In a Time of Pandemic, TV Doctors Wield Growing Influence. Is That A Good Thing?
“Walter Cronkite was considered the most trusted American when he was an anchor and he would always end with ‘And that’s the way it is,'” says Thomas Cooper, professor of Media Ethics at Emerson College in Boston. “There’s that almost pontifical pronouncement that people want in an age of uncertainty. All of that is what audiences are looking for from TV doctors now.
Fauci in particular, says Cooper, is “the household name type of personality who [Americans] would most want to spend an evening with over the dinner table.” “I think sometimes the [doctors] who are in the public service part of this get a little stuck,” says Gupta. “They find themselves hedging on this and I feel for them. But I don’t have to hedge. So when something is wrong, when someone says we should study whether a disinfectant that works on a surface would work in the body, [I can] say it clearly, ‘No. We don’t need to study this. We know the answer to this.
For Torres, the sequence in which news and advice are offered makes the difference. “One of the things that we’re taught [in medical school] is that once [we] say that word ‘cancer,’ patients are not going to listen to a single thing we have to say. So you give all the information up front and then you tell them the reason you’re giving them that information,” he says. “To a certain extent it’s the same thing here.
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