I joked that my clothes smelled like burning tires most days in the summer of 2013. I worked in a lab, filling time between my third and fourth years of a chemistry degree. My stained lab coat protected me from spills, but it was no defence against the chemical smell of sulphur. As much as I enjoyed lab work, I didn’t want to move on to a master’s in chemistry or apply for industry jobs. After work, I was interviewing local bands and writing profiles, pursuing my secret love of journalism—something I’d always wanted to do, but was scared to go after because I was good at a more “practical” field.

My favourite part of the scientific process was always the end: writing reports and explaining concepts. When I started to write about science, I realized I could skip the hours of mixing chemicals or graphing results and, instead, use my knowledge to tell stories. Soon after, I applied to journalism school. But like the sulphur smell that summer, I’ll never get rid of the scientist in my brain. Thankfully, my chemistry background taught me how to be a better journalist—follow evidence, stay organized, be accurate and communicate well.

That training is most useful when I write about science. While it’s certainly possible to learn how to cover it well with time and effort, it’s much easier to make mistakes without training in basic scientific concepts. I can avoid common mistakes: overhyping poorly done research, using the wrong numbers or focusing on individual studies instead of the scientific consensus.

Even so, I’ve written only one story directly connected to my chemistry background—an exploration of how and why to get involved in lab research as an undergraduate. I have, however, used my knowledge to write about a wide range of related topics: dinosaurs, sexual health, ecology, space travel and mental health. Vivien Fellegi also takes advantage of her background when she writes. She worked as a doctor for twenty years while earning English degrees, and later, a master’s in journalism. In 2012, she left medicine behind to be a full-time freelance journalist. But her previous career taught her how to be a generalist unafraid of research. “As a family doctor, you don’t know everything,” she says, “but you know how to find out about everything.”

Like Fellegi, I apply the same process I used to learn chemistry to tackle other scientific topics. As a chemist, I wrote lab reports and made poster presentations explaining my research and what it meant. As a journalist, this helped me explain the significance of a new dinosaur on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, as well as translate complicated technical names into memorable descriptions a general audience can understand. (“Albertadromeus syntarsus” became a “quick-footed plant-eater the size of a turkey.”)

The scientific method also applies to stories outside the beat. Steve Buist studied human biology as an undergrad, and now works as an investigative reporter and feature writer at The Hamilton Spectator. “Science is very regimented,” he says: hypothesis, method, collecting results and analyzing. “Having that sort of orderly approach can be very helpful when you’re doing a large investigative process.” Author and freelancer Alex Hutchinson, who left his post doc in physics to go into journalism, agrees: “General skills are more important and more useful to me than knowing how to calculate how fast a toboggan goes down a slope.”

Last summer, an intern at Now magazine, I was assigned a follow-up story about protests against high school dress codes. We wanted to look at the policies’ language to see if it was disproportionately targeting female students. I put on my scientist’s hat and chose variables to record in a spreadsheet from the policies of all 561 Toronto District School Board schools. I analyzed the data, plotted it on a map and wrote a narrative about it over the course of two days. I had to work quickly, but without experience deciding what data matters and how to efficiently analyze them—which I had from chemistry—I never would have been able to finish the story in time.

But there’s more to science than logic, formulas and data. At its core, an experiment involves observing, testing a hypothesis and writing about it clearly. Last winter, I spent weeks shadowing a photographer, walking through the snow for hours as he snapped pictures of graffiti on Toronto’s walls. I kept watching even as my feet went numb, noticing his behaviour and asking questions to add to the collection of data in my notebook about the city’s subculture and him as a person. When I got home, I fired up a spreadsheet, organized my material, searched it for trends and revised my hypothesis into a theme statement. Once again, science had made me a better journalist.

The sun isn’t up yet, but André Picard is scrolling through Twitter. Most days, he’d be on a 70-minute run up Montreal’s Mount Royal and back to his house in Le Plateau. But Monday is a rest day. That gives the Globe and Mail health columnist more time to read and tweet stories to his over 40,000 followers. This morning, Twitter’s favourite topic is many people’s favourite breakfast food: bacon. 

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s source for cancer information, has reviewed more than 800 studies about processed meat. The headlines are alarming. “Processed meat joins tobacco, asbestos on WHO list of carcinogens,” proclaims the Globe. “Cancer risk rises with the consumption of bacon, sausage, processed meat,” the Toronto Star warns. Reporters repeat the press release numbers: eating 50 grams of processed meat—about two slices of bacon—daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent. Readers take away three words. Bacon. Causes. Cancer.

After an editor asks him to address the furor, Picard takes his laptop into the Globe’s Montreal bureau on the 16th floor of a downtown office building. Flanked by the pieces of his unused desktop computer and a view of shiny skyscrapers, he calmly and efficiently does what he always does: writes a column based on research, clear thinking and logic. By 1 p.m., it’s on the Globe’s website. The headline: “Go ahead, have that BLT for lunch.”

Many other journalists committed a common error. Eighteen percent is the relative risk, a comparison between those who eat processed meat and those who don’t. The more representative numbers are the absolute risk: 56 out of 1,000 non-processed meat eaters will develop colorectal cancer anyway; for bacon aficionados, that number goes up to 66. Hardly worth overhauling your diet. The WHO released a clarification three days later, and many news outlets published follow-up stories with a more measured approach to the science. But Picard didn’t need the new press release to get it right.

When journalists get health stories wrong, the consequences can be dire. After the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned in 2003 and 2004 that antidepressants may cause suicidal thoughts in young people, the overblown coverage changed public perception dramatically. Parental fears led to fewer young people with depression getting treatment, and a 2014 British Medical Journal study found an increase in suicide attempts.

Health journalism also has to counteract junk science and misinformation. The anti-vaccine movement, for example, puts belief over evidence, endangering everyone else’s health. Meanwhile, celebrities peddle pseudo-science: Gwyneth Paltrow is devoted to “detoxifying” juice cleanses, and Demi Moore attempted to clean her blood with leeches. But too often, reporters are the ones who get the science wrong. Picard, who’s been writing about health for almost 30 years, fights the misinformation every day. On the page, he is an assertive advocate for good health policy; in person, he’s soft-spoken, kind and genuine, with a dry wit that reveals itself slowly. His strong statements sometimes make people—doctors, activists or politicians—look bad, and they get angry, yet he’s almost universally respected and well-liked. Although Picard and many other full-time health reporters have the time to do it well, the beat is easy to screw up. General assignment reporters and new journalists can make common mistakes—hyping new discoveries, pandering to emotion or just plain getting the science wrong—that lead to false hope, dangerous health decisions and widespread misunderstandings.

Now 55, Picard stumbled into journalism at the University of Ottawa, which has both French and English student papers. He joined the English paper, The Fulcrum, despite being a francophone born in Ottawa and raised in North Bay, Ontario, because it was looking for a record reviewer. He then worked on the business side, putting his accounting major to work. By the time he graduated, he’d served as both arts editor and editor, which led to two years working for the Canadian University Press. After doing Carleton University’s one-year journalism program, he moved to Toronto to intern at the Globe. While there, he reconnected with his future wife, Michelle Lalonde, whom he knew at The Fulcrum (she’s now a reporter at the Montreal Gazette).

In 1988, the Globe sent him to Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital to investigate a mistreated patient. When he arrived, he found a sign warning others to stay away, implying that the man, who was gay, posed a high risk of contamination. Picard introduced himself to the patient and reached out to shake his hand. The patient took it and burst into tears—he hadn’t been touched in days. The reason he was being treated: a urinary tract infection. Titled “Gay patient angered by AIDS warning card,” the story gave its stigmatized subject a voice. “He said he was humiliated by the experience and appalled by the ignorance of medical staff regarding AIDS and homosexuals,” Picard reported. “‘I had visions of the Nazis when I saw that sign. It was as if I was branded with the pink triangle,’ he said.” According to Picard, on the morning the story came out, the sign came down, and the hospital apologized.

Picard continued covering AIDS after he moved to the Globe’s Montreal bureau in 1989. “Writing early and a lot about AIDS is what changed my perception of health being not just medicine, but a very political issue,” he says. Like any new reporter, he made mistakes while starting out. In a 1987 story about a liver cirrhosis drug, for example, he erred the way other reporters did on the bacon story: he cited the more dramatic relative mortality numbers instead of the absolute risk. When he misstepped, readers wrote and phoned, and he learned.

“A wonder drug’s dark side,” declared the front-page headline in the Star on February 5, 2015. The story, by the paper’s investigative team, was about young women who said they had adverse reactions to the Gardasil vaccine, which reduces the risk of some cancer-causing forms of HPV. “Since 2008 at least 60 girls and women in Canada have convulsed or developed disabling joint and muscle pain and other debilitating conditions after receiving Gardasil,” wrote David Bruser and Jesse McLean. “One needed a wheelchair, another a feeding tube. A 14-year-old Quebec girl, Anna- belle Morin, died two weeks after receiving the second injection of the vaccine.” Ardent anti-vaxxers championed the article.

One problem, though. The journalists messed up a fundamental principle of science: correlation is not causation. The anecdotes don’t reflect the overwhelming evidence that the vaccine is perfectly safe. Just because two things happen doesn’t mean they’re related to each other. The story mentioned the lack of proof only in the 11th paragraph: “In the cases discussed in this article, it is the opinion of a patient or doctor that a particular drug has caused a side-effect. There is no conclusive evidence showing the vaccine caused a death or illness.” The Star removed the article from its website 15 days later. “If anyone in the newsroom had consulted with any of the Star’s excellent health and medical reporters,” public editor Kathy English wrote in her column on the story, “they could have explained the inherent land mines in not giving greater weight to scientific evidence.”

Even less dramatic mistakes can cause damage. When the scientific consensus is particularly strong, proposing another opinion is like saying the earth is flat. But journalism thrives on conflict. The “vaccine debate,” for example, is based on the idea that vaccines cause autism, though the scientific consensus is that there is no connection. A 2015 Ottawa Sun story presented the point of view of an anonymous anti-vaxxer: “‘We are not part of a herd,’ said the mother. ‘We are rational, intelligent human beings who can make informed decisions of how to obtain and maintain a healthy lifestyle.’” That same month, CBC Radio’s The Current interviewed parents on both sides, giving both a platform to share their views. Listening to anti-vaxxers without debunking their beliefs suggests vaccination is something up for debate. According to the science, it’s not.

Covering only individual studies also creates distortions. Health reporters receive a flurry of press releases—Kelly Crowe, medical sciences correspondent for CBC National News, gets up to 50 a day. Each study is embargoed, so most stories come out at the same time. “It creates a false sense of something happening,” Crowe says. “Science evolves, and news has to happen, and there’s an inherent contradiction there.” Studies with opposing results are a normal part of the scientific process: over time, consensus emerges. But reporting on each one along the way leads to contradictory headlines: a proclamation that chocolate is good for you one day and a warning that it’s bad the next. 

Crowe is thankful she works on stories about broader issues instead of just reporting on the newest studies and technologies. “Because what are the real determinants of health?” she asks. “They’re poverty, they’re education, opportunities, geography.” But these issues aren’t news to some editors; nor are research funding and broader health policies.

Sensationalism is another trap. Timothy Caulfield, a health and law professor at the University of Alberta, has researched hype in the beat. Some news stories about scientific studies inflate benefits, but few discuss costs or potential risks. He calls this “hype by omission”: if readers learn only the possible benefits of a new drug or treatment, they’re left with false hope.

The balance is hard to get right, and even Picard is not immune. In 2009, Italian doctor Paolo Zamboni’s research on his proposed multiple sclerosis (MS) treatment, which involved clearing blocked or narrowed veins in the neck, found improvements in the patients. In a companion feature to a CTV documentary, Picard described Zamboni’s results as “stunning” and “striking,” though he added the caveat that the evidence was “too scant and speculative to start rewriting medical textbooks.” He now says the challenge facing the documentary team—which did the research—was that the study’s skeptics were unwilling to comment. The result was a one-sided story.

Patients demanded governments pay for clinical trials to “liberate” the veins and even travelled to other countries for the unproven treatment. In 2010, a man died after undergoing the procedure in Costa Rica. But Zamboni’s study was not a double-blind randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for scientific experiments (see sidebar on page 43), and tested only 65 patients. Further studies found little difference between the neck veins of people with MS and healthy control subjects, meaning Zamboni’s theory might not be as stunning as the stories suggested.

The good news is health journalism, like science, is self-correcting. Picard’s subsequent work on the topic was much more skeptical. “The saga is also a sobering reminder that, as much as we yearn for simple solutions, they rarely exist,” he wrote in 2010. But the initial article remains on the Globe’s website without a correction. And general assignment reporters rarely have the same second chance to get it right.

“I killed my son,” the email begins. That gets Picard’s attention. He goes on to read a heart-wrenching story from a B.C. woman who’d been left alone with her newborn son in the hospital. She fell asleep, rolled over and asphyxiated her baby. Hospital staff told her he had died of sudden infant death syndrome; she didn’t learn the real story until months later, while reading the coroner’s report.

Picard calls her but isn’t convinced that he should tell her story. “When you write about these really personal issues, which I often do, you worry about what the impact’s going to be on the person,” he says. But he kept talking to her over several months, until a larger story emerged. “The perils of sharing bed with baby” became a front-page feature. The woman’s story is the lead of a 1,400-word article that explores how to do co-sleeping correctly. He wrote it in his typical style—clear, with specific examples: “The baby should always sleep on his back, on a hard surface: no waterbeds, no makeshift beds made of cushions or pillows, and no sleeping on the couch or in the Laz-E-Boy.”

Not all journalists show such restraint. In 2011, when Ontario refused to pay for a $40,000 cancer drug for a mother of two, reporters dialled up the despair. The Globe’s Lisa Priest present- ed it as an injustice: “All the best medical advice could not have prepared a 35-year-old breast cancer patient for this: After finding a lump, Jill Anzarut was told her tumour was ‘too small’ to be treated with a drug that can prevent a recurrence, potentially saving her life.” Matt Gurney of the National Post wrote, “Ms. Anzarut, by catching her cancer early, disqualified herself from the best possible treatment.”

Few  stories  mentioned  the  drug’s  potential  side  effects— including  heart  failure,  lung  damage  and  increased  risk  of infection—or that the researchers didn’t test tumours as small as Anzarut’s. Evidence-based or not, the whirlwind of stories created enough political pressure that the province paid for the drug. The Star’s Theresa Boyle says such situations benefit only the individual in the news, not the system or anyone in the same situation. She once received a call about a young boy who would go blind without a costly U.S. operation that Ontario wouldn’t fund. “When you write up stories like this, they can result in the person getting the treatment they want,” she says. “Is that fair to all the others who have been turned down for treatment?” She chose not to cover the story, but another Star reporter wrote it after the issue was raised in question period at Queen’s Park.

These pieces often fail to mention why drugs can be so expensive: drug companies looking to make a profit. Research and development are often covered by grants and publicly funded universities, so astronomical sticker prices aren’t just for covering the manufacturing costs. But instead of including drug pricing in the discussion, some journalists go for the heartstrings. Reporters unfamiliar with the beat are at a distinct disadvantage because there’s so much to know, including the scientific consensus on a topic, how Canada’s health system works and what makes a good study. And in a modern newsroom, many health stories go to general assignment reporters.

But journalists are only part of the problem. “A lot of the actual hype flows from what we call the hype pipeline,” says Caulfield, “where build-up of exaggeration or misinformation happens.” Researchers, who are under pressure to publish and commercialize their work, may talk up their research in the abstract—the summary at the top of every research paper—which is sometimes the only part of the study reporters read. The press release adds another layer of sensation. In the “bacon causes cancer” stories, for example, the press release reported the relative risk, while only a reporter familiar with health might read the study to find the absolute risk. Then, journalists need to catch their audience’s attention and simplify the science to make it understandable. Next, at newspapers, an editor—usually without a scientific background—writes the headline. “In each one of these steps, there are complicit collaborators,” says Caulfield. “Everyone benefits along that chain from a little bit of hype.”

Meanwhile, many scientists are more comfortable with jargon and the specialized knowledge of their field than with plain language. Terms like metastasized, derma, biopsy or clinical trial may confuse reporters, who must ask for explanations or risk leaving readers even more confused.

And editors push for stories they think readers want: diet tricks, waiting room times or the annual article on how bad the allergy season is (despite data suggesting otherwise). Maureen Taylor, Crowe’s predecessor at CBC, left full-time journalism to become a physician assistant (although she’s on the editorial board of Healthy Debate). One reason for the career change was her frustration with superficial daily health reporting. “Often what producers and editors think the audience wants are those lifestyle-type stories,” she says, citing “bacon causes cancer” as an example of what tops newscasts. “But it’s not going to be the story that you’re proudest of.”

The moderator reading Picard’s bio pauses to take a breath, and one of the 30 or so health professionals and reporters in the room starts to clap. Everyone laughs when the moderator adds more accomplishments to the list. When he gets to the podium, Picard smiles and quips, “Yeah, my mom sends those long emails to everybody.”

He’s at a Toronto YMCA for a panel about the benefits and harms of covering suicide; Picard is the only journalist, speaking along with three health professionals. His stage persona is similar to how he is on the page: blunt, clear and based on evidence. Picard’s also the only speaker to get multiple laughs. He’s well practiced; speeches and talks on everything from patient-centred care to psychology are a regular part of his schedule. About half of these gigs are paid, but he expresses his honest opinions as a columnist, occasionally disagreeing with the experts who invited him. At the Y, he says journalists are unlikely to ever follow suicide reporting guidelines created by outside agencies like the Canadian Psychiatric Association, such as to “avoid exciting reporting,” and refrain from publishing photos of the deceased.

In the Q & A portion, a man asks about Picard’s suggestion that a health reporter would write differently about suicide than someone on the crime or arts beat. “What do we do about that?” the man asks. Picard responds, “What we do is have breakfasts like these for crime reporters instead of health reporters.”

Kathryn O’Hara, CTV chair in science broadcast journalism at Carleton, is also a proponent of education. Even six weeks of science training in journalism school—especially understanding statistics and research evaluation—would help young reporters get health stories right as general assignment reporters.

Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview, thinks the checklist his blog’s expert reviewers use could be a good guideline for journalists. Up to 70 percent of stories they analyze miss items such as discussing costs or quantifying downsides. But there’s still reason for optimism, he says, because “there are lots of unprecedented peaks of excellence”: journalists who write about health well. “Unfortunately,” he continues, “those peaks of excellence have in between them a wider and deeper valley of this day-to-day tsunami of garbage.”

Picard is a peak. “One thing about working with André is that it really humbles you,” says Paul Taylor, Globe health editor from 1998 to 2013. “Whatever you think about your own skills, André is so much better.” Taylor once asked Picard to write a column a half-hour before deadline; it came in exactly to word count. “He wrote the story faster than I could just type it.” Les Perreaux, the Globe’s Montreal bureau chief since 2010, was intimidated by Picard when he started the job. “But it didn’t take long to realize that he’s actually a very nice guy, a very generous colleague and a good lunch mate.”

Jeremy Petch, managing editor at Healthy Debate, says Picard is well respected across the health care system. “People read him whether they agree with it or not.” And sometimes, they really don’t agree. Last October, Picard wrote an op-ed about doctors’ “sense of entitlement.” He was reacting to a dispute between the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) and the province, which cut physicians’ fees. (The OMA has since launched a charter challenge against the province.) Doctors can legally strike but face restrictions because they provide an essential service. Instead, the physicians started a social media campaign. Picard took issue with the tone and content of their tweets. He wrote: “There’s a fine line between warning and threatening reductions in patient care, and between highlighting your hard work and whining about your workload and, too often, physicians have veered to the wrong side of that line.” He argued for binding arbitration.

Many doctors felt insulted, and they let him know—directly and on social media. Merrilee Fullerton, a retired Ottawa-based family physician, says, “I think what was really noticeable to me was the word ‘entitlement.’” She accuses Picard of approaching stories with his mind made up—in this case, “his bias is that physicians are probably overpaid, do not require the respect they have traditionally been given, that other people can do their jobs and that they are essentially greedy.”

Such accusations don’t bother or surprise him anymore. What does bother him, though, is people attributing thoughts and statements to his column that he didn’t actually write. He often retweets criticism with a correction.

Flak from both sides of an issue shows that Picard is balanced, says Taylor. During his time at the Globe, he sometimes had trouble explaining what Picard was writing about at editorial meetings, because he wasn’t sure what side of an issue the columnist would come down on. “That’s partly because he isn’t ideological,” Taylor says. “He’s evidence-based, and unless you know what the evidence says, it’s hard to know what he’ll say.”

The evidence was on Picard’s mind in February 2015, when hockey legend Gordie Howe seemed to bounce back from a severe stroke after an experimental stem cell treatment in Tijuana, Mexico. Many reporters, especially in sports sections, quoted the Howe family’s description of the treatment as a “miracle” without question. But an important caveat was missing. Stem cells, building blocks that can transform into specialized cells, are our bodies’ built-in repair system. They can successfully treat some diseases, like leukemia, but there’s no evidence that they can fix post-stroke brain damage. Suggesting otherwise could push desperate people to try risky and expensive options.

Picard wrote that one anecdotal success story is not evidence that these treatments work. He also pointed out holes in other reporters’ narratives: not mentioning the brain’s capacity to rewire itself after a stroke and Howe’s occupational, physio and speech therapy that could have contributed to his improvements. “The media coverage of Mr. Howe’s ordeal,” Picard wrote, “more than anything else, is a striking example of how science should not be presented to the public.”

To be consistent and get things right, Picard relies on lots of reading, learning and meeting experts at conferences. He calls far more experts than he quotes, just to make sure that his assumptions and thinking are in line with the evidence. “To me,” he says, “the guiding force is just try to be fair.” In other words, health reporters have the same responsibility as everyone else in the newsroom: to do good journalism.

Feeling sleepy? In case you couldn’t tell from your Twitter feeds or small-talk interactions this week, it’s daylight saving time again. It’s a yearly ritual each spring: set your clocks forward an hour, complain about how tired you are and, for journalists, write yet another story on the subject.

For the past few days, outlets have been pumping out articles about the missing hour—1,625 show up in a quick Google News search—including service-y reminders to make the switch, fun facts about the practice (did you know that certain communities in Ontario, Quebec, B.C. and Nunavut, as well as all of Saskatchewan, don’t use it?) and summaries of the research on its health effects. If you take the coverage seriously, there’s a long list of things you should be worried about this week: heart attacks, strokes and car accidents.

While I’m not saying the time change has no effect—it takes a few days for your circadian rhythm to adjust to the mini-jetlag and get back to a regular sleep schedule—the aggregate of stories presents a body of inconclusive evidence as something more ominous.

One of the studies most cited by journalists about car accidents in the days following daylight saving time was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1996, and it found a small (8 percent) increase in traffic accidents after the spring shift. That study was based on two years of data. But there are other studies that used larger sample sizes. A 2001 study in the journal Sleep Medicine based on 21 years of data found no effect in the spring and an increase in the fall, which the researchers attributed to people using the extra hour to stay up late and drink. A 2007 study from The B. E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy was based on 28 years of information and found no short-term effect on car accidents in the spring, as well as a decrease in the long term.

When it comes to heart attacks, many reporters cite a 2014 study from Open Heart, an online journal co-owned by The British Medical Journal, that did indeed find an increase in the number of people admitted for an acute myocardial infarction in Michigan hospitals after springing their clocks forward. But the number of people who received treatment in the surrounding weeks stayed constant. The same number of people had heart attacks overall; daylight saving time just influenced when they had one. Daylight saving time, the researchers wrote, “does not influence the overall incidence of this disease.”

Instead of writing about dramatic health problems, it’s more useful to focus on advice for getting back on track with a regular sleep schedule. But an even better conversation—which some journalists contributed to—would be why we even change the clocks in the first place. The official answer is to “save energy,” but there’s little evidence that this works, and it may even waste it as people drive around and keep their air conditioners on during their longer daylight hours. It seems like it’s mostly just tradition at this point, plus getting more enjoyable and bright summer evenings.

You’ve probably read these stories before too, though. Like the others, they get written year after year, even though nothing about the subject really changes. You might be better off taking a power nap.

Seriously though, we need to make the day after #DaylightSavingTime a national holiday.

— Norm Kelly (@norm) March 14, 2016

CBC Montreal reporter Tanya Birkbeck was operating her own camera and interviewing a jersey-clad football fan in front of the Percival Molson Memorial Stadium in downtown Montreal. What happened next would leave her feeling violated. A young bearded man wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses and black hoodie approached, stared straight into the lens and yelled, “Fuck her right in the pussy!”

Five seconds later, another man, also dressed in black, jumped into the frame and repeated the vulgarity. That crisp day in November 2014 was the first time this had happened to her, but before long, being the target of the phrase—known as FHRITP and based on a YouTube video of a prank—became an all-too-common experience for Birkbeck and many other reporters. “It felt personal,” Birkbeck wrote in a cbc.ca op-ed. “Not just a catchphrase, but more of a taunt suggesting that the men around me, instead of talking to me, should be, you know, raping me.”

Many reporters, male and female, have also spoken out about how it feels to be subjected to FHRITP. “When you invade my space, grab my mike and yell that, you’re not just disrespecting my space as a working journalist,” the Calgary Herald’s Erika M. Stark wrote in an April 2015 Storify post. “You’re disrespecting and harming me as an individual. And, in this case, you’re disrespecting someone who has survived sexual assault.”

People have always shouted and waved in front of television cameras—it’s impossible to make sure live hits are never interrupted. But menacing, sexually-charged intrusions can be particularly distracting and upsetting for TV reporters, not to mention offensive to viewers. CBC has responded by providing a list of recommendations for how its reporters should handle sexual harassment in the field. These guidelines are a good first step, but nothing newsrooms can do will be enough to control outsiders’ behaviour and prevent verbal sexual assault. The only way it will stop is to educate people—especially young men—about why demeaning women is not okay, but one of the recommendations may actually get in the way of that.

In spring 2015, Brenda Murray, a senior producer at CBC in Toronto, was worried about how often FHRITP would happen during the summer, when live hits in the middle of crowds are more frequent because of the warmer weather and greater number of outdoor events. “I wanted to see that the corporation showed that we were engaged,” she says, “and any sort of armour that we could prepare the reporters with, the better.”

She forged that armour as part of a 12-person committee—unofficially called the National Safety in the Field Committee—of reporters, editors, executives and HR staff that met to decide how to protect reporters from FHRITP and other forms of harassment. Some members, including Birkbeck in Montreal, joined in through a conference call with the Toronto-based staff. The committee gathered information and ideas from journalists, lawyers, police officers and security professionals. In June, it released recommendations for dealing with field harassment. Training for reporters is in the works, though no start date has been announced.

The strategies, which have been shared with CTV, City and Global, include asking event security to stand nearby, documenting all incidents and not confronting a harasser. “We don’t want to escalate the situation,” the memo sent to CBC staff reads. “Your safety is paramount, and it’s hard to predict how individuals might react to words or gestures which could be seen as provocative.” Greg Reaume, managing editor of CBC news coverage, says choosing how to react in the moment is an individual decision. But this controversial part of the memo pushes reporters in a more passive direction.

That’s a problem because when reporters do say something, either to the harasser or over social media, the incident often sparks a wider conversation about FHRITP and sexual harassment. The most prominent example happened last May, when Shauna Hunt of CityNews overheard a group of men planning to interrupt an interview with FHRITP. She confronted them and challenged them to explain why they thought it was so funny. The resulting conversation about FHRITP—and the sexual harassment of female reporters—reached a fever pitch in the news and on social media. One of the men lost his job at Hydro One as a result of the controversy.

Julie Lalonde, an Ottawa-based women’s rights advocate, says that while she sympathizes with broadcasters trying to keep their employees safe, instructing people to ignore harassers every time is misguided. “Their directive in that memo is, ‘Don’t feed the trolls,’” she says, but that approach means missing the opportunity to hold people accountable for their actions. Lalonde argues that Hunt was in a safe situation: the middle of a crowd in daylight and accompanied by a cameraman. That is the ideal position to directly confront a harasser and encourage a societal shift away from accepting such behaviour.

There are signs that the trend might be dying out—Reaume says there has been a decrease in the number of incidents being reported, and Birkbeck says it hasn’t happened to her since before the summer—but sexual harassment is not new, and it lives well beyond the lifespan of a singular phrase. That’s why it’s important to continue talking about how unsafe journalism can be for women, because the only way to prevent such incidents is to make them socially unacceptable.

That will finally be the case when what happened to Birkbeck’s colleague Morgan Dunlop becomes the norm. She was interviewing music fans at Montreal’s Osheaga Music and Arts Festival this summer when a young man interrupted them by saying FHRITP. But Dunlop didn’t need to decide whether to confront him. The fan she was interviewing, a young 20-something man, did it for her: “Hey man, that’s not cool.”

Update: The man who lost his job at Hydro One after defending FHRITP on camera to Shauna Hunt was back at work on November 2, but Hydro One did not confirm that today was his first day back. Hunt tweeted that the company had let her know in advance. Hydro One said in a statement that it resolved the issue through an arbitration process and that it would it would not comment any further.

For young reporters, journalism is a game of chicken. You can swerve away early, taking a relatively cushy job in public relations, but if you wait too long to jump ship, you might find yourself without a job at all. It’s hard to think about anything other than survival.

That’s a metaphor that Vivian Smith shared in her talk at Ryerson on October 8, taken from an interview with the Calgary Herald’s Jen Gerson for her PhD thesis, which she turned into the book Outsiders Still: Why Women Journalists Love – and Leave – Their Newspaper Careers.

A lot of the young j-schoolers in the room probably think about gender only when they notice the large majority of their classmates are women. But those who graduate into newsrooms find a whole different reality. Only a third of editorial employees are women, and the numbers get smaller the higher up the masthead you go.

Entry-level reporters don’t spend much time thinking about gender, either. When you’re wondering if your job will still exist in six months, it’s hard to think about longer-term challenges such as structural discrimination. Smith, who spent four years interviewing journalists between the ages of 25 and 61 for her thesis, noticed that the younger journalists saw themselves as individuals able to take on anything, including sexism.

Sure, overt hostility is much less common than when women were first entering newsrooms. Obviously it still happens (you remember Jian, right?), but many women are able to enjoy successful careers in the field and feel like they are treated equally at work.

But here’s what Smith’s research found: the same inequalities that faced women in the early twentieth century are still limiting or ending women’s careers. They’ve just been brushed under the surface. There is still a real wage gap between male and female reporters, and women have fewer opportunities to advance into leadership positions.

They also still worry about whether or not to have a family. While in theory it shouldn’t come down to the woman to take the lead in childcare, many of the journalists Smith studied still felt that they had to choose between having children and advancing in their careers.

After the talk, one student asked Smith what advice she has for young women. “Think about diversity all the time,” she answered. Think about how you can promote it within your newsroom, and also in your stories.

I have another piece of advice: keep having these conversations. Thanks, Vivian Smith, for giving us something to talk about.