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“It’s important to move past the scare stories”

Press critic and Fulbright Specialist Trudy Lieberman to deliver keynote address at Concordia event
September 18, 2013
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By Tom Peacock


Vetreran journalist and press critic Trudy Lieberman
Vetreran journalist and press critic Trudy Lieberman will deliver the keynote address, “Health Reporting: Balanced but Broken,” at a world café organized by the Concordia Science Journalism Project. Photo courtesy of Lieberman

In her latest blog entry for the Columbia Journalism Review, outspoken press critic Trudy Lieberman lays into the NBC Nightly News for a segment they aired recently on retiree health care. “It was a confusing, garbled, too-brief mess of a story on one of the most complex and important topics for older people and those nearing retirement,” she wrote.

On Friday, September 27, Lieberman – a journalist with 40 years of experience – will tackle the problems with health-policy reporting in the United States during her keynote address at a world café organized by the Concordia Science Journalism Project.

“We’re not really explaining to people what’s going on,” Lieberman says on the phone from her home in New York City. “There’s a lot of ‘he said, she said’ commentary that doesn’t add very much.”

As the U.S. prepares to implement the largest piece of its Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, the need for useful information on health policy is more important than ever, Lieberman points out. “There are many people here who have serious questions, such as whether, even with subsidies, people in the middle class will still be able to afford decent coverage.”

Lieberman’s visit to Montreal is the first on her four-city Canadian tour as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. The Fulbright Specialist Program (FSP) promotes dialogue and partnerships between U.S. scholars and professionals and their counterparts at institutions in other countries.

The day-long world café event at Concordia will also feature a panel discussion with journalist Charlie Fidelman from the Montreal Gazette; Daniel Weinstock, director of the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy; and Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, associate professor in McGill University’s departments of Sociology and Epidemiology.

Reporting on health policy can be difficult and the complicated facts at play often get in the way of what a reporter may deem to be a great story. Yet Lieberman insists journalists covering health policy can’t simply leave out vital background information to make their stories more readable or watchable.

As she wrote in her Columbia Journalism Review blog entry “A dart to NBC Nightly News”: “It’s important to move past the scare stories and into the details, because that’s the only way the press coverage can provide information that might help thousands of viewers navigate the system themselves.”

What: “Pitfalls in Health Policy Reporting: a World Café”
When: Friday, September 27, 2013, 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Jesuit Hall and Conference Centre (RF Building), Loyola Campus, 7141 Sherbrooke St. W.



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