Couric's anti-vaccination segment a symptom of wider scientific illiteracy

[eridani]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/05/1260374/-Couric-s-anti-vaccination-segment-a-symptom-of-wider-scientific-illiteracy#

Because Katie Couric did a show giving voice to meritless anti-vaccine forces, people are going to die. You really can't get around that; the deaths may be decades from now, and the links from here to there may never be recognized even by the people around whom the threads are tied, but somewhere in the Katie Couric audience there are going to be people who are not going to vaccinate their children against a deadly disease because Katie Couric put it in their heads that there was a risk in doing it that simply is not there, and those children are going to someday get that disease, and they are going to die from it. Think of any defense you like, but the outcome is the same. Oh, but we were just raising questions is the well-worn excuse of sensationalists everywhere, but if you are raising questions where there are, in fact, no serious questions, you are doing harm.

The problem here is, once again, scientific illiteracy. Presenting a mother who believes her daughter died from a vaccine and that other daughters are dying from a vaccine does not count as evidence of it happening, and certainly does not count as a counterargument to vast reams of evidence demonstrating the opposite. I could not go on television and claim that if my daughter died ten days after watching Dora the Explorer, it was clearly Dora the Explorer that killed her. I could not go on television and claim that because I ate a cheeseburger only days before my neighbor had a car accident, cheeseburgers are a cause of neighborhood bad luck.

<snip>

Do journalism schools teach statistics? Do they teach the scientific method even in the broadest sense, the barest minimum of how to tell evidence from coincidence? Why the hell not? Would this not be a key tool of journalism, every bit as much as in any other fact-seeking endeavor?

These are not difficult questions or a difficult story, and Katie Couric and her producers are not gullible people. There is no evidence that the HPV vaccine is unsafe. There is no evidence that serious side effects are anything but rare, and the vaccine is already well

[defacto7]

1. The anti-vaccine propaganda

is so old it's ludicrous. It comes right out of the early 1980's homeschooling, religious extremist, dresses higher than the ankles is sin, have 20 children in your quiver, crowd. I have a sibling that went that route and they live on a completely different planet and have no sense of the real world.

[SidDithers]

2. DU rec...

plenty of scientific illiteracy on display at DU sometimes.

Thanks for posting.

Sid

[lostincalifornia]

3. This is the best argument for an international scientific community. If the US is ever thrown into

a scientific dark ages, then someone else in the international community will continue the progress while others are left behind.

[hatrack]

4. Well, we have to give "both sides" of the story, you see, and . . .

[Eleanors38]

7. Oh, yes, the Right & the Left (assuming the latter exists).

[Blue_Tires]

5. "wider scientific illiteracy??"

The writer is JUST now noticing this? Was this writer in a coma during the George W. Bush era??

[SheilaT]

6. I'm fairly certain journalism schools don't teach statistics.

Nor do they teach formal logic. They teach how to be a reporter.

There is also a stunning lack of context in almost all journalism. There's a huge lack of critical thinking, of asking questions that would actually reveal answers. To be at least a little fair, so much of journalism is deadline driven. Even with that, there's a bizarre living in the pure now that is a lot like someone with no long-term memory, who only lives in the present three or four minutes.

Perhaps more to the point, and I was just looking at the courses offered at the graduate level in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University which is considered to be a very good program (http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/experience/msj/curriculum/) and what stands out is that there is nothing outside of their perspective of journalism. Okay, so this is what happens in any graduate program, that you concentrate on the subject at hand, but still. I found it a bit scary. Especially if the students have mostly majored in journalism as an undergraduate.

I am aware that old-time reporters held journalism degrees in great scorn, but they are almost all retired and dead by now.

This is a lot like the problem of school teachers. Most of them these days major in education, and very few have even a minor in the subject matter they're teaching. So they at least theoretically know teaching methods, but they may know very little about science, history, math, or whatever. The foreign language teachers are usually an exception in that they've generally taken lots of coursework in their language.

[Eleanors38]

8. To paraphrase one social observer...

We live in a time when feelings and Comfort Zones™ are more important than facts. And science sucks, too.

[xchrom]

9. du rec.

[yellowcanine]

10. A relative of mine is convinced her nephew got mercury poisoning from vaccines.

Even though that is physically impossible because the kind of mercury associated with high mercury levels in the blood is methyl mercury and it is not used in vaccines - but you can get from eating tuna. It does no good to explain this to people who believe that vaccines are bad - they have their own facts.

[MissMillie]

11. The Dopplest 9000

What is happening now is the only thing that is happening:


http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/264085/february-10-2010/we-re-off-to-see-the-blizzard

[jwirr]

12. I agree with you totally but don't think it is only education that is the problem. Too many of these

so called journalists are on the corporate dole.