Fox News Irritates Me
I participate on a parenting message board primarily made up of Christian mommas who are pretty crunchy. There are quite a few who do not vaccinate their children. So you can imagine their outrage when it was reported that there were some tainted Hib vaccines given and that the vaccine had been recalled. The vaccines in question were tainted with the bacteria known as Bacillis cereus. Ironically, I just finished studying that little critter in depth this past semester in my microbiology class.
So imagine my surprise when I read on my crunchy parenting board that Fox News had reported that “B. cereus is a spore-making microorganism commonly associated with food that causes cervical cancer.” Okay, granted I don’t know everything there is to know about this bacteria, but surely we would not have been allowed to handle a bacteria with that kind of risk! Everything else we worked with could cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, etc., but cancer?? So I did some digging.
When I searched for the words “Bacillis cereus“‘ and “cervical cancer,” the only site that was a hit was Fox News. But conveniently, a few days after the initial report, they quietly changed the story and never reported loudly and clearly that they had completely screwed up. Now the story reads, “It is a spore-making microorganism commonly associated with food poisoning and causes diarrhea and vomiting in people who eat contaminated foods.”
But here’s the thing. Fox News is primarily watched by people who are a bit suspicious of other news outlets or of the government. There are a good many women on the parenting board who were up. in. arms. over this, because they think it is a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical companies and the government to sell more Gardasil, which is the vaccine designed to help prevent HPV which is a common cause of cervical abnormalities that can cancer. Fox can quietly sweep their reporting error under the rug and cry out, “But we fixed our mistake!” and yet the damage is done. People are more suspicious of a conspiracy by pharmaceuticals and the government because of false reporting.
And folks, that’s my conspiracy theory. I’m a bit suspicious that this was not just a little mistake. I have a theory that Fox News isn’t really made up of conservative people. I think it is made up of people who have figured out how to make a buck off of those who have a beef with other news outlets. And they do that by creating hype and sensationalizing news stories. Hey! Just like the “other” media outlets!
And now I’m off to tune in to NPR….
December 21st, 2007 at 2:06 pm
I would imagine there are a fair number of people who don’t realize that HPV and HiB are not the same thing. Regardless of any misinformation (or disinformation) that may be around, there seems to be little good and accurate information being published that isn’t tarnished by being published in an advertisement coming from a pharmaceutical company. Certainly not in the traditional media (magazines, newspapers, TV) at any rate.
I get really frustrated when I read/hear reporting of a ‘new study’, find the conclusions of the article/report implausible, and then discover that that’s because what the media reported was not what the study actually found.