My name is Craig Cooper Smith, and I'm delighted to be speaking to you today about 10 lessons about how to talk to the media about scientific findings, either yours or others. I have my disclosures listed here. So for those of you who don't know there are actually many Hawkeyes. On the left is Hawkeye from last the Mohicans that's Daniel Day-Lewis, who scored 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. In the middle is Hawkeye Pierce from MASH. The finale had a 77 share and was viewed by 125 million people, the largest ever for a scripted TV show. And the right is the most recent Hawkeye, who's kind of a superhero, kind of a sidekick in Marvel movies, and then now has his own show on Disney+. But for people of a certain age, you're going to know who this is. And this is Hawkeye Pierce, but he's actually played by somebody named Alan Alda. And Alan Alda is not a doctor, although for many years people believed he was. He is, however, a master communicator who's interested in science education. So interested that there's actually something called the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. And if you look at the bottom, after 11 years on the show, Alan wondered why scientists struggled to switch from lecturing about their work to having real conversations about it. So we're going to try to go through 10 different lessons. These aren't from the Alda Center, but things that I think might be helpful. So lesson number one, we're going to start with a description of an ICU patient who receives an experimental drug. This is what you might say. The patient is a 64-year-old female with a history of unreceptable pancreatic neoplasia with a CBD stricture status post ERCP, who presented with lethargy, poor PO intake times two days, emesis rigors, was found to be tachypneic and hypoxic in the ED, intubated for airway protection, hypotensive, started on pressors, AKI, started on CRT, went to IR for tube exchange, cultures grew at gram negatives, had persistent leukopenia, presumed functionally in a compromise, started an experimental checkpoint inhibitor. You understand everything that I just said. What do you think was heard? When I say the patient is a 64-year-old female, that's actually exactly what's heard. When I say a history of unreceptable pancreatic neoplasia with CBD stricture status post ERCP, what's heard is something related to the pancreas, and CBD is something similar to marijuana, and so there must be something similar to medical marijuana here. So ERCP must be a brand of CBD. Presented with, as you see, these things here. So probably what's heard is presented with lethargy, some other things that don't make sense that might have been rigorous. Found to be tachypneic and hypoxic in the ED. Found to be something in the ED. Now I'm not sure what that is. What is the ED? It could be the emergency department. It could be EDU-related, so perhaps a university. It could be perhaps related to Ed Sheeran. Multiple things were done totally related to the ED or Ed. Went to IR for tube exchange. Went to IR. What is IR? I looked it up on the Internet, and there's 142 definitions of IR, including the last one, Ivan Reitman, who sadly passed away recently, who was the director of Ghostbusters. You have these things above, and what's heard? Persistence something with presumed something, and the patient was started on an experimental drug. So let's put the whole story together. This is what's heard versus what's said. The patient is a 65-year-old female with a history of rigorously and continuously using CBD. Got sick in an Ed Sheeran concert after seeing Ghostbusters, was persistently sick, and so started on an experimental drug. What's my take-home point? Everybody in the audience has a native language. Your native language is not critical care research. It's English or something else. However, you're now at least bilingual, as you can converse just as easily in either of these languages. That story that I told you was probably not really in English, but you understood what I said. A reporter is also going to have a native language, potentially English, potentially something else, but is unlikely to be fluent in the language of critical care research. You need to communicate in their native language, not your secondary language, if you want to be understood. Lessons two through four. I love science. I love research. I love words, and I get very excited about each of them. These words roll off my tongue. Animals that overexpress the anti-apoptotic protein BCO2 in their gut epithelium are made septic via pseudomonas pneumonia. Twenty-four hours later, animals were sacrificed. Intestinal tissue was stained for active caspase-3 via immunohistochemical techniques, et cetera, et cetera. Those words actually roll off my tongue, and that's from a paper that I wrote. So how difficult is it to understand me if critical care research is not your native language, and I speak really, really fast, and I include both essential and fairly irrelevant detail, and I don't take the time to articulate what the key message is? So I'm going to try this again, what I actually just put in that previous slide. We looked at animals engineered to have a protein that prevents cell death only in the intestine. Mice were subjected to a model of pneumonia that resulted in almost all the animals dying. By changing cell death in the gut, we improve survival tenfold in pneumonia. Preventing cell death in the gut might be a future treatment for a disease which affects 49 million people worldwide. These are critical points. No matter how excited you are, pace is important. Speak slowly and clearly. These are critically important points that should be included. There are also unimportant points, and they should not be included unless you're asked for more detail. There's a reason that every journal you publish in has an abstract. There's a reason why a journal will often ask you to summarize your most important points in a few sentences. Actually, your research does have one to three most important points, and it's your responsibility to highlight them. Lessons five and six, you may be interviewed by the medical press or by the lay press, and they're quite different. In the medical press, you're generally, not always, but generally talking to peer medical professionals. Even if they're not ICU specialists, they understand the basics of what we do. So we'll take the medical press. I understand that I can't see you on Zoom, but who's a true expert in oncology listening to me? Who's a true expert in psychiatry? Who's a true expert in radiology? Or who took a rotation of these in school or postgraduate training and has had some exposure to them? What you're trying to do is explain your findings in a way that will make sense to someone with a basic understanding of critical care, the same understanding that you have of oncology or psychiatry or radiology. More than nothing, but certainly not that of an expert. In the lay press, who are you talking to? These are my parents, and my parents are amazing. They're smart, and they're well-informed. They're caring and curious. They acknowledge the skill sets in multiple domains I do not. They're very proud of me for what I do, and neither of them is a medical professional. They're not nurses or doctors or APPs or pharmacists or RTs or dieticians or any other type of healthcare professional. And they don't really understand what I do, much less understand what my research is on. And they're still likely not reflective of the general population that you're ultimately trying to communicate with because they're incredibly well-educated. What's my take-home point? Know your audience and communicate to who your audience is. Take-home point number seven. Your employer very likely has a media relations expert. Often, not always, but often, you can actually get extra media training. They'll often help you put together a press release if one is indicated in advance. They're often going to know the reporters and outlets you're going to be talking to. They'll actually often want to be at your interview. Importantly, they want you to come across in the best possible light. Their job is to make you look good, but their job is also to make the university and hospital look good. And equally important, if not more important, to protect the university or hospital from looking bad and to protect them from controversy. They're generally going to want to know about your interviews in advance, especially if you haven't done this a thousand times, and discuss what they believe can and cannot be said and why. And why is this? Because they want to prevent unintended consequences. You have no idea if what you say is going to gain traction in the media and then in social media. You have no idea what will be stated once it's in the public domain. It might be exactly what you want to communicate. On the other hand, it might not. So what might media relations help you do? They might tell you not to work with a reporter of a show that's known for gotcha reporting, that's coming with a clear agenda. They want you to talk about what they want you to talk about, as opposed to what you want to talk about. They're going to prevent you from commenting on things that have potential to get you or your employer in trouble. Commenting on a politician's health, commenting on policies such as mask mandates. And even if you say something that's scientifically accurate, if you criticize somebody who controls the dollars that come to your university, that can be problematic. So if you say something about your governor or your senator, and it's very, very critical, even if it's accurate, your governor or your senator has a lot to do with money that goes to your institution. And your institution is not going to be thrilled with that. There's other ways of getting the message across. Take home message. Work with your media specialist. They can help you with your presentation and likely help with messaging that's not inherently in your wheelhouse. You're the research expert. It doesn't mean you're the messaging expert with the media. And they can prevent you from getting into unintended trouble that you never considered when you agreed to talk to the press to publicize your great work. Lesson number eight. I've been interviewed, especially during COVID, by a zillion different things. CNN and Fox and NPR and the New York Times and the Washington Post and People and Readers Digest and a whole host of local media outlets and those I've never heard of on Internet sites and local TV stations in different countries. And they are not all the same. So, it's important to understand how much of your interview is actually used in the final story. If you're doing a live, all of it. This is nerve-wracking in its own way. And it's also incredibly unusual. I think I've done two entire start-to-finish live interviews. But if you're taped and someone is either or if somebody is taking notes listening to you, it depends on the type of media. Let's talk about a newspaper, a magazine, or an Internet site. How long they talk to you will probably have to do with how long the story is going to be. A story in the New York Times is going to be longer than one in the USA Today. A story in the Atlantic is going to be longer than one in People. You can realistically expect that you're going to talk for somewhere between 15 minutes to an hour and that they will use one to three quotes. I've been on NPR multiple times, and I actually find that Richard Harris, the science reporter, gets the story right 100% of the time when I've been involved. The shortest interview I've ever done has been 30 minutes, and the longest was over an hour. And this goes to a radio story that is short as one to two minutes, and a long radio story is five minutes. I've heard my voice as short as a single sentence and as long as 45 seconds to a minute, which is actually a lot in radio time. Television segments tend to be very short, and as such, television interviews tend to be very short. They don't go into a lot of time on a topic. They're generally much more superficial, so you have to be very focused to make your key points. And as such, time on television tends to be very short. It might be a higher percentage of the time interviewed, but still very little time. So take home points. The vast majority of what you say will not be used, regardless of what type of media you're interviewing with. However, the reader will only know what they see and hear. And so you need to be very conscious throughout the interview that you're making your key points, and you need to be equally conscious that you don't know what will be used. So make sure that literally every single sentence you speak, you're comfortable being in the public domain. Lesson number nine, can you see or hear your quotes before they're published or on the air? Maybe. It depends on the interviewers. Major newspapers and radio stations, TV stations will not allow you to hear or see your quotes in advance. You're going to see and hear them at the exact same time as the rest of the world. Many publications that are smaller will explicitly tell you in advance that they will send their quotes to you. Because, especially for non-controversial things, they want to get the story right. And since many don't take you and they're actually simply writing notes or print interviews, they might have misunderstood something you said. Again, going back to the fact that your communication might not be in their native language. Misquotes are troublesome for both the interviewer and the interviewee, as no one is served by missing the point of what you're trying to say. So if someone sends you the story in advance, read it carefully. Make corrections if needed for content, but not for writing style, which is incredibly offensive to the writer. So the take-home point, your quotes may or may not be accurate. It depends on whether you're taped or not and how good a reporter is at taking notes. And you don't get to decide that. You may or may not get to review your quotes in advance. You also don't get to decide that. If you can review your quotes, review the story for accurate content, but not for writing. My final lesson, your agenda and the media's agenda may be entirely aligned. Either great work or being asked to comment on great work. They're interested in great work, and they're interested in asking you to put the great work of others into context. Or they may be aligned only partially or not at all. At times, the interviewer comes in interested in a preconceived slant in a story, and they want what you say to align with that. How can this manifest itself? Very selective quote use. Asking questions you're not comfortable with or that seem irrelevant. Asking you to draw conclusions that you can't draw. Looking for you to use or at least agree with hyperbolic phrases. So how do you manage this? For very selective quote use, make sure that you're on your game throughout the entire interview. Say precisely what you want and emphasize the most important points. And don't get trapped into the seemingly innocuous aside 40 minutes into the interview that turns out to be the only quote used. Asking questions you're not comfortable with. State you're not able to answer a question or not comfortable asking about it. An example would be when I was asked by a major media outlet about whether I thought the regimen President Trump was prescribed was appropriate when he was diagnosed with COVID. I didn't know. I wasn't his doctor. I don't know what his history was. It wasn't allowed, so I didn't talk about it. Asking you to draw conclusions that you're not able to. Don't. Or be specific what conclusions you can draw and what you can't. Looking for the use to agree or to actually use hyperbolic phrases. Again, don't. Remember who's going to listen and read to this. My parents, who I've shown you before on the left, get the news in the New York Times, nightly TV shows, those still exist, and 60 Minutes. And my college-age students on the right get their news exclusively from the Internet. I'm not sure they know what a newspaper is. But the only similarity in their habits is they both read and watch reputable sites just about all the time. However, both of them tend to hear phrases like game changer and are more likely to believe them. Some hyperbolic conclusions are easier to understand and internalize than multiple levels of nuance. So take home points. No matter what you say, understand that very little of what you say will be used. Be alert throughout the interview so you don't quote-unquote drop your guard and briefly say something that you wouldn't want to be literally the only quote that's used from you. Only answer questions you're comfortable with answering and draw conclusions you're comfortable making. Beware the hyperbolic phrase. The ratio of what's called a game changer in the press to what's actually a true game changer is enormous. So in conclusion, publicizing your research or commenting on others is an important method for us to communicate with a broader audience. Most of us are experts in critical care, but not experts in communication. Remember that perilously little of what you say ends up in the final story. But every single word you order, even if it's just a single sentence in an hour, might literally be the only thing that's used. Understanding how to communicate clearly and concisely your key message is an art. Thank you very much. I wish we could be a person hopefully next year.

communicating scientific findings

media

language

audience

technical jargon