Media Coverage Of Vaccinations

An important debate is brewing regarding the use of vaccines. Despite the widespread reporting of statistics that suggest the overall safety of vaccination technologies, a growing, and increasingly vocal, minority focuses on stories of individual illness and side effects from vaccination. These reports are carried in alternative media and touted by alternative groups that swear against vaccinating themselves and their children. Is either group obscuring the truth about vaccines? Are there reasons for the patterns in coverage? This paper attempts to disentangle issues relating to media coverage of vaccinations by examining the dominant frames the groups of media use to present the issue. In order to develop a sensible measure of media framing,

Understanding propaganda is extremely important to putting together an understanding of politics and popular opinion. Americans that watch average amounts of television and spend average amounts of time on the Internet are exposed to hundreds of thousands of news articles, advertisement and other forms of argument and persuasion every year (id at 4-6). We often feel that we know propaganda intuitively when we see it, and academic definitions reflect this. “The purpose of propaganda is to send out an ideology … with a predetermined plan of pre-fabricated symbol manipulation” (Jowett and O’Donnell at 2-3). In order to accomplish this, propagandists employ “dexterous use of images, symbols and slogans that play on our prejudices and emotions” (Pratkanis and Aronson 2001 at

They encourage a sense that risk is disassociated from individuals and families; so remote as to justify a complete lack of consideration. Similarly, they seek to overwhelm individual stories of harm or the unethical behavior of regulators and manufacturers (see below) as irrelevant and unpersuasive. Without presenting a great amount of detail as to the actual content of the studies or the limitations of the findings, the articles overwhelm a lay reader with qualification and expertise even if data lacks. Attributing positions on vaccines to “studies” or, more aggressively, “the scientific” or “the medical” community rather than individuals creates a sense of objectivity and timelessness that is extremely rhetorically