The Press - Freedom vs Accountability

[downquark1]

I heard MMR (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7753210.stm)being mentioned again as I woke up to the radio bulletin. If wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_outbreaks_in_the_2000s) is to believed measles has caused children to be severely ill and some die. There were 70,000 cases of mumps between 2004-2006.

This all of course was due to Andrew Wakefield's paper which looked at the bowl problems of 12 autistic children. Which was not even convincing then, but the story filled the headlines and opinion columns where every emotional story and quack study was pulled out to try and justify it.

Since then study after study has failed to find a link and the media calls the scare "debunked". The author of the original paper is facing charges of professional misconduct and we now have an epidemic of a virus that is lethal (in rare cases granted). Had this been a government failure there would have been accountability. Had this been a medical professional failure there would have been accountability.

Peter Hitchens preaches that abortion is murder. What is undermining a life saving treatment for invalid reasons (and possibly profit but I won't go there)?

Would accountability stifle freedom of the press? Or is this a sacrifice of a free society that journalists are above their own moral standards?

EDIT: Rereading this it sounds like I'm preaching - they aren't rhetorical questions. What are your opinions?

[downquark1]

No one has an opinion? I'm not going argue I was just asking. It's not exactly an easy issue.

[punky]

TBH, I tend to avoid your threads now but if you really do want/value my opinion, i'll give it.

The press are accountable as they should be. I don't think its as readily enforced as it possibly should be. It gets further complicated when newspapers include op-eds (like Mr Hitchens) and columns. You can't regulate an opinion like you can news. Opinion is not necessarily fact. You can say you believe in an invisible bearded man sitting on a cloud, but don't have to prove it in court. However in reality, to people reading, the lines are blurred and that causes problems.

With the MMR combined vaccine though, the press are't solely to blame. They haven't helped though. The thing is where kids are concerned, mothers tend to mob together which makes it harder to convince them that they are wrong than usual. AFAICR, the press around the combined MMR vaccine initally was fairly accurate. It reported the findings but did leave some doubt there. I think they could have publicised how flimsy the evidence was, but hindsight is 20/20. However, the mothers got talking and they convinced themselves that the MMR was dangerous and orchestrated an anti combined MMR vaccine movement. It got to the point when dedicated clinics were set up offering the separate vaccines privately, at a considerable cost. So long as people were vaccined, its not really a problem. But then people started to ignore all MMR vaccines, not just the combined one.

So basically, its not really the press solely at fault. Its basic human nature. Mud sticks. People are biologically disposed to believe the first side of the story, not the correct side (which makes it hard to get people to believe that people with overturned convictions really are innocent). I don't think the media really stoked it. People are well aware of stoking themselves.

[downquark1]

TBH, I tend to avoid your threads now but if you really do want/value my opinion, i'll give it. Just because I may ultimate disagree doesn't mean I don't value the exchange of ideas.

Well I agree with most of what I said. But who had ultimate responsibility wasn't my question, all the press are (virtually) unified against things like the BNP or communism but that doesn't mean that people aren't members of those parties.

There are lots of reports that come out everyday not all are published and certainly not on the TV headlines. I won't take a survey of 12 children to infer a fashion trend. The "news" was Wakefield's hypothesis which was that MMR was responsible and his recommendation to separate the vaccine, which basically equates to "a scientist believes" article. This is an opinion, is it an opinion interpreting on very inconclusive evidence. If a doctor forms a diagnosis on inconclusive evidence, he would be guilty of some failing and would probably be held accountable.

People are always demanding resignations and accountability whenever someone says something "bad". They are always blaming recent bad events on the past actions of opposing people or governments etc. To use Hitchen's apparent view, people are not free agents but products of liberal propaganda, baby P tragedy is apparently the fault of the liberal 60s. I don't consider unfair linking this concern to the media as the MMR scare was pretty much localised to this country despite being given in many countries including the US.

If we suppose for a moment that the reverse was true, MMR did cause autism and we had an autism epidemic. I suppose their would be MPs, doctors and drug manufacturers heads rolling.

There is a somewhat conflict of interest when you can create profit by reporting controversy but also create controversy by reporting it. The only way to prevent this is some accountability but would that hinder the original purpose of a free press.

[punky]

Its not that you disagree with me (everyone does eventually), but its manner you've gone about it in the past.

Although my post was specifically about the MMR, the majority of the post still stands:

1. The press are accountable, its just rarely enforced.
2. You can't count opinion-driven columns as news.
3. People don't read properly (my last post being a case in point), believe what they want to believe and not what's true.

Newspapers can only report the facts as they are at a point in time. If some study comes out saying that water is bad for you, and they report it, then they can't be held responsible if it later finds out the results were faked or corrupted. The press reports the known facts of the situation. I think their accountability in verifying every scientific report should be limited. ATEOTD they are journalists not scientists. If they deliberately mis-represent the facts at a given point in time, then of course they should be accountable (and they are).

etc...

[downquark1]

I don't disagree entirely but that's a very simplified view. The press do not report every fact, this is both impossible and unnecessary, they report things they think the public will find interesting. People often find things dissenting from the norm interesting, hence people who dissent from the norm get reported, this creates a somewhat misleading impression of what the norm is or how well supported it is. If you say "scientists believe" this could be 2 or 20,000.

There was a case in the MRSA issue where some journalists were perplexed when their samples weren't returning from a lab positive, while other were. They talked about this and someone suggest they use a different lab "this one always gets positives". Stupidity or scoop hunting this isn't good either way. I know this is anecdotal, I'll get the reference later.

Then their is the issue of balance. The press believe every opinion must be countered. This leads to a strange phenomenon where you get one "scientist" saying one thing and another "scientist" saying the opposite. Most of the time this is because of 2 reasons: the evidence is genuinely ambiguous and both scientists are leaping to conclusions or one of them is a nut. A quick google search can reveal this but of course you can't say this one is a nut because that would destroy the balance and people will say you're biased. Or they could take the time to ask MORE scientists rather than just two.

The MMR controversy had the strange sight of Ben Goldacre (a working doctor) having a columnist argument with Melaine Phillips (a woman who doesn't understand that having larger samples makes your statistics more accurate) about epidemiology with Melanie referencing several clearly untrustworthy sources. A person unfamiliar with the issues just sees a sort of card game where all cards are equal. It seems you can get away with promoting almost anything as long as someone else says it. - Yes this is opinion, but I wouldn't hire people who's opinions turn out so wrong.