In the Corriere della Sera magazine Martina Pennisi made a remarkable interview with Samantha Cristoforetti who will return to space next year, this time as commander. AstroSamantha (this is her name for social networks) is one of the most appreciated and esteemed characters: in June when with SWG we measured the popularity of a panel of popular people for young people, Cristoforetti ended up on the podium (in Italy she is only behind Bebe Vio and Liliana Segre).
In the interview there is an important passage relating to the difficulties of the vaccination campaign and which questions us about how to better provide information. Cristoforetti says: «I don’t think it’s a problem of scientific literacy. For example, I, and so my family, got vaccinated at the first useful opportunity, not because I read the papers or acquired information that I still don’t have. There are dedicated institutions and I choose to trust these institutions. So the question to ask is: why are there people who choose to trust the charlatan on duty on Facebook and not the institutions? How can this trust be recovered? ».
The trust lost by the institutions is therefore the problem to be solved, as Nesrine Malik wrote a few days ago in the Guardian (“Vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of people’s broken relationship with the State”). In the interview Martina Pennisi rightly reverses the question to Cristoforetti who does not hold back: «(How can you regain trust?) With transparent and honest communication. And distinguishing what is science from what is research: science is a wealth of roughly acquired knowledge that it is no longer reasonable to question, while research is a part of science still subject to discussion, debate, with bands of uncertainty, which must be communicated honestly. Scientific disclosure by you journalists is also fundamental: oversimplification leads to conflicting messages, so people don’t trust you. Perhaps we need to have a little more confidence in the fact that they are able to manage a more articulated message ».
And then a question comes back that we asked ourselves in this space a couple of months ago. This: have we done everything possible to convince the undecided by informing them with a campaign that explains well, honestly, the risks and benefits? And we journalists, especially when we deal with these complexes, shouldn’t we try to be less assertive, insert more often in what we say an honest doubt than an easy simplification that clearly smells of lies? Recover the perhaps, the probably, the nuances in our narratives? With “a more articulated message”, as Cristoforetti says, we would be less exposed to criticisms that are also correct in substance but now intolerable in terms of social media. And above all we would recover that heritage that we once had and that has gradually crumbled and without which doing this job becomes an onanistic exercise, essentially useless: credibility.
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