Know Your First Amendment Rights: The Wakefield Inquisition
The unprecedented journalistic attack on Dr. Wakefield and colleagues after their 1998 paper on autism and bowel disease has begun coming apart at the seams. Now that Wakefield has filed a defamation suit, and a judge in England cleared the paper's other senior author of all wrongdoing, it's time to ask: How did Murdoch's London Sunday Times and the British Medical Journal get away for so long with getting the story so wrong? How long will it take the mainstream media to do its job and report the real facts?
Dan Olmsted
Dan Olmsted is Editor of AgeOfAutism.com, the daily web newspaper of the autism epidemic. He began reporting on autism in 2005, writing a weekly column for United Press International. In 2010, he and Mark Blaxill co-authored The Age of Autism -- Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic. A graduate of Yale College, he has been a journalist for 35 years and was an original staff member of USA Today and a senior editor of UPI.
