Carol Costello, award-winning journalist and a former anchor and correspondent at CNN and HLN, discussed the great importance of effective STEM communications as a guest speaker at Dean Tina Choe’s “Great Minds in STEM” seminar course in Loyola Marymount University’s Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering.
Costello, who brings decades of practical experience to her LMU journalism courses, delivered a thought-provoking, two-part lecture series centered around the messaging and reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic’s early days.
“Why should you care about messaging? In order to communicate, you have to notice what’s around you, and feel what people are feeling,” she said. “Sometimes what is said matters less than that feeling. You have to recognize the audience’s psychology as people.”
In a room full of future scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and health care providers, she posed a simple question: Why should they care about messaging? In her experience: to connect with any audience at all.
“Knowing how to talk to anyone else, especially outside your field, is key,” Costello said. “Jargon cannot help you show you understand what you’re talking about if your audience doesn’t know the terminology.”
By using data and timelines pertaining to the early 2020 response to the global pandemic and how organizations in the United States, from the CDC to the president, chose to speak about it, Costello drove her point home: Many Americans have been left with a shaken confidence in the sciences.
“Because the research was twisted by messaging, the facts stopped mattering. Emotion became the main way to appeal to an audience, to appeal to their human side — because that always works,” she said.
She reminded students that because people were scared during the uncertainty of the pandemic, the pressure was heightened to get things right the first time, in a very truncated window.
“Scientists were still discovering things about the virus and about how to treat it, so there was mixed messaging,” Costello continued. “The scientists could not manage to connect to the public, and politicians and pundits stepped in to create a message. Without the confidence in the messaging of the scientists, you end up losing trust.”
Empathizing with the difficulty of the situation, Costello pointed out what the STEM students in attendance already knew: “In science, you rarely solve a problem forever — things change, theories change, language changes in science.” Despite these limitations, it’s up to the communicator to do the work to connect to the audience.
She went on to use examples of blatant disinformation or clever repackaging of some truth, and some outlandish statements that have been released since 2020 in reference to vaccines and COVID-19.
“Before we can solve the problem, we need to know what the problem is and what weapons are being used to thwart objective truth,” Costello said in the second session of her lecture before launching into an analysis of various messaging from camps such as lobbyists, comedians, and government officials.
“When there is something you have doubts about, you want to hear from someone you trust, who you can relate to, who speaks your language,” she explained.
In her experience as a journalist, Costello said she has taken something to heart when considering how to reach the public: People don’t need to hear the positives or the negatives, per se; they just want to be heard. Understanding the questions and needs of your audience is the key to great communication.
