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Book review: Health, risk and the news

Now that the MMR–autism scare is receding into history, we can reflect on the role played by the media. Tammy Boyce, researcher in media studies at Cardiff, focuses on a six-month period in 2002 when the controversy was at its height. She has examined the content of newspaper, radio and television reports, consulted national audience surveys, conducted focus groups and interviewed key sources and journalists. 
 
Dr Boyce readily acknowledges that the media had a major impact and that it tended to favour the anti-MMR cause. She found that the repeated association of MMR with autism and the promotion of single vaccines as an alternative ‘resonated with the audience'. Dr Boyce asks some important questions: why was media coverage so sympathetic to the campaigners against MMR, and why did those supporting MMR appear relatively ineffectual? 
 
Dr Boyce shows how the media's formal commitment to balance is ‘not always the most effective or honest way of reporting a story'. Thus an objective account of the MMR controversy ‘would not have been balanced, because, in reality, the evidence was not balanced'. An objective account would have to indicate that, on the one hand there was a vast amount of evidence confirming the safety and efficacy of the MMR vaccine, whilst on the other, there was much speculation but very little evidence for the MMR–autism link. Dr Boyce found much ‘over-balancing’ of stories, giving the misleading impression of an equivalence of evidence, and creating ‘a charade of objectivity’. 
 
There was a similar problem of balancing sources. Though anti-MMR scientists and health professionals were in a tiny minority, they were often presented on equal terms with pro-MMR experts. Furthermore, pro-MMR experts were often challenged by parents who blamed MMR for making their children autistic, elevating emotion over reason and confusing expertise and experience. 
 
Supporters of Andrew Wakefield, the former Royal Free researcher who led the campaign against MMR, often claim that he is a victim of a conspiracy uniting the medical establishment, Big Pharma and the government. An irony that emerges from Dr Boyce's study is that if there was any conspiracy over MMR it was on the other side. Dr Wakefield collaborated with lawyers and parent campaigners, cultivated contacts with compliant (and scientifically naive) journalists and was advised by a leading PR firm. Meanwhile supporters of MMR were fragmented and lacking any coherent media strategy, always in the position of reacting to the latest initiative from the Wakefield campaign. Medical authorities were inclined to leave matters to the Department of Health, but, on the defensive in face of mounting public distrust and wary of exacerbating parental anxieties, government officials were inclined to keep a low profile. 
 
Dr Boyce shows how the politicization of the MMR controversy in the wake of the BSE scandal had a major influence on media coverage, to the detriment of public discussion about science and, ultimately, to the detriment of public health.