Science, Health, and Broadcast Media

the usual -- inaccuracies usually only amount to a few muddled details, most of which are corrected by the next broadcast. When stories of national relevance are misreported, though, they're much more likely to be permanently embedded in the viewers mind. Unless the story will continue across multiple broadcasts -- anything involving a celebrity will do -- it's unlikely that those inaccuracies will be corrected. In most cases, uncorrected errors are fairly innocuous. How in depth does a story really need to go to get the point across in most cases?

Unfortunately, one of the few areas where bad reporting can actually lead to public harm, health news, is no less prone to the inaccuracies that plague the rest of the news. Consider, for example, the topic of vaccines and autism. Now, I'm not going to turn this into a discussion of that particular issue, but a little background is necessary for the point I'm longwindedly getting to. For years, certain groups have claimed that vaccines have a causal relationship with the development of autism, and for years, study after study have shown that no causal relationship exists. Regardless of how one feels on vaccines as a whole or autism or anything related, the cold hard facts are that no causal relationship exists between routine childhood vaccines and autism. Controversy sells, though, so the broadcast media has been more than willing to keep this "debate" in the news and to play down the science in favor of the drama.

That's to be expected in any media that serves as a money-earning enterprise, rather than a public service. What should also be expected, though, is for the stories, regardless of how sensational, to report the story accurately in the end. To continue the autism example, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) is hearing 5,000 cases brought by the parents of autistic children who claim that vaccines played some part in the development of autism in their kids. It's necessary to note that the VICP does not discuss scientific plausibility. They are a legal court and discuss only legal matters, and in the public interest, their guidelines on payouts are fairly lax. If the plaintiff's case can offer a plausibility of "50% and a feather", the plaintiff will be compensated. Of the test cases selected to determine if the remainder of the 5,000 cases can be heard, the VICP decided to settle one of the cases, saying that enough evidence was presented to indicate the plausibility of a vaccine-related injury.

Does this mean that the government has conceded, legally or scientifically, that vaccines can cause or have ever caused autism? From some of the broadcast segments I've seen on the ruling, it sure would sound like it. Take, for example, KWQC's noon broadcast on March 7:

For years, the debate has raged: do childhood vaccines cause autism or not? Federal health officials have conceded that childhood vaccines "significantly aggravated" a rare, underlying disorder that led to autism-like symptoms in a 9-year old Georgia girl. The case is before a special court to compensate people injured by vaccines. The debate over whether vaccines cause autism has gone on for years. It is believed this is the first time health officials have conceded vaccines may have played a part.

Now, at the heart of the story, KWQC got it right. The crux of the settlement is that childhood vaccines aggravated a pre-existing disorder, and that led to the development of autism-like symptoms. What's wrong with the way this was reported? Among the smaller issues are the lack of detail regarding how the decision is reached in this particular court (e.g., "50% and a feather" rules) and the vague term "federal health officials" to describe what is, in reality, a legal court. Though health-related, it's important to note that this isn't the result of clinical trials or other scientific inquiry.

Those are fairly minor quibbles, though, compared to the real issue: the girl involved in this case does not have autism. Would anyone watching this short health segment have gotten that? Not likely, considering the last two sentences of the story specifically state that this is the "first time health officials have conceded vaccines may have played a part [in the development of autism]". That is simply inaccurate. The government conceded that there was enough evidence to show that vaccines aggravated a pre-existing mitochondrial disorder leading to autism-like symptoms, not to autism. This distinction is incredibly important to the story, but it's buried and the story closes by reinforcing an inaccurate detail. I chose this one example, but outlets across the nation reported this story in the exact same manner.

If I've gotten too bogged down in the details of this one particular story, let me cut through now with the main point. Broadcast news media outlets generally do not report scientific or health related stories with enough detail to give an accurate picture of the story at hand. The segments require more than a passing mention crammed between scandal and human interest segments, but broadcast news is unwilling to spend that extra time, short as it would be. We should demand more of the media. They should cut down the celebrity gossip and fear-mongering, and give us better health and science reporting.