A groundbreaking reporter visited the University of Iowa campus on Wednesday to discuss the media and public health.

The College of Public Health invited its first journalist-in-residence, Jonathan M. Katz, for a special presentation as part of the UI’s inaugural Global Public Health week at the College of Public Health Building.

“Katz has covered numerous public health-related topics around the globe,” said Mitch Overton, the marketing and community-engagement coordinator of the public-health school, in an email.

“Katz is a regular contributor to the *New York Times*,” said Anjali Deshpande, the director of the Master of Public Health Program. “Jonathan broke the story that the United Nations was responsible for and was covering up its role in the cholera epidemic that killed thousands.”

For his courage in journalism, Katz was awarded the Medill Medal in 2011.

Throughout his presentation, Katz discussed the effect that the media can have on the conversations held by the public about major social issues. Many times stories will contain a terrifying headline to complement a picture that looks straight out of horror film in order to grab a reader’s attention, Katz said.

“This kind of attention-grabbing imagery is good for grabbing attention, but it then, in a lot of ways, ends up poisoning the conversation,” Katz said.

There is a large problem facing journalists surrounding attention-grabbing headlines, Katz said. He said that when members of the public learn about an outbreak of a disease such as cholera or Zika, they don’t talk about the possible causes of the disease.

Conversations like this, he said, would be more productive to containing the disease rather than discussing how to save one from getting contaminated.

However, in order to get the public to have more productive conversations, he said, the media need to grab their attention with a horrifying image and caption, which results in terror and the public discussing the wrong topics.

When talking about the cholera outbreak, Katz said, “We weren’t talking about sanitation in Sierra Leone, we weren’t talking about the inequality of the world, where having all the toilets in some places and none of the toilets in other places leads to public-health crises that can threaten everybody.”

Katz does not see a clear solution to this problem. However, he has some hope that the media can work with public health in order to find new and interesting ways to call attention to major issues without damaging the discussion people have about the crises.

“I am hoping that the journalism community and the public health community, among others, are going to be able to find ways to continue working together closely,” Katz said. “We need to try to find ways to strengthen the institutions that we can still control and use them to inform the public about threats.”