Now that we're half way through the university semester, I'm finding myself inundated with a lot of marking. Sometimes, I try to tackle this work at home, but being the skilled procrastinator that I am, this will inadvertently lead me into the land of daytime television. It was here the other day that I caught a few minutes of Oprah, and noted that in that short timeframe, I found my reaction changing from a sort of admiration to a feeling best described as a prolonged wince.
The reason for this abrupt change of heart was essentially the appearance of Jenny McCarthy in what looked like a correspondence role - she of the celebrity ilk, noteworthy for being a very powerful advocate of some very shaky medical advice. I won't go into too much detail here about her travails, since they've been covered extensively here at Boingboing and elsewhere in the media, but suffice to say, both the medical and scientific communities overwhelmingly take issue with her claims regarding linkage between the MMR vaccine and Autism. Indeed, her opinion has not changed, despite recent studies that showed that much of the data in the Wakefield paper (the scientific article that laid the media groundwork for this linkage) was actually fraudulent in nature.
Anyway, this is interesting to me. Ms. Winfrey by all accounts seems to have her heart in the right place, and as a person of considerable media clout, you would think that she (or at least her team) would have carefully thought through the ramifications of associating with such a notorious individual.
Except that when you look a bit deeper, you find other instances where her brand chooses to ignore a very simple and sensible idea: that "claims," especially claims that operate best under scientific ways of knowing, should only be supported when there is robust evidence to back them up.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/28/dear-oprah-some-thou.html
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