What MacNeil was referring to was the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee’s annual “Strategic Plan for Autism Spectrum Disorder Research,” which was released in January, not March. It stresses again and again that there is no evidence for a casual relationship between vaccines and autism in the general population, and that the connection has not yet been proven even for smaller subgroups thought to be vulnerable. In his review for the Times, Rainey reported that when he pressed MacNeil about the committee’s recommendations, he “conceded that additional research does not yet prove anything.”

The committee also notes that other factors such as “parental age and exposure to infections, toxins, and other biological agents may confer environmental risk” and need to be researched. And it highlights the fact that many members of the public feel that “limited autism research funds” would be better spent exploring other avenues of causality and/or treatments, services, and support for those with autism. So MacNeil is guilty of an error of omission, but he’s also guilty of an error of commission.

The second big problem with his statements about that committee’s recommendations is that he makes them seem like a new development. They are not. The committee has been making basically the same statements about the need for some vaccine-autism research focused on subgroups in strategic plans going back at least to 2008, when a report from the Institute of Medicine—an independent, nonprofit organization that is part of the National Academies—recommended designing studies that could identify small subpopulations at risk from environmental exposures. Acting like something has changed in order to create an artificial news hook is misleading and irresponsible.

Journalist David Kirby—who has long urged the medical community not to ignore vaccines—used the same ploy last month in a column for The Huffington Post, alleging that the interagency committee “has signaled a shift in research priorities into the causes of autism, moving away from genetic studies in favor of investigating the interaction between genes and environmental factors, which it said could include toxins, biological agents and vaccines.” This is disingenuous. Yes, there are new studies coming up, but research priorities have been slowly “shifting” toward epigenetics for years.

Kirby’s post, though, is primarily about a February report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that outlines five-year research needs, where “neurodevelopmental disorders, including spectrum disorder” is one of thirty immunization safety topics. There is little sense of where it ranks, priority-wise, among all the others (though a reporter could ask).

Recommendations that the National Vaccine Advisory Committee (part of the Department of Health and Human Services) gave to the CDC in 2009 advised that researchers focus on those with “regressive autism, wherein children achieve normal developmental milestones in language and social skill until 18-24 months of age, and subsequently lose those milestones or experience a plateau in terms of development.” The advisory committee further noted that several studies have estimated that that group comprises about 15 percent of all cases of autism spectrum disorder [ASD] and that “the temporal occurrence of this regression and the vaccination schedule is not evidence of a causal relationship, but regressive autism does fit the recommendations of the [Institute of Medicine] committee for further research in rigorously defined subsets of ASD.”

The NewsHour should have include at least some of this background. Unfortunately, MacNeil’s reporting failed to provide any context about the federal research guidelines that he considered so revelatory. He also fails to provide context about sources. At one point in Part One, his daughter Allison talks about her son, who received three standard vaccinations at fifteen months and then says:

People say to me, Alison, it’s a coincidence. Alison, how do you know this happened? Well, it’s impossible for me to know. But what I will say is this: It was not a coincidence that my child was diagnosed with autism at the same time that his whole system shut down. Something happened to my child.

“At that point, an impartial reporter might have asked why, if Alison was uncertain, she started a blog titled “My Vaccine Injured Child,” Mnookin wrote on his Panic Virus blog.

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Curtis Brainard is the editor of The Observatory, CJR's online critique of science and environment reporting. Follow him on Twitter @cbrainard.