12 How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science
We need to make some sense of all this, and appreciate just how deep into our culture the misunderstandings and misrepresentations of science go. If I am known at all, it is for dismantling foolish media stories about science: it is the bulk of my work, my oeuvre, and I am slightly ashamed to say that I have over five hundred stories to choose from, in illustrating the points I intend to make here. You may well count this as obsessional.
We have covered many of the themes elsewhere: the seductive march to medicalise everyday life; the fantasies about pills, mainstream and quack; and the ludicrous health claims about food, where journalists are every bit as guilty as nutritionists. But here I want to focus on the stories that can tell us about the way science is perceived, and the repetitive, structural patterns in how we have been misled.
My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years; but there is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science: in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality; they do work that is either wacky or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and, most ridiculously, ‘hard to understand’. Having created this parody, the commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about.
Science stories generally fall into one of three categories: the wacky stories, the ‘breakthrough’ stories, and the ‘scare’ stories. Each undermines and distorts science in its own idiosyncratic way. We’ll do them in order.
Wacky stories—money for nothing
If you want to get your research in the media, throw away the autoclave, abandon the pipette, delete your copy of Stata, and sell your soul to a PR company.
At Reading University there is a man called Dr Kevin Warwick, and he has been a fountain of eye-catching stories for some time. He puts a chip from a wireless ID card in his arm, then shows journalists how he can open doors in his department using it. ‘I am a cyborg,’ he announces, ‘a melding of man and machine,’* and the media are duly impressed.
≡ This is a paraphrase, but it’s not entirely inaccurate.
A favourite research story from his lab—although it’s never been published in any kind of academic journal, of course—purported to show that watching Richard and Judy improves children’s IQ test performance much more effectively than all kinds of other things you might expect to do so, like, say, some exercise, or drinking some coffee.
This was not a peripheral funny: it was a news story, and unlike most genuine science stories, it produced an editorial leader in the Independent. I don’t have to scratch around to find more examples: there are five hundred to choose from, as I’ve said. ‘Infidelity is genetic,’ say scientists. ‘Electricity allergy real,’ says researcher. ‘In the future, all men will have big willies,’ says an evolutionary biologist from LSE.
These stories are empty, wacky filler, masquerading as science, and they reach their purest form in stories where scientists have ‘found’ the formula for something. How wacky those boffins are. Recently you may have enjoyed the perfect way to eat ice cream (AxTpxTm?FtxAt+VxLTxSpxW?Tt=3d20), the perfect TV sitcom (C=3d[(RxD)+V]xF?A+S, according to the Telegraph), the perfect boiled egg (Daily Mail), the perfect joke (the Telegraph again), and the most depressing day of the year ([W+(D-d)] XTQ MxNA, in almost every newspaper in the world). I could go on.
These stories are invariably written up by science correspondents, and hotly followed—to universal approbation—by comment pieces from humanities graduates on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are, because from the bunker-like mentality of my ‘parody’ hypothesis, that is the appeal of these stories: they play on the public’s view of science as irrelevant, peripheral boffinry.
They are also there to make money, to promote products, and to fill pages cheaply, with a minimum of journalistic effort. Let’s take some of the most prominent examples. Dr Cliff Arnall is the king of the equation story, and his recent output includes the formulae for the most miserable day of the year, the happiest day of the year, the perfect long weekend and many, many more. According to the BBC he is ‘Professor Arnall’; usually he is ‘Dr Cliff Arnall of Cardiff University’. In reality he’s a private entrepreneur running confidence-building and stress-management courses, who has done a bit of part-time instructing at Cardiff University. The university’s press office, however, are keen to put him in their monthly media-monitoring success reports. This is how low we have sunk.
Perhaps you nurture fond hopes for these formulae—perhaps you think they make science ‘relevant’ and ‘fun’, a bit like Christian rock. But you should know that they come from PR companies, often fully formed and ready to have a scientist’s name attached to them. In fact PR companies are very open to their customers about this practice: it is referred to as ‘advertising equivalent exposure’, whereby a ‘news’ story is put out which can be attached to a client’s name.
Cliff Arnall’s formula to identify the most miserable day of the year has now become an annual media stalwart. It was sponsored by Sky Travel, and appeared in January, the perfect time to book a holiday. His ‘happiest day of the year’ formula appears in June—it received yet another outing in the Telegraph and the Mail in 2008—and was sponsored by Wall’s ice cream. Professor Cary Cooper’s formula to grade sporting triumphs was sponsored by Tesco. The equation for the beer-goggle effect, whereby ladies become more attractive after some ale, was produced by Dr Nathan Efron, Professor of Clinical Optometry at the University of Manchester, and sponsored by the optical products manufacturer Bausch & Lomb; the formula for the perfect penalty kick, by Dr David Lewis of Liverpool John Moores, was sponsored by Ladbrokes; the formula for the perfect way to pull a Christmas cracker, by Dr Paul Stevenson of the University of Surrey, was commissioned by Tesco; the formula for the perfect beach, by Dr Dimitrios Buhalis of the University of Surrey, sponsored by travel firm Opodo. These are people from proper universities, putting their names to advertising equivalent exposure for PR companies.
I know how Dr Arnall is paid, because when I wrote critically in the newspaper about his endless equations stories just before Christmas, he sent me this genuinely charming email:
Further to your mentioning my name in conjunction with ‘Walls’ I just received a cheque from them. Cheers and season’s greetings, Cliff Arnall.
It’s not a scandal: it’s just stupid. These stories are not informative. They are promotional activity masquerading as news. They play—rather cynically—on the fact that most news editors wouldn’t know a science story if it danced naked in front of them. They play on journalists being short of time but still needing to fill pages, as more words are written by fewer reporters. It is, in fact, a perfect example of what investigative journalist Nick Davies has described as Churnalism, the uncritical rehashing of press releases into content, and in some respects this is merely a microcosm of a much wider problem that generalises to all areas of journalism. Research conducted at Cardiff University in 2007 showed that 80 per cent of all broadsheet news stories were ‘wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry’.
It strikes me that you can read press releases on the internet, without paying for them in newsagents.
‘All men will have big willies’
For all that they are foolish PR slop, these stories can have phenomenal penetrance. Those willies can be found in the Sun’s headline for a story on a radical new ‘Evolution Report’ by Dr Oliver Curry, ‘evolution theorist’ from the Darwin@LSE research centre. The story is a classic of the genre.
By the year 3000, the average human will be 6?ft tall, have coffee-coloured skin and live for 120 years, new research predicts. And the good news does not end there. Blokes will be chuffed to learn their willies will get bigger—and women’s boobs will become more pert.
This was presented as important ‘new research’ in almost every British newspaper. In fact it was just a fanciful essay from a political theorist at LSE. Did it hold water, even on its own terms?
No. Firstly, Dr Oliver Curry seems to think that geographical and social mobility are new things, and that they will produce uniformly coffee-coloured humans in 1,000 years. Oliver has perhaps not been to Brazil, where black Africans, white Europeans and Native Americans have been having children together for many centuries. The Brazilians have not gone coffee-coloured: in fact they still show a wide range of skin pigmentation, from black to tan. Studies of skin pigmentation (some specifically performed in Brazil) show that skin pigmentation seems not to be related to the extent of your African heritage, and suggest that colour may be coded for by a fairly small number of genes, and probably doesn’t blend and even out as Oliver suggests.
What about his other ideas? He theorised that ultimately, through extreme socio-economic divisions in society, humans will divide into two species: one tall, thin symmetrical, clean, healthy, intelligent and creative; the other short, stocky, asymmetrical, grubby, unhealthy and not as bright. Much like the peace-loving Eloi and the cannibalistic Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
Evolutionary theory is probably one of the top three most important ideas of our time, and it seems a shame to get it wrong. This ridiculous set of claims was covered in every British newspaper as a news story, but none of them thought to mention that dividing into species, as Curry thinks we will do, usually requires some fairly strong pressures, like, say, geographical divisions. The Tasmanian Aboriginals, for example, who had been isolated for 10,000 years, were still able to have children with other humans from outside. ‘Sympatric speciation’, a division into species where the two groups live in the same place, divided only by socioeconomic factors, as Curry is proposing, is even tougher. For a while, many scientists didn’t think it happened at all. It would require that these divides were absolute, although history shows that attractive impoverished females and wealthy ugly men can be remarkably resourceful in love.
I could go on—the full press release is at badscience.net for your amusement. But the trivial problems in this trivial essay are not the issue: what’s odd is how it became a ‘boffins today said’ science story all over the media, with the BBC, the Telegraph, the Sun, the Scotsman, Metro and many more lapping it up without criticism.
How does this happen? By now you don’t need me to tell you that the ‘research’—or ‘essay’—was paid for by Bravo, a bikini-and-fast-car ‘men’s TV channel’ which was celebrating its twenty-first year in operation. (In the week of Dr Curry’s important science essay, just to give you a flavour of the channel, you could catch the movie classic Temptations: ‘When a group of farm workers find that the bank intends to foreclose on their property, they console each other with a succession of steamy romps.’ This might go some way to explaining the ‘pert breasts’ angle of his ‘new research’.)
I spoke to friends on various newspapers, proper science reporters who told me they had stand-up rows with their newsdesks, trying to explain that this was not a science news story. But if they refused to write it, some other journalist would—you will often find that the worst science stories are written by consumer correspondents, or news generalists—and if I can borrow a concept from evolutionary theory myself, the selection pressure on employees in national newspapers is for journalists who compliantly and swiftly write up commercial puff nonsense as ‘science news’.
One thing that fascinates me is this: Dr Curry is a proper academic (although a political theorist, not a scientist). I’m not seeking to rubbish his career. I’m sure he’s done lots of stimulating work, but in all likelihood nothing he will ever do in his profession as a relatively accomplished academic at a leading Russell Group university will ever generate as much media coverage—or have as much cultural penetrance—as this childish, lucrative, fanciful, wrong essay, which explains nothing to anybody. Isn’t life strange?
‘Jessica Alba has the perfect wiggle, study says’
That’s a headline from the Daily Telegraph, over a story that got picked up by Fox News, no less, and in both cases it was accompanied by compelling imagery of some very hot totty. This is the last wacky story we’ll do, and I’m only including this one because it features some very fearless undercover work.
‘Jessica Alba, the film actress, has the ultimate sexy strut, according to a team of Cambridge mathematicians.’ This important study was the work of a team—apparently—headed by Professor Richard Weber of Cambridge University. I was particularly delighted to see it finally appear in print since, in the name of research, I had discussed prostituting my own reputation for it with Clarion, the PR company responsible, six months earlier, and there’s nothing like watching flowers bloom.
Here is their opening email:
We are conducting a survey into the celebrity top ten sexiest walks for my client Veet (hair removal cream) and we would like to back up our survey with an equation from an expert to work out which celebrity has the sexiest walk, with theory behind it. We would like help from a doctor of psychology or someone similar who can come up with equations to back up our findings, as we feel that having an expert comment and an equation will give the story more weight.
It got them, as we have seen, onto the news pages of the Daily Telegraph.
I replied immediately. ‘Are there any factors you would particularly like to have in the equation?’ I asked. ‘Something sexual, perhaps?’ ‘Hi Dr Ben,’ replied Kiren. ‘We would really like the factors of the equation to include the thigh to calf ratio, the shape of the leg, the look of the skin and the wiggle (swing) of the hips…There is a fee of ￡500 which we would pay for your services.’
There was survey data too. ‘We haven’t conducted the survey yet,’ Kiren told me, ‘but we know what results we want to achieve.’ That’s the spirit! ‘We want Beyonce to come out on top followed by other celebrities with curvy legs such as J-Lo and Kylie and celebrities like Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse to be at the bottom e.g.—skinny and pale unshapely legs are not as sexy.’ The survey, it turned out, was an internal email sent around the company. I rejected their kind offer, and waited. Professor Richard Weber did not. He regrets it. When the story came out, I emailed him, and it turned out that things were even more absurd than was necessary. Even after rigging their survey, they had to re-rig it:
The Clarion press release was not approved by me and is factually incorrect and misleading in suggesting there has been any serious attempt to do serious mathematics here. No ‘team of Cambridge mathematicians’ has been involved. Clarion asked me to help by analysing survey data from eight hundred men in which they were asked to rank ten celebrities for ‘sexiness of walk’. And Jessica Alba did not come top. She came seventh.
Are these stories so bad? They are certainly pointless, and reflect a kind of contempt for science. They are merely PR promotional pieces for the companies which plant them, but it’s telling that they know exactly where newspapers’ weaknesses lie: as we shall see, bogus survey data is a hot ticket in the media.
And did Clarion Communications really get eight hundred respondents to an internal email survey for their research, where they knew the result they wanted beforehand, and where Jessica Alba came seventh, but was mysteriously promoted to first after the analysis? Yes, maybe: Clarion is part of WPP, one of the world’s largest ‘communications services’ groups. It does advertising, PR and lobbying, has a turnover of around ￡6 billion, and employs 100,000 people in a hundred countries.
These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.
Stats, miracle cures and hidden scares
How can we explain the hopelessness of media coverage of science? A lack of expertise is one part of the story, but there are other, more interesting elements. Over half of all the science coverage in a newspaper is concerned with health, because stories of what will kill or cure us are highly motivating, and in this field the pace of research has changed dramatically, as I have already briefly mentioned. This is important background. Before 1935 doctors were basically useless. We had morphine for pain relief- a drug with superficial charm, at least—and we could do operations fairly cleanly, although with huge doses of anaesthetics, because we hadn’t yet sorted out well-targeted muscle-relaxant drugs. Then suddenly, between about 1935 and 1975, science poured out an almost constant stream of miracle cures. If you got TB in the 1920s, you died, pale and emaciated, in the style of a romantic poet. If you got TB in the 1970s, then in all likelihood you would live to a ripe old age. You might have to take rifampicin and isoniazid for months on end, and they’re not nice drugs, and the side-effects will make your eyeballs and wee go pink, but if all goes well you will live to see inventions unimaginable in your childhood.
It wasn’t just the drugs. Everything we associate with modern medicine happened in that time, and it was a barrage of miracles: kidney dialysis machines allowed people to live on despite losing two vital organs. Transplants brought people back from a death sentence. CT scanners could give three-dimensional images of the inside of a living person. Heart surgery rocketed forward. Almost every drug you’ve ever heard of was invented. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (the business with the chest compressions and the electric shocks to bring you back) began in earnest.
Let’s not forget polio. The disease paralyses your muscles, and if it affects those of your chest wall, you literally cannot pull air in and out: so you die. Well, reasoned the doctors, polio paralysis often retreats spontaneously. Perhaps, if you could just keep these patients breathing somehow, for weeks on end if necessary, with mechanical ventilation, a bag and a mask, then they might, with time, start to breathe independently once more. They were right. People almost literally came back from the dead, and so intensive care units were born.
Alongside these absolute undeniable miracles, we really were finding those simple, direct, hidden killers that the media still pine for so desperately in their headlines. In 1950 Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill published a preliminary ‘case-control study’—where you gather cases of people with a particular disease, and find similar people who don’t have it, and compare the lifestyle risk factors between the groups—which showed a strong relationship between lung cancer and smoking. The British Doctors Study in 1954 looked at 40,000 doctors—medics are good to study, because they’re on the GMC register, so you can find them again easily to see what happened later in their life—and confirmed the finding. Doll and Bradford Hill had been wondering if lung cancer might be related to tarmac, or petrol; but smoking, to everybody’s genuine surprise, turned out to cause it in 97 per cent of cases. You will find a massive distraction on the subject in this footnote.*
≡ In some ways, perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise. The Germans had identified a rise in lung cancer in the 1920s, but suggested—quite reasonably—that it might be related to poison-gas exposure in the Great War. In the 1930s, identifying toxic threats in the environment became an important feature of the Nazi project to build a master race through ‘racial hygiene’.
Two researchers, Schairer and Schoniger, published their own case-control study in 1943, demonstrating a relationship between smoking and lung cancer almost a decade before any researchers elsewhere. Their paper wasn’t mentioned in the classic Doll and Bradford Hill paper of 1950, and if you check in the Science Citation Index, it was referred to only four times in the 1960s, once in the 1970s, and then not again until 1988, despite providing valuable information. Some might argue that this shows the danger of dismissing sources you dislike. But Nazi scientific and medical research was bound up with the horrors of cold-blooded mass murder, and the strange puritanical ideologies of Nazism. It was almost universally disregarded, and with good reason. Doctors had been active participants in the Nazi project, and joined Hitler’s National Socialist Party in greater numbers than any other profession (45 per cent of them were party members, compared with 20 per cent of teachers).
German scientists involved in the smoking project included racial theorists, but also researchers interested in the heritability of frailties created by tobacco, and the question of whether people could be rendered ‘degenerate’ by their environment. Research on smoking was directed by Karl Astel, who helped to organist- the ‘euthanasia’ operation that murdered 200,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and assisted in the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ as head of the Office of Racial Affairs.
The golden age—mythical and simplistic though that model maybe—ended in the 1970s. But medical research did not grind to a halt. Far from it: your chances of dying as a middle-aged man have probably halved over the past thirty years, but this is not because of any single, dramatic, headline-grabbing breakthrough. Medical academic research today moves forward through the gradual emergence of small incremental improvements, in our understanding of drugs, their dangers and benefits, best practice in their prescription, the nerdy refinement of obscure surgical techniques, identification of modest risk factors, and their avoidance through public health programmes (like ‘five-a-day’) which are themselves hard to validate.
This is the major problem for the media when they try to cover medical academic research these days: you cannot crowbar these small incremental steps—which in the aggregate make a sizeable contribution to health—into the pre-existing ‘miracle-cure-hidden-scare’ template.
I would go further, and argue that science itself works very badly as a news story: it is by its very nature a subject for the ‘features’ section, because it does not generally move ahead by sudden, epoch-making breakthroughs. It moves ahead by gradually emergent themes and theories, supported by a raft of evidence from a number of different disciplines on a number of different explanatory levels. Yet the media remain obsessed with ‘new breakthroughs’.
It’s quite understandable that newspapers should feel it’s their job to write about new stuff. But if an experimental result is newsworthy, it can often be for the same reasons that mean it is probably wrong: it must be new, and unexpected, it must change what we previously thought; which is to say, it must be a single, lone piece of information which contradicts a large amount of pre-existing experimental evidence.
There has been a lot of excellent work done, much of it by a Greek academic called John Ioannidis, demonstrating how and why a large amount of brand-new research with unexpected results will subsequently turn out to be false. This is clearly important in the application of scientific research to everyday work, for example in medicine, and I suspect most people intuitively understand that: you would be unwise to risk your life on a single piece of unexpected data that went against the grain.
In the aggregate, these ‘breakthrough’ stories sell the idea that science—and indeed the whole empirical world view—is only about tenuous, new, hotly contested data and spectacular breakthroughs. This reinforces one of the key humanities graduates’ parodies of science: as well as being irrelevant boffinry, science is temporary, changeable, constantly revising itself, like a transient fad. Scientific findings, the argument goes, are therefore dismissible.
While this is true at the bleeding edges of various research fields, it’s worth bearing in mind that Archimedes has been right about why things float for a couple of millennia. He also understood why levers work, and Newtonian physics will probably be right about the behaviour of snooker balls forever.*
≡ I cheerfully admit to borrowing these examples from fabulous Professor Lewis Wolpert.
But somehow this impression about the changeability of science has bled through to the core claims. Anything can be rubbished.
But that is all close to hand-waving. We should now look at how the media cover science, unpick the real meanings behind the phrase ‘research has shown’, and, most importantly of all, examine the ways in which the media repeatedly and routinely misrepresent and misunderstand statistics.
‘Research has shown…’
The biggest problem with science stories is that they routinely contain no scientific evidence at all. Why? Because papers think you won’t understand the ‘science bit’, so all stories involving science must be dumbed down, in a desperate bid to seduce and engage the ignorant, who are not interested in science anyway (perhaps because journalists think it is good for you, and so should be democratised).
In some respects these are admirable impulses, but there are certain inconsistencies I can’t help noticing. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. I can barely understand most of the sports section. In the literature pull-out, there are five-page-long essays which I find completely impenetrable, where the more Russian novelists you can rope in the cleverer everybody thinks you are. I do not complain about this: I envy it.
If you are simply presented with the conclusions of a piece of research, without being told what was measured, how, and what was found—the evidence—then you are simply taking the researchers’ conclusions at face value, and being given no insight into the process. The problems with this are best explained by a simple example.
Compare the two sentences ‘Research has shown that black children in America tend to perform less well in IQ tests than white children’ and ‘Research has shown that black people are less intelligent than white people.’ The first tells you about what the research found: it is the evidence. The second tells you the hypothesis, somebody’s interpretation of the evidence: somebody who, you will agree, doesn’t know much about the relationship between IQ tests and intelligence.
With science, as we have seen repeatedly, the devil is in the detail, and in a research paper there is a very clear format: you have the methods and results section, the meat, where you describe what was done, and what was measured; and then you have the conclusions section, quite separately, where you give your impressions, and mesh your findings with those of others to decide whether they are compatible with each other, and with a given theory. Often you cannot trust researchers to come up with a satisfactory conclusion on their results—they might be really excited about one theory—and you need to check their actual experiments to form your own view. This requires that news reports are about published research which can, at least, be read somewhere. It is also the reason why publication in full—and review by anyone in the world who wants to read your paper—is more important than ‘peer review’, the process whereby academic journal articles are given the once-over by a few academics working in the field, checking for gross errors and the like.
In the realm of their favourite scares, there is a conspicuous over-reliance by newspapers on scientific research that has not been published at all. This is true of almost all of the more recent headline stories on new MMR research, for example. One regularly quoted source, Dr Arthur Krigsman, has been making widely reported claims for new scientific evidence on MMR since 2002, and has yet to publish his work in an academic journal to this day, six years later. Similarly, the unpublished ‘GM potato’ claims of Dr Arpad Pusztai that genetically modified potatoes caused cancer in rats resulted in ‘Frankenstein food’ headlines for a whole year before the research was finally published, and could be read and meaningfully assessed. Contrary to the media speculation, his work did not support the hypothesis that GM is injurious to health (this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing—as we will see later).
Once you become aware of the difference between the evidence and the hypothesis, you start to notice how very rarely you get to find out what any research has really shown when journalists say ‘research has shown’.
Sometimes it’s clear that the journalists themselves simply don’t understand the unsubtle difference between the evidence and the hypothesis. The Times, for example, covered an experiment which showed that having younger siblings was associated with a lower incidence of multiple sclerosis. MS is caused by the immune system turning on the body. ‘This is more likely to happen if a child at a key stage of development is not exposed to infections from younger siblings, says the study.’ That’s what The Times said.
But it’s wrong. That’s the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, that’s the theory, the framework into which the evidence might fit, but it’s not what the study showed: the study just found that having younger siblings seemed to be somewhat protective against MS.
It didn’t say what the mechanism was, it couldn’t say why there was a relationship, such as whether it happened through greater exposure to infections. It was just an observation. The Times confused the evidence with hypothesis, and I am very glad to have got that little gripe out of my system.
How do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? Often they use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. ‘Scientists today said…Scientists revealed…Scientists warned’. If they want balance, you’ll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach which can be seen at its most dangerous in the myth that scientists were ‘divided’ over the safety of MMR). One scientist will ‘reveal’ something, and then another will ‘challenge’ it. A bit like Jedi knights.
There is a danger with authority-figure coverage, in the absence of real evidence, because it leaves the field wide open for questionable authority figures to waltz in. Gillian McKeith, Andrew Wakefield and the rest can all get a whole lot further in an environment where their authority is taken as read, because their reasoning and evidence are rarely publicly examined.
Worse than that, where there is controversy about what the evidence shows, it reduces the discussion to a slanging match, because a claim such as ‘MMR causes autism’ (or not), is only critiqued in terms of the character of the person who is making the statement, rather than the evidence they are able to present. There is no need for this, as we shall see, because people are not stupid, and the evidence is often pretty easy to understand.
It also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists’ parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, changeable, didactic truth statements from arbitrary unelected authority figures. When they start to write about serious issues like MMR, you can see that this is what people in the media really think science is about. The next stop on our journey is inevitably going to be statistics, because this is one area that causes unique problems for the media. But first, we need to go on a brief diversion.