How do you cover health research with context and balance? Two veteran reporters share tips

In an era of widespread media distrust and rampant misinformation, reporting with context and balance has never been more important. This is especially true on the health beat, where a steady stream of complex science and policy routinely poses challenges to reporters on deadline.

To help reporters navigate these coverage challenges, the Center for Health Journalism was recently joined by Emily Alpert Reyes, a public health reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and Usha McFarling, who covers health disparities as a national science correspondent for STAT. The veteran reporters appeared at the Center’s 2025 Ethnic Media Collaborative symposia, which took place in Los Angeles last week. 

Given the massive volume of health research being published every day, one of the first-order tasks facing any reporter sifting through journal releases is to figure out how much weight to give any given study. Interviewing other experts in the same field who are not affiliated with the study in question is an essential step in contextualizing and interpreting the findings. But there are other tips, tools and clues reporters can turn to before picking up the phone as well.

Literature reviews can be a great source for figuring out what the overall research says on a specific issue, Reyes said. Such reviews might look at 20 or 50 individual studies to identify common findings and assess the strength of the evidence they provide. Likewise, meta-studies crunch data from lots of individual studies to gauge broader trends and the strength of evidence behind them. 

On individual studies, pay attention to sample sizes. “How many people are doing any given study? It’s a really easy way to get, like, sort of gonzo numbers that don’t mean anything,” Reyes said, a problem that can be especially acute when studies involve a small number of people. And be sure to look for a study’s p-value in the results to assess how statistically significant a given finding may be (<0.05 is a standard cutoff for statistical significance).

At a broader level, Reyes urged reporters to not mention the existence of a given health disparity in their stories without trying to at least briefly explain why that disparity exists. 

Failing to do so “can end up reaffirming people’s prejudices instead of actually explaining what it’s about,” she said. “So people can sort of take this thing that’s happening with Black people more than white people to mean, ‘Oh, this is a Black people problem’ — as opposed to, ‘We have a problem with how our system is treating Black people.”

While researching a given health topic, always be on the lookout for striking datapoints that might lead to a deeper exploration. McFarling’s reporting antennae perk up when she comes across an unexpected or unusual statistic. For example, during COVID she was researching the percentage of physicians who are Black when she came across the statistic that fewer than 2% of orthopedic surgeons are Black. That unexpectedly low figure led her to pursue a deeply reported story on the enduring lack of diversity in orthopedics — even as the rest of medicine made gains. 

“If something like hits you, like, emotionally, or surprises you, like, it's going to surprise your readers,” she said. “And maybe if there’s like a number that seems off, there’s a story behind it.”

Reporting on health disparities and inequities can be a difficult, emotionally exhausting beat to pursue. A fellow journalist asked McFarling if she ever becomes discouraged by the seeming lack of change while covering health disparities — and the feeling that we’re reporting on the same structural issues, over and over. 

McFarling said she takes comfort in the conviction that her stories are educating prominent heath providers and industry leaders about the stubborn persistence of racism and unequal outcomes in health care. She’s especially heartened when those on the receiving end of such disparities have recognized themselves in her coverage. 

After her 2022 story on Black and Hispanic only making up 5% of residents but 20% of those forced out of training programs in 2015, she got a number of emails from those who’d been dismissed before completing their residency.

“The emails I got were like, ‘I thought I was alone. I thought it was me.’ That’s when I was crying. So that really keeps me going,” she said.