Flicking back through the book, I see that the MRSA scare was almost entirely a Tabloid thing. But the MMR reporting was across papers including the broadsheets which may be why I was thinking the MRSA reporting filtered higher up the feeding chain.

There's clearly a class of paper which has no real interest in the truth and that's a much wider problem than in the public understanding of sicence, but I like to think there are a lot that still do and these are making mistakes which you'd hope were easily avoidable, though I seem to have picked the wrong example here.