Speaker: Viviane Fairbank (St Andrews & Stirling)

Should Science Journalists Know About Science?
Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, many journalists in the 2000s reported on one researcher’s unfounded claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. They treated the issue as an open question that required equal consideration of “both sides”: those who thought there was a causal link between vaccines and autism, and those who did not. Many commentators blamed journalists for the avoidable, unfortunate results that followed, including measles outbreaks among unvaccinated children in the US and UK.

The inclination is to interpret the MMR-vaccine case as showing not the impossibility of good journalism on politicized scientific issues, but rather the dangers of bad journalism: if science journalists had done their job properly, the idea goes, their work would have served to illuminate scientific knowledge instead of obfuscating it. This prompts the question: In what sense did journalists fail to grasp the relevant science regarding vaccines and autism, as their critics have claimed? And, more generally, to what epistemic norms ought we hold science journalists today? I call this the Epistemic Challenge for Science Journalism (ECSJ).

In this paper, I aim to answer the ECSJ by bringing together insights from practicing journalists and journalism educators, scholars of science communication, and epistemologists. In §1, I detail the MMR-vaccine case and outline the Epistemic Challenge for Science Journalism. In §2, I present the dominant answer to the ECSJ in the science communication and journalism education literature, which I call the Knowledge-Based Solution, and I argue that it is unconvincing: knowledge of science is neither sufficient nor necessary for good science journalism. In §3, I propose an alternative, which I call the Confirmation-Based Solution, and I show that it is able to make sense of the MMR-vaccine case and others in a satisfying way. In §4, I turn to recent debates about journalistic objectivity, and I argue that the Confirmation-Based Solution can respond to important concerns voiced by journalists and their audiences. §5 discusses my proposal in the context of philosophical debates about epistemic norms of assertion. §6 concludes.