I'm not a journalist and don't have their gravitas. Journalists have some gravitas and it should be required that have some modicum of rigor. This is a forum where we exchange ideas not an organ of record and the one who is taken to be the preeminent news source in North America.

There is a difference. They have whole teams dedicated to research. Use them. As someone upstream said, don't take one fact and weave a theory around it. Make sound reasoning and use the research teams available to them.

Thomas asked for evidence from select publications. I don't bookmark things like that. I don't even recall where I might have read or heard the anti-vaxers, but they are an example of a group whose voice is given much too much voice in mainstream media, in my view.

And I asked where that was happening in the mainstream media, and you started talking about the minimum wage.

Robert F Kennedy was the source for the Salon Piece in footnote 4.

"He had written a much-discussed and much-challenged story for Rolling Stone last year linking childhood vaccines and a rise in autism."

"Nonetheless, perhaps more than any other Kennedy of his generation, he is looked upon as the next potential vessel for Something Bigger. In words, temperament and actions, he conveys a frenetic vibe of restlessness that invites the questions "What else?" "What next?" "What more?""

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/25bobby.html?pagew...

Its this kind of stuff that is ultimately problematic. Note that this is in the 'fashion' section of the NYT.

You could say that 'Salon' is outide your definition of mainstream media, but the issue is that the sites you mentioned still cover the stories, even if nothing more than as references in pursuit of 'journalistic integrity'.

Obviously google will turn up lots of materiel on this if you want it.

(Note that the current treatment of these topics is far more skeptical. The LA times in 2015 is not going to treat these topics the same as the NY times in 2006.)

Salon is nowhere near the mainstream media. It's a punchline for people who think Slate is mainstream, and those people are themselves not in the mainstream.

The NYT piece you cite is not about vaccination, and notes on that subject only that RFKjr wrote an antivax piece that was challenged.

I suppose you could use the same argument for rolling stone, but frankly it doesn't matter. Look at the UVA rape case from earlier this year (covered widely). The RFK piece on vaccination was published originall in rolling stone. The hagiographic prose the NYT writes about the author (kennedy) and the editorial selection of the piece by rolling stone lend these ideas credibility regardless of the flaws in the articles. Again, look at the UVA rape article earlier this year (published: rolling stone) and see how much coverage it got in NYT, WaPo, LaTimes etc. Its worth noting That WaPo debunked alot of the Rolling stone reportage ultimately, but that just goes to show that not all newsrooms are single minded/purpose entities.

Lastly, if you look up (and read) the footnotes in my earlier not, you'll se that there is a clear link between the academic critique of 'journalistic integrity' and the anti-vaccination example, insofar as 'false balance' is a well defined sub-topic of that debate. Under the Wikipedia article for that...you notice (rightly or wrongly) that of the examples given, the anti-vaccination quakery (eg, kennedy in rollin stone etc) is a "well worn" example.

In other words, a commenter making reference to this is not making any novel or original argument that needs "footnotes". Footnotes are useful when there is a more subtle point, a nuance or something that is not obvious. Footnotes are less called for here, as a simple google search will attest.

No, the complaint that drew the request for citations was 'antivaxers given same credibility as epidemiologists', not the complaint on journalistic rigour in general.

Just like the "it's a vibe" response, your own point on rigour isn't particularly rigorous.