LAUSR

As scholars and practitioners who study and teach communication and education, we are intimately aware of the interrelationships between communication and pedagogy. More importantly, we are cognizant of the fact that education is not confined to the classroom context. The scholarship on communication pedagogy that has been published over the decades in Communication Education has made evident the contextual breadth of the educational environment. This special issue continues and expands our appreciation and awareness of this breadth. As the editor for 30+ years of the journal Health Communication, my attention is naturally drawn to the implications of this expansion to communication contexts related to health and health care delivery. The study and practice of health communication have never been confined to the classroom context, as health communication is inherently practice-oriented while being simultaneously based in theory. The Hoffmann-Longtin et al. piece in this issue does an admirable job of reviewing some of the classroom-based pedagogy related to care provider–patient communication skills training while going well beyond that context in the new research reported within the article. The focus on science communication in the Tallapragada piece is also directly related to the health communication context, as most health communication is based on science. Of emerging interest in the area of health communication, however, is the focus evident in the Lee and Will article on fake news and misinformation. Although the term fake news is a relatively recent addition to common vocabulary, with an emphasis on the political, fake news and misinformation as concepts have been studied within health communication for a number of years. In fact, many important health issues have been poorly and inadequately reported in the traditional and social media for some time. Just as fake news has important political implications, it also has life-threatening, bottom-line health consequences. One of the pieces in this special issue mentions a fundamental example of this in the discussion of vaccination issues and the misrepresentation of them in the media. This is a vitally important issue, although it is not the only one that has been examined in depth by health communication researchers. Although there are numerous examples of fake health news that have been studied in the two flagship health communication journals, Health Communication and the Journal of Health Communication, space precludes a thorough report of these. The interested reader is referred to Krishna and Thompson (in press) for a more detailed discussion of the relevant work, as this focus on both description and consequences of fake health