Is this a media tipping point?

I’m not sure I should be even writing this article.  I’m worried I’m going to encounter some kind of quantum news effects, where if I somehow manage to probe into the inner workings of American Media, maybe I’ll accidentally send one electron flying off in the wrong direction, letting off some cascade that erases exactly what I want to talk to you about.  So it is with great trepidation that I tell you this.  In the words of Buffalo Springfield, “There’s something happening here.  What it is ain’t exactly clear.”  In the past week, I’ve seen two stories in relatively mainstream news outlets that actually take the scientific perspective on vaccines and alternative medicine.

Please tell me the waveform didn’t just collapse.

We all already know about the Wired article from a couple weeks back (if you don’t know about it, Wired’s cover story from October was called “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All”… I think I’m in love…).  On November 4^th, Michael Specter , science writer for “The New Yorker” released a book called Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, and on Sunday, NPR’s Weekend Edition had an almost eight minute interview between Specter and Scott Simon, where Specter was allowed to talk about the refusal of parents to vaccinate their children, organic vs. genetically modified food, homeopathy, and global warming… and he went for the scientific point of view on all of them.  And it’s awesome to listen to.  And here’s the big kicker.  On Tuesday, November 10^th, the AP put out an article “Experts: Placebo power behind many natural cures,” where the author, Marilynn Marchione, makes the case that “natural” and “alternative” cures have no benefit outside of the placebo effect.  Marchione discusses just how powerful the placebo effect can be, which is an important point to bring up.  People hear “placebo” and they think “non-functional.”  This is true in a way, but as Val Jones once pointed out to me, pain is an incredibly subjective feeling.  Because of pain’s mental component, something like a placebo can actually have a fairly striking effect.  Of course, if you take real medicine, you’ll get that placebo effect as well as the real effect of the medicine, but this doesn’t discount the power of the placebo, and the underestimation of placebo effects is, alongside the general distrust of modern medicine, one of the biggest reasons why alternative medicine continues to thrive.

Wired was cool and I thought Amy Wallace’s story was pretty fantastic, but Wired is sort of a magazine for the geekier part of the population.  These are our people, and seeing an article where they agree with us, while cool, is not much of a shocker.  NPR… well it’s NPR.  It’s bigger, it reaches more of an audience than Wired, especially a show like Weekend Edition.  But NPR is a sort of liberal-bent news organization.  I think they’re great.  I think they put out some of the best news in America, calm and rational, you know where their political cards are, but still, they don’t get everywhere.  But the Associated Press?  Almost every news organization on the planet gets some of its news from the AP.  Certainly, every web-based news source is taking stories directly from the AP feed, and for  Google News, Yahoo News, the AP is one of their prime sources.  The AP is big, and apparently, this story is only part of their story on Alternative Medicine or as they put it, “an occasional Associated Press series on their use and potential risks.”  Would I like the series to be less occasional?  Yes.  But it’s a pretty damn good article, and I’m glad it’s in such a wide-ranging news source.

I don’t know what’s causing it, but I am noticing a shift in how the media is reporting this stuff.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s all marshmallows and gumdrops, there’s plenty of woo-woo still out there.  When looking for an article to write about, I ran across the obituary of a cryptozoologist in the Huffington Post where the author began by referring to the cryptozoologist as “the man who came closer than anyone to proving the existence of the [Loch Ness monster].”  No.  I’m sorry.  You can’t be the closest to proving the existence of something that isn’t there.  It’s like if I claimed to be the closest to proving the existence of Superman because I spent years staring into phone booths and wearing red capes.  But you take these recent stories, you maybe include in there the St. Petersburg Times’ “The Truth Rundown,” (their five month-long series of articles on the harm that comes from Scientology) and you start to feel like maybe there’s something going on.

Maybe we’re getting near a tipping point.  Maybe we are at one of those moments where the skeptical movement can actually influence where the media goes next?  Well… maybe not.  But hey, it’s a nice thought.  Honestly, I don’t know if this is all about to collapse.  I don’t know when Oprah will next find a passion project thanks to her buddies Dr. Oz and Jenny the Menace and drag us screaming back into the miasma of nonsense but until then… hell… I’m cautiously optimistic.