I want to take a quick look at the role of the media in the anti-vaccine movement. Thankfully, over the past year, the mainstream media has provided increasing coverage to the scientific refutation of the vaccine-autism link. Over the course of the previous decade, however, the balance of coverage went to the claims of the anti-vaccine movement.
Tammy Boyce was one of the first to examine the role of the media in the vaccine-autism debate. Her book Health, Risk and News: the MMR Vaccine and the Media, published in 2007, looks at media reports during the height of the movement, centering around 2002. She also examines other pieces of data, such as audience surveys and focus groups, which provide a comprehensive examination of how media coverage influenced parents' opinions.
Boyce's conclusion is that the media had a major impact on public opinion and that coverage favored the anti-vaccine advocates. She asks important questions, such as why this type of coverage predominated, and why counterclaims had relatively little effect. Boyce's book is a great way to develop a perspective on how media coverage can follow trends and become incredibly biased, even when journalists mean well.
Today, medical researchers are unanimous in their support for the MMR vaccine and vaccination in general. Some, such as Paul Offit, have even called for anti-vaccine theories to be relegated to the scientific fringe by the journalistic community, in the same category as AIDS denialism and other politically based, anti-scientific claims.
I think this is a good idea. As much as the anti-MMR scare was a wake-up call for the general public to treat all sources of information with a healthy dose of skepticism, it served more so as an indictment against sloppy scientific journalism. Those covering science stories in the media have an ethical responsibility to provide information as balanced to both sides of an issue as possible. Health, Risk and News clearly shows what happens when this responsibility isn't upheld.
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