Long ago I used to read Time magazine every week; I liked to be kept informed about what was happening round the world, in an objective and concise fashion.
Then I began to realise how inaccurate its coverage of the Northern Ireland troubles was, and my doubts began to grow. If its Irish coverage is inaccurate, I surmised, the rest of its reports may be inaccurate as well. But flaws and lack of balance can happen closer to home.
I write a weekly column for an Irish daily, The Irish News, and during the mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR) scare last year I defended the vaccine strongly, emphasising its benefits and its safety, and criticising the wild speculation about its possible dangers. A few days later The Irish News carried, as its main front page feature, with an accompanying photograph, a story about a mother’s concern that her child had become ill as a result of the MMR vaccine.
I was a tad aggrieved at this; my own newspaper indulging in what I reckoned to be inaccurate reportage.
The emotive use of a single case was particularly regrettable—cold scientific evidence is quite impotent when pitched against a photograph of a sick child, as individuals are always more important than statistics.
It’s the same reason that James Cameron sticks a trite 90 minute love story on to the beginning of Titanic even though all we really wanted to see was the big ship hitting the iceberg and going down like a concrete squid. But Cameron knows that the individual is all powerful, and we care more about the nauseating adolescents we have come to know rather than the anonymous 1500 other people who died.
And we cannot fight fire with fire. I have no refuting emotive evidence worthy of a front page spread, no equivalent emotional sledgehammer, no picture of the thousands of healthy, happy Irish children spared illness and death precisely because they received the MMR vaccine.
In an ironic counterpoint to the way prestigious medical journals, the BMJ excepted, seem to publish mainly positive results, the lay media want only bad vibes, horror stories, stuff to scare their readers; good news, alas, is not often newsworthy.