THE MMR VACCINE-AUTISM CONTROVERSY IN THE POST-TRUTH ERA: A CORPUS-ASSISTED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF A NEWSPAPER AND FACEBOOK CORPUS

The present dissertation is a corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis (Baker 2006; KhosraviNik and Unger 2016) of the UK newspaper coverage of the MMR vaccine-autism “controversy”. This “controversy” concerns the alleged link between the triple MMR vaccine and the onset of autism, that was first suggested in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues in a paper published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. Despite having been subsequently discredited and retracted, and despite the fact that Andrew Wakefield was stripped of his medical license by the British General Medical Council, the paper has arguably contributed greatly to the negative perception of vaccines by the British public: it fostered a climate of scepticism towards experts and authorities, and it effectively created a public debate, re-presented in the mass media, where objective facts and evidence were pitted against emotions and personal beliefs (see, for example: Boyce 2006; Clarke 2008; Stöckl and Smajdor 2017). In this sense, the MMR vaccine-autism debate may also be interpreted considering more recent discussions about a post-truth epistemology (D’Ancona 2017) and the spreading of mis/disinformation and fake news. In order to explore the discursive characteristics of this debate, a corpus of news articles from major UK newspapers was built and analysed; the quantitative analysis was carried out using the corpus analyser AntConc (Anthony 2020), while the qualitative analysis was carried out manually through close reading. The analysis aimed at exploring the way in which proponents and opponents of vaccination used language – and especially evaluation (Bednarek 2006a, 2006b), polyphony (Fløttum and Gjerstad 2013) and argumentative storytelling (Carranza 2015) – to legitimize their views and delegitimize their opponents’. To this end, special attention was paid to editorials and readers’ letters, which were largely ignored by previous studies (Clarke 2008) but are here seen as argumentative texts (Richardson 2007) allowing for reader participation and engagement, where audiences can publicly react to the news and discuss it. The second part of the research is devoted to the analysis of a corpus of users’ comments taken from the Guardian and the Daily Mail Facebook pages, with the aim of carrying out a comparison between online and offline debates about the MMR vaccine. Such a comparison is proposed as one possible way to explore the role played by the internet and social media in re-presenting medical debates and in shaping the so-called “post-truth” society. The results of the analyses point to a marked polyphony in newspaper articles, where multiple social actors are re-presented (chiefly children, parents, medical doctors, and the government), often using largely the same linguistic strategies and frames; thus, different views are equally quoted and legitimised, irrespective of the amount of scientific evidence supporting them. Social actors themselves exploit participatory genres such as letters to the editor and Facebook comments to foster their own views using a variety of linguistic and argumentative means, the most distinctive of which is argumentative storytelling, whereby personal experiences with vaccinations are used as evidence to support one’s positions towards the medical procedure. Moreover, online participants regularly refer to each other using labels such as pro-vaxxer and anti-vaxxer (which, on the other hand, are infrequent in the newspaper corpus) used to summarise one own’s identity and system of beliefs. Thus, trust in vaccines is transformed into a polarising, partisan, and ultimately profoundly ideological issue.