Fiona Veitch Smith

Last night I watched The Day After Tomorrow on DVD. Yikes! Did you know we’re all going to freeze to death because of global warming? OK, so it’s only a film, but a film based on a scientific theory. As far as I understand it, because the earth is overheating due to unsustainable industrial development, the polar caps are beginning to melt, pouring fresh water into salty oceans. This ‘desalination’ of the oceans may lead to massive climate change, which will result in a new ice age.

Now the only reason I’m not stocking up on thermal underwear is that I recently read State of Fear by Michael Crichton (Harper Collins, 2004) in which the author of Jurassic Park puts forward the opposite theory: the earth’s not warming up at all, at least no more than it would naturally do without the intervention of man. This manifesto of the anti-global warming lobby, thinly disguised as a novel, points the finger at the media for a disinformation campaign on behalf of shady, unscrupulous figures trying to make a fast buck in the name of environmentalism.

Global Warming

So who am I to believe? On the one hand we have (reportedly) the majority of the world’s scientists and on the other, jovial botanist David Bellamy, Michael Crichton and the American government. (OK, so that’s a bit mean: there are quite a few scientists who don’t tow the global warming line, but they’re still vastly in the minority.)

I don’t mind stating up front that I’m not with Bellamy et al, but I doubt that I could win a debate with any of them - I’m not an expert on global warming and neither, I doubt, are the majority of you. But there’s one point with which I agree wholeheartedly with Crichton: I only know what I think I know because I’ve read, seen or heard it through the media. The question is: how do these media-induced perceptions line up with reality?

SARS

And what about SARS or the dreaded human mutation of Avian Flu? The only SARS I’ve ever had close contact with is the South African Revenue Services. I still remember the expression on the postman’s face when he delivered a letter emblazoned with the tax service’s logo to my British home at the height of the last ‘crisis’!

But I must admit, despite being usually levelheaded about such things, I did think of going online to acquire the Tamiflu vaccine. A 10-second Internet search revealed that I could get ‘essential protection against Bird Flu’ for only 620 euros. At that point my level headedness returned.

The more eagle-eyed of you may have picked up that I’m incorrectly using SARS and Avian Flu interchangeably. And you probably aren’t virologists. SARS, of course, stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and is a human disease, caught, in the most publicised instance, from poultry. Avian Flu, as the name suggests, is a disease in birds. The mediated fear is that it may mutate and become a threat. Some scientists think it’s inevitable; others that it isn’t.

But how do I know this? I’m no brighter than most of you; I don’t have a science degree or even a subscription to New Scientist. I simply did an Internet search and clicked on the most official looking website I could find. The fact that it happened to be at the top of my favourite search engine list and I didn’t have much time to put this article together, also contributed to my choice of site.

Checking facts

Most journalists, like me, work to deadline. We don’t have all the time in the world to check and triple check facts. We don’t deliberately mislead the public, but sometimes errors creep in. I worked for a daily paper in South Africa that sometimes got things wrong in their morning edition then corrected them for the afternoon one as soon as the error came to their attention. Sometimes it wasn’t that they’d simply got their facts wrong, but that another source emerged during the morning shedding new light on the first story. But what if someone only read the morning edition?

Before we leave sarswatch let’s take a closer look at the site. If you scroll right down to the bottom of the home page you’ll see that all material is copyrighted to someone called Tim Bishop. There’s a link to his website. If you follow it you will discover that he’s not an expert at all, just an ‘entrepreneur, writer, and product manager and project manager, living in Berkeley, California.’ A quick read of the site (note quick, there could have been something I missed) tells me that Tim set up this non-profit site as a public service. It’s good to know, however, that it was named ‘site of the week’ by the British Medical Journal, so my faith is not completely shaken. When I follow the link to the BMJ it appears legit.

But how many members of the 12.9 million British households that have access to the Internet (National Statistics Omnibus Survey July 2005) would have bothered following the trail? Even worse, how many of the 36 million British newspaper readers (National Marketing Agency) would have taken the trouble to find a computer, go online then check out everything they’d been told? Or the TV news viewers? Or the radio news listeners? And how many of you bothered to check out my statistics despite me giving you the links?

Credible sources

As a young journalist I was taught to weigh the credibility of information against the known or perceived credibility of the source. In other words, who said it was just as important as what was said. The ‘official’ version of events was always sought although this was not always considered the most credible. For example, in the apartheid era, a human rights activist’s version of racially fuelled events was sought to bring balance to the obviously biased government version.

This doesn’t mean that the official version of everything is ‘wrong’ just that the motives behind the given version need to be examined. Is there an economic motive? An ethical motive? A political motive? In this media directed world, there are people who believe everything, and those who believe nothing. I have an avowed Tory friend who refuses to believe any official government statement because she doesn’t trust Tony Blair! More seriously, there are millions of people dying of HIV infection in Africa, many of whom simply just don’t believe what health officials tell them.

The furore around the MMR vaccine is another prime example. My primary source, if you would like to know, is BBC Online. The BBC is widely perceived as being one of the most accurate sources of news and information around. I say perceived, because this may or may not be true, but people believe that it is. The BBC has worked hard to create an image of unbiased, factually based reporting. But this image was somewhat tarnished as a result of the Andrew Gilligan interview with David Kelly concerning WMDs – I won’t bother spelling this one out; like SARS and HIV you all know what I mean thanks to the media.

Despite this blip, I still rate the BBC over most other news agencies. Not that I think it’s infallible, just that they get it right more often than they get it wrong.

MMR

So back to MMR. The intro paragraph in an article entitled MMR Research Timeline states: ‘Despite continued attempts by the Department of Health and doctors (to persuade people) that the vaccine is safe, some parents still have doubts about its safety.’ The article was written in June 2003. This parental doubt has continued despite the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, who published the original article that started the panic, recanting. And despite the massive media coverage of the so-called discrediting of Dr Andrew Wakefield, the author of the report, and his theory that MMR is linked to autism.

For those of you who might have been on Mars for the last seven years (by the way, did you spot the Beagle?) I’ll briefly recap. In 1998 Dr Wakefield, a transplant surgeon who had done research into inflammatory bowel disease, published the results of a study of 12 children, which suggested that their bowel troubles might be linked to measles. As all these children had received the Measles Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine in their second year, he considered that there might be a further link to the combined vaccine. It was later revealed that Wakefield had been paid to study whether or not some children had developed autism because of the MMR. Some children appeared in both studies. The Lancet claimed that it didn’t know of this conflict of interest at the time and would never have published the initial article if it had done so.

In November 2004 Channel 4 flighted a documentary by researcher Brian Deer that suggested that Wakefield had profited from the worldwide MMR scare by providing single jabs of the three vaccines. The single jabs could not be accessed on the NHS and had to be imported. However, many parents found the cost prohibitive and simply did not have their children vaccinated. The result has been localised outbreaks of measles, a potentially fatal disease that had almost been eradicated in the UK by the MMR vaccine.

Who’s to blame?

So what portion of blame can be attributed to the media? Dr Wakefield’s initial findings were never presented as conclusive. In the Lancet article he called for ‘further research’. In response, the Medical Research Council reviewed the study and concluded that there was ‘no evidence to indicate any link’. But when the story hit the popular media, pandemonium broke out. Week after week readers and viewers were presented with families of autistic children who believed they had been damaged by the MMR. Parents began to panic and no matter how many articles were run discounting the theory, an increasing number of worried parents joined Internet forums and support groups, which shared information about ‘what the authorities aren’t telling you’.

The furore seems to have finally subsided with a recent study in Japan proving ‘conclusively’ that there is no link between MMR and autism, but I still know of some parents who are not convinced. Why not? The media may have started the scare by reporting something that should not have been presented to the unscientifically trained masses at such an early stage, but they have also done their best to correct it by publishing the other side of the debate. People make their own choices. When presented with two sides to an argument they will probably choose to believe the one that backs up their own views anyway. Yes, the way an issue is presented (tear jerking testimonies by the parents of autistic children vs the bland testimony of a scientist, for example) can influence a reader or viewer’s perception of a story, but in the end, it’s our decision.

Personal choices

I’m the mother of a 10-month-old baby and in the next six months she will need to get the MMR. I’ve read whatever I can find in the media and have come to the conclusion that the majority of the world’s scientists back the MMR and only a few appear not to. So we’ll go for the MMR. I may be wrong and my daughter’s life will be affected, but I can only trust what better-informed people tell me. And how do they tell me? Through the biased, sensationalist, over-simplified mode of communication known as the media.

But what if the media had never covered the MMR story? I would never have known about Dr Wakefield’s theory, nor would the majority of you. It would never have been exposed to public scrutiny and we would never have known that it’s something we should think about. The same with global warming. This is called ‘setting the agenda’ and it has an enormous impact on the way we view our world.

For example, do we ever hear about the daily persecution of Christians around the globe? At a recent workshop participants were asked to tell the group three things about themselves. One of them had to be a ‘cause, political or otherwise’ that we felt strongly about. When I said the worldwide persecution of Christians, one person responded: ‘but that doesn’t happen anymore.’ How could she have such a view? Simply because she’d never been exposed to another.

Christian media

And it is only because I peruse the Christian media that I do. The Christian media make a point of setting a Christian agenda. And publications, like the Plain Truth, have an important role to play in informing people who don’t necessarily go to church that there is an alternative worldview.

Another publication that did that, The Christian Herald, has sadly closed down after 130 years. Its witness will be sorely missed. In Cape Town I taught briefly at a Christian college called Media Village. One of its aims is to train students to industry standard so they can get jobs in the secular media and help put Christianity back on the agenda.

Some years ago I met a Belgian man who was amazed to find out I was a Christian. ‘But no one believes that stuff any more. Not educated people anyway,’ he said. ‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘It’s just what I’ve read in the media,’ he answered.

All of which goes to prove that, at the end of the day, perception is reality.

First appeared in Plain Truth as ‘Mediating Reality, February 2006

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