Personal responsibility for the common good: The MMR vaccination discourse in contemporary Serbian daily newspapers

Abstract

This article examines the discourse on the attribution of responsibility for the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination in the Serbian daily press. The proliferation of the MMR debate in the media is concurrent with the gradual decline of the MMR childhood vaccination in post-socialist Serbia and represents a local response to the global MMR controversy. The aim was to discover how the responsibility of the MMR childhood vaccination is communicated by the Serbian daily press. Several discourse approaches were combined with the attribution of responsibility theory. Articles covering the MMR controversy in two major newspapers – the broadsheet Politika and the tabloid Kurir – were analysed from the periods corresponding to two measles outbreaks – 2014–15 and 2017–18. The results show that the media outlets identified the lack of individual responsibility as the major factor in the fall in MMR immunization and the rise of measles epidemics. At the same time, press coverage ignored other sociopolitical causes for this outcome; for example, a lack of public health education and proactive vaccination campaigns highlighting the benefits (but also the slight risks) of vaccination, or the absence of any official provision of compensation in individual cases of proven vaccine side effects.