Whether the topic is vaccines, climate science or health care reform, experts often complain that journalists don't pay enough attention to data. But it's not that simple. How can two intellectually rigorous journalists look at the same evidence and come to completely different conclusions? How should reporters sift through what appears to be contradictory scientific evidence?
Join us as two nationally known journalists and authors, Shannon Brownlee and Michael Specter, pick apart the evidence on the H1N1 (swine) flu vaccine and other issues. Moderated by Ivan Oransky, M.D., adjunct professor at SHERP and executive editor of Reuters Health.
Date: Thursday, December 10, 2009
Time: 6-8 p.m.
Location: NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, 20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor
Sponsored by the NYU Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP)
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Shannon Brownlee is a Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation's Economic Growth Program. Her book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer was named the best economics book of 2007 by New York Times economics correspondent David Leonhardt and is being used by legislators and policy makers to craft health care reform legislation. A former senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Republic. She has won numerous awards, including an Association of Health Care Journalists Award for Excellence, the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She holds a Master of Science in marine sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. For more, see overtreated.com and "Does the Vaccine Matter?", a story co-written with Jeanne Lenzer and published recently in The Atlantic (links below).
Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. His most recent book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, was published on October 29, 2009. Specter writes often about science, technology, and public health. Specter came to The New Yorker from The New York Times, where he had been a roving foreign correspondent based in Rome. From 1995 to 1998, Specter served as the Times Moscow bureau chief. He came to the Times from The Washington Post, where, from 1985 to 1991, he covered local news, before becoming the Post's national science reporter and, later, the newspaper's New York bureau chief. He won Overseas Press Club's Citation for Excellence in 1996 for his reporting from Chechnya, has twice received the Global Health Council's annual Excellence in Media Award, and has received the 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Award. For more, see michaelspecter.com and "The Fear Factor", a short piece he recently wrote in The New Yorker. See also a recent NPR interview, including an excerpt from Denialism.
Ivan Oransky, M.D., has taught medical reporting at SHERP since 2002 and is executive editor of Reuters Health. Prior to joining Reuters, he was managing editor, online, at Scientific American. From 2002 to 2008, he was at The Scientist, first as web editorial director and then as deputy editor. He has also served as founding editor in chief of Praxis Post, an online magazine of medicine and culture. He is the author or co-author of four books, including The Common Symptom Answer Guide (McGraw-Hill, 2004), and has written for numerous publications including the Boston Globe, The Lancet, The New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal Online. He received his BA at Harvard and his MD from NYU, and completed an internship at Yale. He has been a member of the board of directors of the Association of Health Care Journalists since 2002 and now serves as AHCJ treasurer.