Four guidelines identified by the Daubert Standard provide credible ways of evaluating evidence when reporting on the Covid pandemic, writes George Claassen.
"Mass media is a powerful force for influencing the public," the award-winning scientists and science writers Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst observe in their excellent analysis, Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial.
The Covid pandemic has highlighted this power to influence and focused sharply on how the media deal with intricate science news, also when reporting from court.
The anti-vaccination movement's highly effective and dangerous utilisation of media - mostly through rogue media outlets, blogs, social media and YouTube - to spread their quackery will be a research topic that should keep mass communication scientists busy for years.
News24 has been bombarded by uninformed readers who believe the pseudoscience, quackery and conspiracy theories on social media and want it to publish the anti-vaccination drives and drivel of so-called doctors, politicians and other people of influence (Sherri Tenpenny, Joseph Mercola, Robert Kennedy Jr., Ty and Charlene Bollinger, Rizza Islam, Rashid Buttar, Erin Elizabeth, Sayer Ji, Kelly Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Ben Tapper, Kevin Jenkins, and numerous others, also our own Susan Vosloo, Faiez Kirsten, Tros Bekker, Maré Olivier) who have been leading the attack on evidence-based science with misinformation, even spreading blatant lies and distortion of the facts about vaccinations.
As Time magazine reported, these "physicians are part of the Disinformation Dozen, "a group of top super-spreaders of Covid-19 vaccine misinformation, according to a 2021 report by the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate. The report, which was based on an analysis of anti-vaccine content on social media platforms, found that 12 people were responsible for 65% of it. The group is comprised of physicians, anti-vaccine activists and people known for promoting alternative medicine".
Difficult position
The media are in a difficult position, interpreting the science as it is being reflected by all and sundry and by court judgments. How do we interpret news about science, and is the media's reporting about court findings critical enough, reflecting what science really says, not how courts interpret it?
Should an electricity company such as Eskom be held liable for leukaemia in children who live close to electrical installations? Or a pharmaceutical manufacturer for the birth defects of babies whose mothers used a pill against morning nausea during their pregnancy?
For the legal profession, the value of credible scientific evidence in court received an important new dimension after significant findings over the past two decades by US courts and specifically the American Supreme Court. For journalists reporting from courts where intricate scientific testimony is given, these judgments are important to portray credible and accepted peer-reviewed science in the media.
The Supreme Court judgment delivered by Judge Harry Blackmum has also changed the way in which state prosecutors can call expert witnesses to testify. It is imperative that the media should also take note of this as the legal position and what is allowed in court, are also applicable in the way the media allow pseudoscience or unproven claims made in the name of science to be given a platform.
In a previous column, I referred to the statistically erroneous expert testimony of a British paediatrician, Professor Roy Meadow, who was directly responsible for life sentences handed out to three mothers whose babies died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Meadow's testimony was later proven to be statistically unreliable by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the mothers were released, and the British ministry of health launched a thorough investigation of 297 other cases which led to mothers or other parties being convicted of murder of babies.
Stories with shouting headlines about findings by courts where dubious expert testimony was allowed, thrive in the media - whether it is about electrical installations or mobile phones and their towers, or glyphosate, an active ingredient in many herbicides blamed for causing cancer in multimillion dollar lawsuits, or medicines harming consumers such as mothers taking pharmaceutical products against morning sickness.
This often happens despite contradictory peer-reviewed and established science not given an opportunity in court because the "Prosecutor's Fallacy" and misinterpretation of statistics were paramount, leading to wrongful convictions.
Critical guidelines
The phrase was coined by Professor Peter Green, a former president of the RSS, who showed why Meadow's Law ("One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder unless proven otherwise...") does not hold any water when mathematical statistics are taken into consideration. The Prosecutor's Fallacy is an unscientific phenomenon in the legal profession when prosecutors misinterpret statistics and sway juries to believe these erroneous statistics.
An important finding in which critical guidelines were laid down about the credibility and trustworthiness of scientific testimony in court, came in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals in 1993. Unfortunately, these guidelines are still ignored mainly by prosecutors - and not taken notice of by court reporters - still practicing the "Prosecutor's Fallacy".
In the Daubert case, the parents of two minors claimed that their children's birth defects resulted from their mothers' pre-birth use of Bendectin, an anti-nausea medication manufactured by Merrell Dow. A District Court accepted the statement of an expert who scrutinised the scientific literature about the subject that no evidence could be found that use of the drug by pregnant mothers is a factor in human birth defects. The court found in favour of Merrell Dow.
Yet, the court did not allow the testimony of eight other experts who wanted to testify that there is enough scientific evidence that Bendectin was indeed the cause of birth defects.
The Supreme Court in 1993, however, established what is now known as the Daubert Standard for how US Federal courts should evaluate the admissibility of scientific knowledge as evidence.
In its finding, the Supreme Court set out a list of criteria applicable to journalists who must deal with pseudoscientific and quackery claims, often based on conspiracy theories - by which scientific testimony should be allowed and applied in court cases based on evidence.
The Daubert Standard identified four guidelines according to which expert scientific testimony should be evaluated and which can act as a gatekeeping function to avoid the phenomenon of the Prosecutor's Fallacy:
- Are the theories or techniques on which the testimony of an expert rests, based on testable scientific evidence, the so-called falsifiability principle of Karl Popper? For example, double-blind testing evidence is usually absent and wrong interpretation of statistics is rife as the testimony of Meadow showed.
- Has the theory or technique passed the necessary process of peer review? Often, the testimony of so-called experts is based on personal interpretation of a case without considering the presence or absence of peer-reviewed evidence. South Africa's Advertising Regulatory Board can take a leaf from this book. It unfortunately often allows dubious "science experts" in the alternative medicine field to testify on behalf of quacks, despite the protests of Dr Harris Steinman, the country's leading anti-quackery fundi, that there is no peer reviewed evidence substantiating the testimony that supports the false claims made in advertisements.
- Are the claims generally accepted by the scientific community and was there a definite or potential probability of mistake with reference to the scientific method applied? With regard to the theory of evolution, the claims of creationists who believe in a six-day creation and as Young Earth proponents stating the planet is only 6 000 years old, the scientific consensus is proven in literally thousands and thousands of peer-reviewed studies over more than 150 years since Darwin formulated his theory in 1859, that evolution is the valid explanation of the development of life, also that the Earth is more than 4.57 billion years old. In Kitzmiller and Others v Dover School Board, the Intelligent Design (ID) movement received a bloody nose in 2005 when Judge John Jones found that, based on verifiable scientific evidence, ID is not science, but a religious movement. Similarly, the overwhelming and proven scientific evidence is that vaccinations work and save lives, despite what anti-vaccination hysterics propose. The fact that my parents made sure that I was vaccinated against a host of children's diseases, as well as the parents of billions of other children doing the same to protect their offspring, and that I'm sitting here writing this column because of their wisdom, prove vaccinations work.
- Are the techniques and methods applied in the specific scientific research statistically acceptable, or do they show fatal flaws?
Blackmum wrote that it was the judge's duty to see that an expert's testimony rests on trustworthy scientific grounds and that it is relevant to the case being heard. Pertinent evidence based on scientifically accepted principles would be acceptable expert testimony.
In another case against electrical companies, the court again established the principle that judges are not scientists and recommended that judges should appoint independent (that is, not being paid by any of the parties) experts to act on behalf of the court.
Judge Stephen Breyer emphasised that courts could seek guidance from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Academies of Science to identify neutral experts, not to solve scientific problems, but to ensure that information that has not been verified, has not been of any help in the case, and is untrustworthy, should not been put to a jury.
For journalism, these guidelines provide credible ways of evaluating evidence. In News24's case, and similar steps taken by GroundUp and Daily Maverick, the accepted science by the South African Medical Association, the Medical Research Council, and hundreds of expert virologists worldwide about the advantages and safety of vaccines, provide sufficient reason not to give a platform to a right of reply to the highly controversial Panda group doubting many aspects of vaccinations against Covid-19.
News24 and its media colleagues, in this way, fulfil their role as gatekeepers to protect its readers against harmful, misleading, and dangerous views, not accepted in the mainstream scientific community.
It is the first step in setting a very necessary Daubert Standard for the news media how to report on science.
- George Claassen is News24's public editor and a board member of the Organization of Newsombudsmen and Standards Editors.
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