When Jenny McCarthy gets offered a job, people notice. Initially, I thought that McCarthy's new job as a co-host on the ABC daytime television show "The View" would attract attention mainly from science bloggers and reporters because of her embrace of the thoroughly discredited view that vaccines cause autism.
I was wrong. Entertainment reporters, celebrity bloggers, and news services took note. That includes Perez Hilton, who linked to and quoted from Michael Spector's highly critical post at The New Yorker. "We couldn’t be more thrilled that Jenny McCarthy is officially set to join ABC’s The View as new co-host. And yet, it seems that the news of her new gig is being met with some public outrage!" Hilton bubbles.
Indeed. Spector wrote that McCarthy "will be the show’s first co-host whose dangerous views on childhood vaccination may—if only indirectly—have contributed to the sickness and death of people throughout the Western world." ABC executives, he writes, "should be ashamed of themselves for offering McCarthy a regular platform on which she can peddle denialism and fear."
Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus, a book about the anti-vaccine phenomenon, writes on his blog that ABC's decision to hire McCarthy was "shameless and lamentable." He also posted the entire 5,000-word chapter of the book devoted to McCarthy, called "Jenny McCarthy's Mommy Instinct."
Emily Willingham at Forbes urges McCarthy "to chill her vaccine and autism stance and publicly state what the evidence demonstrates: She was wrong about both." Phil Plait, author of Bad Astronomy at Slate, takes his eyes off the heavens to condemn McCarthy as "a threat to public health" who has "gone everywhere and anywhere protesting vaccinations."
Alex Pareene at Salon writes under the caustic headline, "Putting Jenny McCarthy on 'The View' will kill children." The result of her fulminations against vaccines "has been the recurrence and spread of preventable diseases," Pareene writes. In an opinion piece in USA Today, Ronald Bailey of the libertarian site reason.com writes that McCarthy's new job "is really bad news for America's children." (And he is not the only critic who takes a swipe at Oprah Winfrey for giving McCarthy a platform for her anti-vaccine views.)
Brendan Nyhan at Columbia Journalism Review slams some members of the press for reporting McCarthy's views as "controversial" rather than "discredited," an error that's hard to understand; no reporter who has ever done a Google search should make that mistake. TIME's TV critic James Poniewozik slam's McCarthy's hiring, citing another TIME post on "a University of Michigan study showed that about a quarter of parents placed “some trust” in celebrities’ views on the safety of vaccines."
Some bloggers think McCarthy's hiring is a good thing. Tom McCarthy of The Guardian writes:
There’s an argument to be made that a good way to expose the plain wrongness of McCarthy’s dangerous beliefs to the audience that most needs to hear it is to televise her on weekday mornings arguing about it with Whoopi Goldberg and, yes, Barbara Walters. The View could in fact shine a much-needed corrective light on the ignorance that McCarthy has otherwise been able to peddle unrebutted in a book and in appearances on less combative TV shows.
He could be on to something. I don't know what Whoopi's views are on vaccines, but if the two get into it, I think McCarthy will discover she has more than met her match.
Theresa Liao, on her blog Science, I Choose You!, writes, "Let’s talk about vaccination on The View. Let’s have a discussion about why vaccination is important on national television, on a show that is viewed by many mothers and mothers to be."
Bill Nye told The Huffington Post's David Freeman in an email that
A show like 'The View,' like any story or show that holds your attention, depends on conflict. So, here's hoping they promote this conflict, or at least vigorous disagreement, about the role of science in medicine and in our technologically advanced society. I believe Ms. McCarthy's views will be discredited.
I asked Lauri Hogan, a spokesperson for The View, whether ABC was concerned about the controversy, and she declined to comment beyond the network's press release–which makes no mention of vaccines. She told The New York Times that "the show had made no request to Ms. McCarthy that she keep the vaccine issue off limits."
-Paul Raeburn
Leave a Reply