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July 16, 2013
When ‘he said,’ ‘she said’ is dangerous
Media errs in giving “balanced” coverage to McCarthy’s discredited views
By Brendan Nyhan
ABC’s announcement yesterday that actress/comedian Jenny McCarthy will become a
cohost of The View brought forth a torrent of condemnation from doctors, science
journalists, opinion writers, and even entertainment commentators who oppose giving the
antivaccine activist a highprofile platform to spread misinformation.
Unfortunately, however, the early coverage has generally failed to follow best practices
for covering false or unsupported claims, giving greater reach to discredited claims that
have potentially dangerous consequences for public health.
One problem was that McCarthy’s hiring was initially categorized as an entertainment
story under the journalistic beat system and thus covered by reporters who don’t
specialize in science or health.
Predictably, some of them resorted to “he said,” “she said” style coverage that failed to
make clear just how extreme and scientifically discredited McCarthy’s views are. USA
Today TV writer Gary Levin, for instance, described McCarthy’s claim that vaccines
cause autism only as “controversial” and portrayed her critics as coming from “pro
immunization advocacy groups,” drawing fire from NYU professor Jay Rosen. Salon
entertainment staff reporter Daniel D’Addario likewise stated only that McCarthy’s
“strong stance against vaccines…has been a source of controversy in recent years”
(though two other Salon writers denounced the hire in opinion pieces). Philadelphia
Inquirer entertainment reporter Tirdad Derakhshani explicitly framed the issue in “he
said,” “she said” terms, noting only that “Jenny made enemies of doctors when she said
vaccination caused her son Evan’s autism.” Worst of all, AP television writer Frazier
Moore repeated McCarthy’s nonsense with no qualifier whatsoever, writing that
McCarthy “emerged as an activist, campaigning about the dangers of vaccines, which she
claims triggered her son’s autism.”
To their credit, however, two entertainment writers stood out for providing factbased
coverage. New York Times television writer Bill Carter stated directly that McCarthy’s
claims are based on a “widely disproved theory [that] has led to unnecessary illnesses in
children, according to child health experts,” while Los Angeles Times entertainment
reporter Meredith Blake immediately described McCarthy’s views as “discredited” in an
initial blog post yesterday. In a longer story for print today, Blake reiterated that the
theory is “discredited,” pointed out that the original article linking vaccines to autism has
been retracted and its lead author stripped of his medical license in the United Kingdom,
and quoted numerous critics of the hiring.
One health writer, USA Today’s Liz Szabo, also covered the controversy in a separate
article from Levin, but she drew deserved criticism from Rosen for using a “he said,”
“she said” frame. To Szabo’s credit, the article does state that “Two dozen studies have
failed to find any link between autism and vaccines” and gives some space to McCarthy’s
critics. However, the online headline is agnostic about the merits of the actress’s claims
(“McCarthy’s view on vaccines stirs ‘View’ controversy”), the lede refers only to
McCarthy’s “claims that vaccines cause autism,” and the article explicitly sets up an
opposition between “vaccine skeptics and some parents of autistic children” who “hail
McCarthy as a hero” and “public health groups” who “say they fear that McCarthy… will
use her new job to spread dangerous misinformation.”
There is no perfect way to cover McCarthy’s hiring, of course, but giving “balanced”
coverage to fringe beliefs is the worst approach to covering misinformation. Indeed,
CJR’s Curtis Brainard argued that this sort of reporting has helped keep the
vaccine/autism myth alive long after the scientific debate has been settled.
If McCarthy is allowed to discuss health issues on the show when she starts in
September, these sorts of problems will only get worse. Bill Nye “the Science Guy” told
the Huffington Post that he hopes the show will “promote this conflict, or at least
vigorous disagreement, about the role of science in medicine” because he “believe[s] Ms.
McCarthy’s views will be discredited.” But the reality is that misinformation is extremely
difficult to counter with facts alone. That’s why it was laudable that the Chicago Sun
Times stated that McCarthy would “not be writing about vaccines or giving medical
advice” in her advice column for the paper. Will ABC do the same? Or will the network
and View cohost Barbara Walters sit by while McCarthy misleads millions of
Americans, including many young women, about a medical issue that could cost children
their lives?
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