Bridging Worlds: Clinical Investigator & News Investigator on Finding the Truth

Transcript:

Narrator: 0:01

Welcome to MedEvidence, where we help you navigate the truth behind medical research with unbiased, evidence-proven facts, powered by ENCORE Research Group and hosted by cardiologist and top medical researcher, Dr. Michael Koren.

Dr. Michael Koren: 0:16

Hello, I'm Dr. Michael Koren and I'm excited to be here for another episode of MedEvidence, and we have a really interesting podcast today because I'm going to have the chance to interview somebody who usually interviews me. So I have here Erik Avanier. He's a local news reporter, a terrific guy. We've gotten to know each other, become friends over the years through media reporting. A lot of this was related to COVID and we have this common thread that we're going to explore today, and that is that both Erik and I are investigators and I want to have a conversation around that.

Erik Avanier: 0:54

Thank you Again. I'm Erik Avanier from WJXC News Channel 4, here in Jacksonville Florida, sunny Jacksonville, Florida, and I have to say that this is my first podcast, so I am very excited to do this. As you said, I'm always interviewing you, so now you get to interview me and we get to just have this conversation.

Dr. Michael Koren: 1:12

That's great, that's great. So we're going to poddy train you now.

Erik Avanier: 1:15

Oh, okay.

Dr. Michael Koren: 1:17

And this is going to be a lot of fun. So just start by telling the audience a little bit about your background. How did you get involved in the news? Just let people know where you came from and how you got to where you are now.

Erik Avanier: 1:28

Oh man, that is a really long story. You sure you got that much time.

Dr. Michael Koren: 1:31

Give me the one-minute version.

Erik Avanier: 1:32

I'll tell you. I got interested in news a long time ago as a little kid. My godmother, Sylvia P. Flanagan, used to work for Jet Magazine.

Narrator: 1:42

She was the editor, like the editor for the Jet Magazine, Jet and Ebony Magazine out of Chicago.

Dr. Michael Koren: 1:47

Is that still out there?

Erik Avanier: 1:50

No actually it's not. It pretty much went under, but I remember as a kid you know, going to her condo there in the Hyde Park area of Chicago and you know I'm from the south side of Chicago and you know I'm from an area that you know there's a lot of poverty.

Dr. Michael Koren: 2:02

Yeah, yeah. So, just so everybody knows, Jet Magazine was focused on the African-American population.

Erik Avanier: 2:07

Correct, Jet and Ebony. Yes, yeah.

Dr. Michael Koren: 2:08

And it's interesting because my junior high school was 40% black and we had Jet Magazine all over the place because the kids were reading it, so it was interesting. I haven't thought about that for a while.

Erik Avanier: 2:30

I remember Jet Beauty of the Week, or something like that. We won't get into that but I remember watching my Godmother interview all these starts. And I remember thinking like, oh man, I want to do that, I want to be able to meet the people that she meets. So go off to college and major in mass communications in Louisiana, Grambling State University in Louisiana. And I actually fell into television by accident because I wanted to go into print media like her, and obviously someone discovered me. It was a professor there that discovered me and said, hey, you should do television. A udition for television. And from there the world was my oyster.

Dr. Michael Koren: 3:02

That's great. And how'd you end up in Jacksonville? Just the right job. How did that work out?

Erik Avanier: 3:06

Yeah. So in this business, especially coming out of college, you take every opportunity you can get. So I've lived all over the country and every time a job opening came up if it was to be a reporter or a reporter anchor you take that. And then you find yourself going from one city in one state to another and eventually I ended up here in Jacksonville. Prior to here, I was working for a CBS affiliate in Chattanooga, Tennessee, prior to that, a CBS affiliate in Boise, Idaho. So yeah you're like all over the place.

Dr. Michael Koren: 3:35

Interesting. So you've actually been in different markets. I didn't realize that. Oh yeah, large, small and medium, beautiful, beautiful. So one of the things we're going to talk about today is the fact that we're both investigators. I am a clinical investigator and I look at medical issues and try to figure them out, and you're a news investigator. So there's probably some things that are different and some things that are kind of the same, but I would float this hypothesis as a clinical investigator. We start with a hypothesis, and the hypothesis is that we're both trying to get to the truth and then ultimately projecting the truth to the public. So with that in mind, so tell me a little bit about how you approach me about a story. We did a lot of COVID stories together, for example, but there've been other things. So explain to the audience, kind of, what your mind frame is when you come to a local investigator like me and you're trying to get information about the truth.

Erik Avanier: 4:28

Well, you know, a lot of times, you know, we hear things in the news, we see things in the news nationally, and so the one way we try to localize that is find someone who's here, local, who is involved in that. You're a local, I mean, I think about it. When COVID first burst on the scene, this was an international it was a national story.

Erik Avanier: 4:49

And you were someone that we could count on to kind of localize everything that was going on, because I know you guys were doing trials and you got you know for the vaccines and stuff like that. And so that is what we're a lot of times what we're looking for. We're looking for someone who can tell, who help us tell the story, but from a local perspective and the fact that there were trials going on here in Jacksonville, no one knew that.

Dr. Michael Koren: 5:14

Right, yeah, so that's interesting. So I'm going to explore a little bit about this thread, about the truth, and I'll be a bit controversial here by saying that you know there are people and it may be disproportionately in a younger generation that kind of thinks that you repeat things over and over again and whatever you're saying is the truth and is not necessarily subject to the hypothesis testing that's so important in my field and I assume in your field as well. Yeah, we call that fake news, okay, okay.

Erik Avanier: 5:46

Yeah, we call that fake news. Okay, Okay, yeah, we call that fake news. When someone has an agenda and there is no fact checking, there's no research, it's just. Oh well, this is what I believe. So this is what I'm going to just tell everyone, and we have to deal with that a lot. You know, when I'm out in the field and I'm reporting on a story, especially if it's a crime story, you know I'm going to give you one example. Sure, I remember several years ago I was covering a story about a child that had been raped out, way out in the county, and the crime scene was at the suspect's house. The suspect just happened to live with his parents. My photographer and I we roll up and the first thing that the mom says when we ask hey, can we talk to you about this crime that was committed involving your son. The first thing that came out of her mouth was do you believe in making america great again?

Erik Avanier: 6:47

And I like what and it was just you know, and she was going on and on and on again about these, these things that are in the news. And I had to explain her. Ma'am, I don't cover politics, right? I'm here because a crime was committed, right? Um, here is a copy of the arrest warrant where it states everything that happened, blah, blah, blah, and it was interesting how her entire demeanor changed. Like yeah you know what you're right. Why am I politicizing this? Why, you know, and so it's stuff like that. I run into all the time.

Dr. Michael Koren: 7:18

Yeah, like the old Dragnet show. Just the facts, ma'am, exactly, yeah, interesting. So in the clinical research area, we create a hypothesis and then we create this way of testing that hypothesis that involves patients and coordinators, and we're blinded. We don't know which assignment you're given, so that we're objective, and we do something called randomization, where you're equally likely to be in one group versus the other, and all these things are put into place to make sure that our findings are as objective as possible. So talk a little bit more about the things that you do in the news and I'm going to ask you one thing in particular that I've noticed maybe a little bit of a change over the years, which is showing two different opinions at the same time, so that you can get both sides of an argument. It seems like the news has gotten polarized, where you don't do that as much as you used to.

Erik Avanier: 8:07

So if you want to be fair and balanced, you have to do that. Now there's two ways of doing that. One way of doing that let's just say, if you're covering politics, one way of doing that is if you're covering a specific topic and you've got, say, a democratic view, yeah, you want to be able to let that person say what they have to say from their point of view. But then if you're going to do that, however amount of time that you give that person in that news story, you want to give that equal time to someone of an opposing view. So it could be done that way. Another way would be and we do this occasionally, especially with certain stories, like one I did recently involving Iran and Israel you can have one view as one story and you in a 10 o'clock newscast and then tease ahead to the 11. Okay, you heard this side. Coming up at 11, you get to hear the other side.

Erik Avanier: 9:11

So, you could do that in both ways. If you don't do that, everything comes across one-sided and there's a lot of. I hate to say that at times there could be some misinformation because things can get slanted that way and when you do that, you lose all credibility.

Dr. Michael Koren: 9:29

Right and again. We also like to be honest about the business aspects of things. So if the news does that and you tease the other side, you keep the people engaged, so they watch you.

Erik Avanier: 9:37

I would say another thing that we're starting to do too, especially with some of these stories, is we are now starting to post the entire unedited interview on social media. I like that. So, for instance, you may recall, was it back in October, when Hamas attacked Israel, one of the things we did was interview a woman who survived that attack. But even though we use certain soundbites in the story for transparency purposes, we posted the entire.

Erik Avanier: 10:14

I want to say it's more than 20 minute long interview on our website and also on YouTube, so people can see that in its entirety for themselves. Interesting. It's not like, oh, we're just picking and choosing certain sound bites and you get to hear the questions, because a lot of times in some of these news stories, the lack of transparency is not hearing the question that is asked.

Dr. Michael Koren: 10:37

That's so interesting. So again, in both cases in the clinical research case and in the news investigator case we have different techniques, but we're trying to show transparency, trying to show objectivity and trying to show that this is the way to get to the truth. And let's get a little bit more detailed about COVID, because obviously that was an area rich in conspiracy theories and an area where you were actually very helpful to talk with me and talk with others and show this is the science. And what's interesting is, now that we're looking at COVID in the rearview mirror, there's still all this discussion about conspiracies and not maybe enough talk about the science.

Dr. Michael Koren: 11:18

What do the vaccine studies actually do? What do we actually learn about COVID? And you and I have had this conversation. One of the things that was a characteristic of COVID as a virus is that it had disproportional effects on the most vulnerable populations. So people who were elderly had devastating effects of COVID, particularly in the beginning, whereas younger people sometimes had very mild illnesses, and that was a fact that we learned relatively early on, but we weren't stating that enough and powerfully enough, in my opinion.

Erik Avanier: 11:49

And not to mention people of color that suffer from diabetes and different other ailments that are already there. I look back on that and think, wow, you know what? That story was not told in its entirety.

Dr. Michael Koren: 12:03

Yeah, well, that's interesting of itself because you've actually break down the racial differences. It was the comorbidities that drove it. One of the particularly interesting threads was in the Hispanic population, so Hispanics were more likely to get infected, but they tended to be younger, and so the younger Hispanics that were infected actually had relatively mild illnesses, but instead what was reported was that Hispanics were being disproportionately affected. So it can be really tricky with these type of things.

Erik Avanier: 12:32

You know and then you know, and how many of the reports that we hear, you know well the Hispanics that were coming into the country illegally. They're bringing that.

Dr. Michael Koren: 12:40

Right, that was all you know.

Erik Avanier: 12:42

So you had a lot of that coming in and a lot of that you know. Let's be honest, it was misinformation

Dr. Michael Koren: 12:49

Of course, driven Right right, or basically putting a lens over things to see what you want to see and not seeing the full picture. So I think we both have to deal with that, and one of the very important tools that we have in my field that's a little bit more difficult for you is that we state the hypothesis before we even start and all you can do is test that hypothesis. You can't change the hypothesis, so you have to finish the study, test that hypothesis and get the answer. Then you create the next study with the next hypothesis. So that's one of the very important elements of discipline that occurs in the clinical research world that helps us keep pathologically objective and relentlessly skeptical about our results.

Erik Avanier: 13:32

Yeah, because you guys, like you said-.

Dr. Michael Koren: 13:35

And I like those terms.

Erik Avanier: 13:36

You're doing a lot of testing and stuff like that, whereas, from a journalist standpoint, all we have in front of us are we have details, we have facts based on documentation or details based on an eyewitness who saw something or heard something.

Dr. Michael Koren: 13:59

If I'm saying this correctly, one of the things that you do use is internal consistency, so it has to be all internally consistent. So if one eyewitness says something and somebody else who didn't talk to that first eyewitness says something that corroborates it, then that's a much more powerful statement than if they're different.

Erik Avanier: 14:17

Now here's where it gets tWhen you have multiple eyewitnesses, tricky. they all saw the same thing, but from a different point of view. So what a police officer saw which the same thing that they're seeing through their body cam is different than what another witness saw through their cell phone from this side, versus what another witness may have saw from this side. So it's interesting yeah.

Dr. Michael Koren: 14:42

ight Right. Internal consistency can be either people saying different things that don't contradict each other, or say things that actually do contradict each other, and so you have to make that distinction.

Erik Avanier: 14:55

They're all telling the truth, but they're saying it from a different point of view. Yeah

Dr. Michael Koren: 15:00

Well, you hope they're all telling the truth. Yeah, and that's the other variable is that some people may have their agendas and they may prioritize their agenda over just reporting the facts.

Erik Avanier: 15:09

Really good example. A couple of years ago, JSO went after a guy who was wanted he's wanted criminal for violence and gun violence and you bring because this is a really good example of that. He was shot and killed by JSO. You know, before the body cam was released, a lot of the neighbors were like oh no, they just shot the guy, like just, you know, everyone was saying from our point of view, they just shot into the car and it was like wow, they just executed this guy. And this was coming from multiple neighbors that saw it from different points of view. But guess what happened? We get the body cam video and we see that's. Yeah, I can understand how it looks that way, but the body cam video actually shows the car coming towards the deputy, which gives the deputy a totally different perspective.

Narrator: 16:06

Okay, now the deputy is shooting to defend himself.

Erik Avanier: 16:08

I get it, that's a good example of what we were just talking about Great example, perspectives, great example.

Dr. Michael Koren: 16:13

So I want to switch gears just a little bit and talk about how you project the truth in medical science and in what you do. Obviously, in what you do, part of your investigative process is projecting. Because you're on TV? Obviously, we're not on TV and we have to make other ways of projecting what we learn. And it's hard, it's not so easy to get the word out. We're finding different formats?

Dr. Michael Koren: 16:38

Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious your perspective. One how do we get medical findings into the public space more? How do we educate the population about what's real, what's not real, what's true, what we know, what we don't know, and how we're going to find out the things that we don't know?

Erik Avanier: 16:54

You know, a lot of times, you know a lot of it is just going door to door. You know, like I said, like without a camera, sometimes you can go into communities and just have talks with people. But you bring up something also really interesting about how do we know what's true and what's not true. This is something that, as a journalist, we deal with daily. We get images all the time. We get videos all the time the time, and a lot of times we have to before as distressing as those images and those videos may look, we have to do our own due diligence to research and investigate those images. When was it taken? Where was it taken? We're looking at the background to see, hey, was that even in Jacksonville, was that even in Florida? So we deal with that all the time where, like you said, you get information and you're worried okay, are we putting out the right information or are we putting out something that's fake?

Erik Avanier: 17:52

Same thing with sound that you get from people you may, for instance, I may go interview, I may go to a candlelight vigil and interview a mom who lost her son and you know she may say, oh, my son was the pillar of the community, was always in church would give you the shirt off his back, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and sounds great. But then I'm looking at images. I'm you know, I'm looking at like, wow, you know, I'm looking at the things that your son was involved in, and sometimes the two just don't add up. And so at that point, as a journalist, I have to ask myself okay, are we projecting the truth here? And so it's a lot more research.

Dr. Michael Koren: 18:40

You make a great point, so what you're talking about is how do we ensure the public there's a credibility to the process?

Erik Avanier: 18:48

Exactly.

Dr. Michael Koren: 18:49

And we both have that issue. So in medical science we have all these things in place. I mentioned placebo-controlled studies, blinded studies, hypothesis testing, objectivity et cetera. I don't think people understand that at a core level and I think in the news business there may be some predisposition to think that you're intrinsically biased and there isn't a credibility. That is really your catchphrase, which is so important to what you do on a day-to-day basis.

Erik Avanier: 19:19

Well, I think, in your case though, especially from a medical standpoint, I think for a lot of people, you have to realize a lot of people did not go to medical school.

Dr. Michael Koren: 19:31

So from a medical standpoint.

Erik Avanier: 19:34

I can understand how some people may have a certain disposition towards what they're told, because they don't understand. And I think in that case, people that are in the medical field have to learn to communicate at a much simpler level. Instead of using these really big medical terms when you're trying to convey a message to people. Keep it really simple. So that people can understand.

Dr. Michael Koren: 19:59

Yeah, and so ultimately, the integrity of the process, either in the news or in clinical science, is the key, and we have a saying in research is that the integrity of the investigator is what drives the truth in clinical research, and probably that's the same for the news.

Erik Avanier: 20:16

Yeah, yeah, you know. When you set out to find the who, what, when, why and where, you know you're, you're laser focused on that and you know you. Just, you just have to remember that. You know you're trying to convey a message to people and you want to be credible. You want to, you know, you want to be transparent, because if you're not, you lose that audience, you lose that viewer, you lose that reader.

Dr. Michael Koren: 20:47

Erik, this has been a delightful conversation. I've enjoyed it thoroughly. You are now fully poddy trained, oh yes, and we'll have to have you come back again in the near future and talk about another topic. But hopefully the audience enjoyed this conversation and I've certainly learned a lot. And let's get the word out about clinical research and also about the news.

Erik Avanier: 21:10

Yeah, we need to do that. In fact, we need to get together, you and I and a couple of people here at the Jacksonville Center for Clinical Research, and we need to actually go out into these communities and just talk to people. I love it, just have a conversation at the simplest level and just have a conversation with people, cause I think that the more people understand, know about what you guys do, the more they understand, the more, uh, the more people buy in to it Right?

Dr. Michael Koren: 21:36

I love it. Thanks for participating in MedEvidence, all right.

Narrator: 21:39

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