Is the Media Simplifying a Complex Story on Disease Outbreaks?

In recent years, there has been an outbreak of media stories on early childhood disease outbreaks. The press has reported a spike in cases of measles, mumps, and whooping cough in communities from Seattle to Vermont. In many of the stories, a cause-and-effect relationship to lower childhood vaccination rates has been explicit. (Some journalists, however, have been careful not to follow the herd.) An obvious culprit is the anti-vaccination movement. But in a provocative post at his Cultural Cognition blog, Dan Kahan asks: