After working on the front lines of public health for 20-plus years, through several waves of Ebola crises and COVID-19, Alfayo Wamburi knows a thing or two about how people understand infectious disease outbreaks.

And after all that time, he says he’s noticed journalists still tend to make the same mistakes.

“Over and over we have used fear techniques to drive our communication,” said Wamburi, a Ph.D. behavioral specialist working for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs based in Kenya. “And it doesn’t work.”

Equally harmful to public education and trust are stories that minimize concerns.

Recent headlines about Ebola tend to focus on reassurance: Your risk is low, don’t panic, nothing to see here. While these stories are meant to be reassuring, they could be turning the audience away. When people are worried and they hear officials or reporters dismissing their concerns, they tend to stop listening. And then if cases of an infectious disease do turn up in their community at a later date, trust is further eroded.

Journalism can also fuel that mistrust when coverage focuses more on dramatic imagery than useful information, Wamburi said.

“The journalists run with what will make people drawn into reading a message or listening to a story. They are catching attention,” he said. “So they will go to a place with many deaths and take pictures and write scary stories. When there’s a pandemic, people don’t want to die, and people don’t want their people to die as well, and they tend to look at how best can they change that.”

Both approaches seem educational, but they’re not, Wamburi told me …

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