Misinformation in the modern age

Pulling the Wool
    By Ben McGrath

After her younger daughter died while taking the popular anti-AIDS drug AZT, Valerie Emerson decided that the three-drug cocktail prescribed by disease specialists for her HIV-positive four year-old son would not be necessary. Although the state contended that witholding drugs was tantamount to child abuse, just over two weeks ago, a Maine judge ruled that Emerson could keep custody of her son despite her refusal to follow the recommendations of top physicians.

For Serge Lang, a long-time Yale math professor, this ruling came as good news. A member of the Board of Directors for the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of HIV/AIDS, Lang believes that there is significant evidence to question whether HIV really causes AIDS as conventional wisdom dictates. The group's president, scientist David Rasnick, has even testified on Emerson's behalf, claiming that her son's AIDS medication was likely to cause him more harm than good.

In a recent speech at Yale entitled, "Misinformation in the Modern Age," Lang argued that the judge's verdict didn't have as positive an impact as it could have. While the Maine newspapers apparently did a diligent job of covering the case, according to Lang, media outside the state ignored it. Sure, the Associated Press (AP) typed up a blurb about the court's finding, but as far as Lang knew (from asking Rasnick and unnamed others), no newspapers outside of Maine had seen fit to print the article. This, Lang said, "indicates the suppression of information in the press at large."

Even if it were true that no paper outside of Maine picked up the AP story on the trial, Lang's conclusion would be questionable. After all, the number of stories that are released over the news wires is far greater than the number actually printed in major papers.

The notion that hundreds of newspaper editors would conspire to withhold the same story from the reading public is better suited for an X-Files forum than a serious academic speech. Besides, the basic thrust of the story--that a woman was allowed to maintain custody of her child because of medical evidence regarding AIDS medication--wasn't clear-cut enough and didn't touch on the causes or nature of AIDS one way or the other. So it seems unlikely that conventional AIDS theorists would see the story as particularly threatening anyway.

What's most problematic about Lang's "suppression of information" remark, however, is that--in this case, at least--it is entirely unfounded. In less than five minutes of free Nexis searching (the greatest perk of being a Yale student, by the way), I was able to turn up more than 20 different newspapers (from USA Today and The Washington Post to The Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Des Moines Register) that had in fact printed the Maine custody story by the time of Lang's speech. The Chicago Tribune ran an AP report of the case on three different days during that week, and The Boston Globe even assigned one of its own staff writers to cover the story before the trial broke out. It hardly seems fair to say that this publicity represents any kind of media suppression.

I find it odd that a man committed to attacking scientific and journalistic inaccuracies would himself fail to properly research something as simple as this. Lang has been an avid watchdog of many newspapers, including The Yale Daily News (he exposed some careless reporting with regard to the Jorgenson sexual harassment issue two years ago) and The New York Times. Lang's famed crusade to keep Harvard political science professor Samuel Huntington out of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences on the grounds that Huntington practiced "pseudoscience" received prominent mention in both the Times and The New Republic.

As a social science major wary of scholarship which attempts to reduce concepts like human frustration and satisfaction to graphs and equations (which Huntington has been known to do), I admire Lang's dogged quest to uphold the highest scientific standards. And as a skeptical reader of most journalism today, I also respect his crusade against inaccuracies in the media. But the demonstrated willingness to make grand claims without verifying the evidence makes Lang guilty of the same crime for which he has hounded others.

Concluding his speech on the proliferation and blind acceptance of inaccurate science and reporting, Lang asked, "What are you going to do about it?" We can start by holding ourselves to the same standards as those we are criticizing. If we don't, we are merely perpetuating the spread of misinformation in the modern age.

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