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A very interesting seminar yesterday here at the Reuters Institute: Dr Tammy Boyce of the Risk, Science, Health and the Media Group at the University of Cardiff, presented key results from her new book, Health, Risk and News: The MMR Vaccine and the Media. Note: For those of you not aware of the MMR vaccine controversy here in the UK, wikipedia provides a good, brief summary. Dr Boyce studied all links in the "media chain" - sources, journalists and editors, content and audiences, which made for a very impressive and thorough study. Essentially, her view was that "the good story would have been no story", i.e. the controversy was largely media-created and recieved far, far more coverage than justified. However, she did not just "blame the journalists" but also stated that science communicators and scientific organizations could be criticised for not being active (nor proactive) enough in coming out and defending the MMR vaccine - according to her, individual doctors came out and defended the vaccine but many of the big scientific/medical associations did not manage to present a strong defense in the media, something that cannot be blamed on just the media. Interestingly, Dr Boyce did not absolve the public from blame either: the information was there, easily accessible, yet many people failed to take advantage of it and made bad decisions. The most interesting question to me as a journalism scholar was of course "Why did this become a story in the first place?". Dr Boyce presented several explanatory factors (that it was based on controversial science, that it was about children, that it was consistent with important news values), but noted that one was probably more important than the others: source activity, i.e. that the originator of the claims against the MMR vaccine, and organizations that took up the cause against the MMR vaccine, were very active and strategic in promoting their views through the media. However, another factor not mentioned during the presentation, but that came up during the discussion afterwards, that also seems to have been very important, is the highly politicized nature of the UK press. "It was essentially the Daily Mail that saw an opportunity to stick it to the Labour government," said Dr Boyce - the Daily Mail actively campaigned against the MMR virus, and the cause was taken up by The Sun as well. Because of pack journalism mechanisms, other media were then "forced" to follow the story as well. Dr Boyce convincingly showed how the MMR story became politicized from the start - for example, the most common source pairing (i.e. the two most prominent sources in any given news item) in MMR articles was a scientist (generally saying that the MMR vaccine was safe) and a politician (generally saying that they were taking public concerns seriously) - rather than, for example, a scientist (pro-MMR) and another scientist (anti-MMR). This led Dr Boyce to classify the MMR story as a political story rather than a science story - a distinction that was criticised by some seminar participants, who argued that trying to keep a story in the scientific domain effectively keeps it from being discussed and debated in public. Plug: I would definitely recommend Dr Boyce's book - it has relevance beyond just the discussion of health and risk reporting, also containing some very interesting observations on pack journalism (observations that definitely have a general relevance). EDIT: John Kelly has also blogged about the seminar here.