation experts. In addition to different data sources and analyses involved in calculating the most recent cardiac arrest incidence, there are likely other reasons for this larger number, for example, the population is both growing and aging — and age is a risk factor for heart disease, and other factors could include increasing prevalence of health-related risk factors such as high blood pressure and diabetes, environmental risk factors such as air pollution, COVID-19 and the opioid crisis.
While we know the source of the data is reliable, we cannot say anything about the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s number because we don’t know how they came up with it.
We cannot even verify the 35,000 because it apparently comes from unpublished analysis by a private researcher completed in 2019, according to another HSF publication. A quick online search will also return a 2008 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that suggests there may be upwards of 33,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) annually in Canada. But there's a warning that both the “reported incidence of OHCA and reported survival to discharge after OHCA are highly variable.”
What’s worse, not only did CBC miss that really obvious point about the single year’s data as well as the lack of a good source for the claim HSF did make, the reporter and editors actually wrote a sentence that turned a single year’s data into a trend that simply isn’t backed by *any* information the CBC had.
That’s where the horror-show really started because not only is the story factually wrong and in most respects unsupported by *any* verifiable evidence, the implication that cardiac arrests have doubled since 2020 fuelled online speculation over the weekend by anti-vaccination activists as more evidence to support their claim COVID vaccines killed people and should never have been forced on anyone.
COVID revealed the profound misunderstanding of scientific subjects throughout Canadian society, including among people working in conventional news media.
News media across Canada, including in Newfoundland and Labrador spread misinformation inadvertently and failed to question government actions even when they were obviously wrong or dubious. One Telegram reporter assigned to cover health issues actually did not understand how the body’s immune system worked and argued publicly that the underpinnings of our collective understanding of the immune system for at least 300 years was wrong. In another notorious incident, a CBC report of tourists living on the Bonavista peninsula during COVID - based on hysterical claims full of innuendo and xenophobia - prompted the provincial government to take unprecedented and unconstitutional actions in controlling movements into the province.
This particular story shows yet again how easily well-educated, well-intentioned people can produce false and misleading information. There were plenty of indicators that something was off in the HSF fundraising mayerial including the lack of *any* way to check the claim about what appears to be a dramatic change in the number of cardiac arrests happening outside hospitals. Sure, HSF pointed to lots of potential explanations for the big number but even the vague wording of the paragraph quoted above should have given any reasonable person enough pause to hold off on the story. After all, we have no way to confirm the bigger number is right.
The one thing in local CBC’s favour is that they weren’t the only one’s suckered by a dubious bit of advertising hype. But that’s all. The fact Global, CBC, CTV, and other news outlets across the country ran versions of the same story just shows how little critical thinking goes on in newsrooms across the country. It’s not just about imaginary DFO persecution of a 12 year old. We live in a post-factual world and that embraces the conventional news media as much as Donald Trump.
“The message is clear,” a Telegram editorial writer offered in 2017, “the media is now dealing with a situation where some believe they can simply make things up.
“We [in news media] have to be more careful than ever to be accurate. We also have to be ready to clearly identify and call out both mistakes and lies for what they are, when they occur. We want you to consider the source, and not find us wanting.”
A fine sentiment but sadly not something that the Telegram or many newsrooms are really good at. All too often, conventional media are found wanting.
Take as another example, this bit of social media nonsense last week from the Pee Seas.
CBC’s Peter Cowan retweeted the Pee Sea image and text with this added bit: “Just a reminder that the rules in NL continue to allow corporations to give parties unlimited amounts of money which can create the appearance of a conflict of interest.” In a second comment, he listed off donations made by the same companies or other processors to the Pea Seas.
But here’s what Peter left out:
Election finance laws in Newfoundland and Labrador don’t limit what *anyone* can give. It’s not just corporations.
The accusation the Pee Seas made is not the appearance of a conflict of interest. It says the government is siding with processors because of the donations.
There’s a naked spelling mistake in the Pee Sea bit of the image, something that is becoming a Pee Sea trademark.
The other bit of the image doesn’t appear to be coming from the union that represents most of the province’s fish harvesters. It’s possibly from a splinter group connected to former reporter/editor/member of parliament/Pee Sea candidate Ryan Cleary. That makes the ad even weirder.
Corporations include unions, which give heavily to the New Democratic Party. That matters if you want to say - as absurdly as Peter did - that political donations lead to a conflict of interest. The financial officer for the United Food and Commercial Workers head office in Toronto gave $20,000 to the NDP in 2021. In the same general election, the union representing most harvesters and plant workers gave $3,000 to the NDP leader’s district campaign. You'd have to go through the rest to find other union donations.
In short, Peter’s mention about what local campaign finance laws still do really left out some enormous bits of context that would help people understand the political swamp the fishery is, among other things.
Our society needs conventional news media. But we should not ignore the reality that there is an enormous gap between the claims or aspirations in that old Telly editorial and what actually happens.
That reality must be a central part of the discussion of both the value of and problems with conventional news media, ones raised again recently by the financial problems of the Saltwire chain. It’s great that a Saltwire writer had a good story about pay equity, for example. But remember that no newsroom in Newfoundland and Labrador invested any effort on the story of outrageous contracts for temporary nurses until the Globe did the grunt work and broke a far more serious story. Instead, they spent their scarce resources chasing other, and in some cases far smaller stories, like the German interest two years ago in low level flying again in Labrador.
In our consideration of news media, we must also look at the way biases in newsrooms limit, restrict, and distort what news outlets report and how they report what they do cover.
Generally, we should consider more carefully the interplay between the quality of the conventional media and the role it plays in society not so much as a reliable source of impartial information but as a source of misinformation that widens the cleavages in our society.