Unproven, Unasked, Unheard
The Autism News Cycle That Served Everyone But Us
Donald Trump made his big announcement yesterday, claiming that Tylenol in pregnancy causes autism. The news media was all over it. Reporters raced to fact-check. Experts called it false. Some news outlets shrieked from a political angle. Markets reacted. Autism made the headline — again. But if you scan the cycle closely, you’ll notice the same pattern: no matter who rebuts or reframes, autistic people lose.
The Amplifiers
Some outlets gave Trump exactly what he wanted: his claim, stripped of context, carried straight into a headline. Fox News promised an “answer to autism.” C-SPAN announced a “link” between Tylenol and autism. TODAY warned of “increased risk.” The Times of London wrote it as if it were established fact. These headlines don’t hedge. They do worse. They treat autistic life as the pathology that medicine might prevent. Harm doesn’t get clearer than that.
The Fact-Checkers
Most outlets chose a different frame: call it “unproven.” NBC, NPR, BBC, Yahoo — the word appeared everywhere. The intent was protective. But notice what happens when a headline reads, Trump pushes unproven link between Tylenol and autism. The myth is still the frame. Autism remains pathology. The rebuttal is not dignity, only doubt. “Unproven” isn’t the same as “harmful logic.” It isn’t the same as saying autism is not a tragedy to be avoided. These headlines claim to protect truth while quietly spreading the suspicion.
The Spectacle
Then came the politics-first and drama-first coverage. Axios warned of lawsuits. The Guardian cast it as another UK political spat. The Daily Beast turned it into comedy with Cuba and the Amish as punchlines. The Washington Post highlighted Trump’s feelings. In all these cases autism is a backdrop, not a subject. It is lawsuit fuel, parliamentary banter or absurd spectacle. The human reality of autistic lives gets flattened into scenery for Trump’s theater of MAGAlomaniacal absurdity.
The Outliers
A handful of outlets broke script. Bloomberg called it junk science. CBC reported that families were worried and angry. Autism Speaks — of all organizations — released a statement urging policymakers to move on from vaccine and Tylenol myths and fund real supports instead. Think about that. Autism Speaks, long a deficit-framing giant, sounded closer to AAB’s stance than the New York Times. Not because they finally embraced autistic dignity, but because even they could see that chasing myths is a waste of time.
The Mechanism of Harm
This cycle reveals how media amplifies harm even while claiming to debunk it. Amplifiers repeat the claim as fact. Fact-checkers anchor the suspicion with words like “unproven.” Spectacle reporters erase us in favor of politics. Outliers get drowned in the noise. The result is simple: autistic people appear in headlines only as risk, myth or punchline. We are almost never quoted first. We are almost never the narrators. Even the science pieces reduce us to a question mark instead of a subject with integrity.
Better Questions
What if editors asked not whether Trump was wrong, but why autism is still framed as a disease? What if the frame was not “unproven” but “ableist”? What if journalists stopped recycling deficit logic and started treating autistic dignity as non-negotiable? The missing story is not Tylenol. It is the media’s complicity in keeping our existence debatable.
What Remains
Trump’s claim will fade from the cycle. The headlines will not. They will live on in search engines, school projects and casual memory, quietly teaching the public that autism equals risk. That’s the real harm. Until journalism stops using our lives as clickbait, every “unproven” headline is still proving the wrong thing.