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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Click here to read the full interview.
How can journalists break complex topics like this bill down for a general audience?
Zauzmer Weil: It's all about explaining. It's everything that we do as journalists – to ask our sources, ask people in the world who are knowledgeable to explain. And then our job is to translate and break it down and explain for anybody who's our reader to understand it.
So if you're writing about Medicaid, for instance, a huge number of Americans are on Medicaid. They're very familiar with exactly how it works. So that's part of your audience.
And then there's another part of your audience who have never really had to think much about Medicaid until now. So when you write your story, make sure that you're conveying information that both sides would find valuable.
What advice do you have for journalists to make federal policy more accessible for local audiences?
Zauzmer Weil: It starts with talking to people in your community and seeing what they're worried about and what's going to affect them.
It also starts with knowing what the problem points are in your community. If you already have a problem with a hospital or a clinic that’s shaky in its funding and people are already worried about it closing, you go back to that problem point and say, “is this gonna make that problem worse or better?”
Local issues give you a chance to really dig deep and be an expert because you are there, day in and day out in your community. You know what's happening, and it's harder to do that sometimes with a national issue.
I think local journalism is the best. It's great training. It's great satisfaction. There's real impact.
How did you keep up with the constantly changing information as the bill went through its many different iterations?
Zauzmer Weil: I was pretty focused on several specific aspects of the bill. It wasn't like I was trying to cover every single policy every single day, but you do have to check. You have to make sure before you hit publish that something hasn't changed. You go back to your sources, you go back to the latest text of the bill, you check in with the experts, and you try your best to be up to date.
It's also nice to see sometimes our stories can feel outdated, but that might be because our story had an impact.
I did a story that I don't think a lot of people were talking about, about an early version of the way they changed the child tax credit. I wrote a story about that, and later they changed the bill, and that was not the way that it ended up. That's not to say the earlier story was wrong. It may mean that the earlier story had an influence on policymakers who read that and thought, “oh, that's a problem, we can't do it that way,” and they fixed it.
What sources can journalists rely on to gather facts about the bill?
Zauzmer Weil: To start, a great resource is the bill itself. I think a lot of the reporting you read is sort of second or thirdhand, where it's “this person said this” about what the bill does.
However, there is actual text that you can read, and I found that very helpful, especially as things were changing. As the House version was different from the Senate version, I always found it very helpful to just go to the bill, press control F, search for what you're looking for, and read what it does.
If you're looking for outside resources, there's been a lot of good work on this bill from different academic and nonprofit and advocacy groups. The NYU Tax Law Center has been fabulous. The Yale Budget Lab and a lot of the groups that might advocate for one position or another like the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy or the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. A lot of these groups have done really good, useful analysis.
If you're looking for something really niche and you're not sure who works on it, I usually do a Google Scholar search and just find who's written an article on the subject, and that can lead you to the right expert.
Read on for advice on how journalists can avoid the spread of disinformation.
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