Why Is Katie Couric Promoting Vaccine Skeptics?, When a former hard-hitting news anchor’s daytime talk show suffers dangerously slipping ratings, what’s the next step? If it’s Katie Couric, the answer is to trade a history of responsible reporting for irresponsible scaremongering. In her segment last week on the HPV vaccine, Couric delivered a blow to both public health and her image. The question now is what Couric – if she’s willing – can do to repair the damage.
It’s a sad turn of events for Couric, once known for drawing attention to public health issues such as colon cancer, which killed her husband. The former CBS anchor, soon headed for Yahoo! News, is now scaring the public away from a vaccine that actually prevents other kinds of cancer.
Last Wednesday’s segment focused on Gardasil, a vaccine licensed by the FDA to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV), the sexually transmitted infection responsible for 26,000 cases of cervical, oral, penile and anal cancers a year. Almost a decade of data, covering 50 million administrated doses, supports the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. The handful of reports of serious events happening after vaccination (including death and severe disability) have been investigated and determined to be unrelated to the vaccine. But you wouldn’t think as much if you watched the show.
Couric unwittingly captured the core problem with her episode when she prefaced a question to a guest with this gem: “We’ve obviously heard two different sides about the HPV vaccine, and I think for parents watching, it’s probably still rather confusing when you hear these heartbreaking stories that these families have endured.” The irony lay in the fact that Couric herself exacerbated the confusion, abdicating her responsibility as a journalist to present the facts about the vaccine unambiguously to her audience.
On one hand, the episode may be precisely what “Katie insiders” had in mind when they complained in the Hollywood Reporter back in October that she had “refused to shape shows with softer features to appeal to daytime’s key 25-to-54-year-old female demo, insisting instead on the kind of harder-edged interviews she enjoyed on Today and her stint as anchor of CBS Evening News.” Indeed, the show boasted Oprah-worthy heartbreaking stories of girls who were supposedly killed or seriously injured by the vaccine. And Couric certainly went softer, leaving her guests’ dubious claims unchallenged.
On the other hand, Couric may have irreparably damaged her image along with the harm she visited on public health. Time’s Alexandra Sifferlin asked if Couric would become the next Jenny McCarthy, famous for promoting pseudoscientific anti-vaccine views. Multiple Forbes columnists, Slate writers, Salon and others slammed the episode, cataloguing its inaccuracies and correcting its misinformation.
Yet the show’s response to the backlash–claiming to present “the facts supporting the potential of the vaccine” and a desire “to share multiple viewpoints”—offered no apologies. Now Couric confronts a crossroads of sorts: Does she take the path from respected journalist to sensationalistic tabloid star? Or does she step back and salvage her reputation?
It helps to understand what sins Couric committed in an episode offering an almost textbook example of false balance, the practice of presenting “both sides” of an issue as though they have equally valid evidence when, in fact, one has a clearly established evidence base that the other lacks. (Think of inviting 9/11 Truthers to join a show featuring 9/11 victims’ family members.) Media coverage of vaccines has a particularly sordid history of false balance already, but Couric tipped the scale toward the “side” without evidence, letting emotion outweigh facts.
One guest tearfully told of her daughter’s death, which the mother blamed on the vaccine. Then a mother-daughter couple (founders of an anti-vaccine website) told their harrowing journey supposedly caused by the vaccine. After assigning a “controversy” where none existed with the episode title,
“The HPV Controversy,” Couric drummed up more fear with the subtitles: “Was the HPV Vaccine Responsible for One Girl’s Death?” and “Is the HPV Vaccine Safe?” As Michael Hiltzik noted at the LA Times, “Merely to ask the questions is to validate them.”
In the segment, Couric did not demand evidence to show the vaccine actually caused the problems (and no evidence to date substantiates the possibility), and the mothers offered only vague assertions. Not that Couric seemed to mind: It’s been long established that emotional anecdotes trump facts and figures in the human mind—a trick of our amygdalae that can skew the risk-benefit calculus we make about issues such as vaccines.
It’s a sad turn of events for Couric, once known for drawing attention to public health issues such as colon cancer, which killed her husband. The former CBS anchor, soon headed for Yahoo! News, is now scaring the public away from a vaccine that actually prevents other kinds of cancer.
Last Wednesday’s segment focused on Gardasil, a vaccine licensed by the FDA to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV), the sexually transmitted infection responsible for 26,000 cases of cervical, oral, penile and anal cancers a year. Almost a decade of data, covering 50 million administrated doses, supports the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness. The handful of reports of serious events happening after vaccination (including death and severe disability) have been investigated and determined to be unrelated to the vaccine. But you wouldn’t think as much if you watched the show.
Couric unwittingly captured the core problem with her episode when she prefaced a question to a guest with this gem: “We’ve obviously heard two different sides about the HPV vaccine, and I think for parents watching, it’s probably still rather confusing when you hear these heartbreaking stories that these families have endured.” The irony lay in the fact that Couric herself exacerbated the confusion, abdicating her responsibility as a journalist to present the facts about the vaccine unambiguously to her audience.
On one hand, the episode may be precisely what “Katie insiders” had in mind when they complained in the Hollywood Reporter back in October that she had “refused to shape shows with softer features to appeal to daytime’s key 25-to-54-year-old female demo, insisting instead on the kind of harder-edged interviews she enjoyed on Today and her stint as anchor of CBS Evening News.” Indeed, the show boasted Oprah-worthy heartbreaking stories of girls who were supposedly killed or seriously injured by the vaccine. And Couric certainly went softer, leaving her guests’ dubious claims unchallenged.
On the other hand, Couric may have irreparably damaged her image along with the harm she visited on public health. Time’s Alexandra Sifferlin asked if Couric would become the next Jenny McCarthy, famous for promoting pseudoscientific anti-vaccine views. Multiple Forbes columnists, Slate writers, Salon and others slammed the episode, cataloguing its inaccuracies and correcting its misinformation.
Yet the show’s response to the backlash–claiming to present “the facts supporting the potential of the vaccine” and a desire “to share multiple viewpoints”—offered no apologies. Now Couric confronts a crossroads of sorts: Does she take the path from respected journalist to sensationalistic tabloid star? Or does she step back and salvage her reputation?
It helps to understand what sins Couric committed in an episode offering an almost textbook example of false balance, the practice of presenting “both sides” of an issue as though they have equally valid evidence when, in fact, one has a clearly established evidence base that the other lacks. (Think of inviting 9/11 Truthers to join a show featuring 9/11 victims’ family members.) Media coverage of vaccines has a particularly sordid history of false balance already, but Couric tipped the scale toward the “side” without evidence, letting emotion outweigh facts.
One guest tearfully told of her daughter’s death, which the mother blamed on the vaccine. Then a mother-daughter couple (founders of an anti-vaccine website) told their harrowing journey supposedly caused by the vaccine. After assigning a “controversy” where none existed with the episode title,
“The HPV Controversy,” Couric drummed up more fear with the subtitles: “Was the HPV Vaccine Responsible for One Girl’s Death?” and “Is the HPV Vaccine Safe?” As Michael Hiltzik noted at the LA Times, “Merely to ask the questions is to validate them.”
In the segment, Couric did not demand evidence to show the vaccine actually caused the problems (and no evidence to date substantiates the possibility), and the mothers offered only vague assertions. Not that Couric seemed to mind: It’s been long established that emotional anecdotes trump facts and figures in the human mind—a trick of our amygdalae that can skew the risk-benefit calculus we make about issues such as vaccines.
