The fundamental growing pain of the Information Age is distrust.

I don’t want medical information from Del Bigtree, producer of Vaxxed and a former producer for the Dr. Phil-created show The Doctors. Sadly, millions of Americans listen to people like Bigtree because faux medical shows run on free television and are endorsed by celebrities like Oprah. For this reason, Vaxxed must be addressed.

I also don’t want medical information from ABC News after listening to the questions posed to Bigtree by their segment reporter during their unedited 10-minute interview prior to releasing Vaxxed. She asked general rather than science-based questions and subsequently ran a piece focusing on celebrity-non-medical-professional Robert De Niro. Sadly, millions more Americans get their medical information from ratings-chasing sources such as these.

The confluence of too much information and a massive shift in newspaper revenue streams means many journalists have cut the corner of agnosticism and taken the shortcut to opinion. Opinions sell faster and better than impartial news because they provide an extra service. The public is overwhelmed by the sheer scope of information out there. The layperson’s response to information overload has been to confer trust on opinionated individuals in the media, whether those individuals have any expertise or credentials or not. (Dr. Phil has a masters degree in experimental psychology. Millions of people are unwittingly participating in his experiments.)

The underlying problem is this: Everything Del Bigtree says in his interview about the way our institutions are supposed to work is correct. His logic about our broken system lends disproportionate weight to his unrelated thoughts about vaccines. Donald Trump is presently enjoying the same path to success. People are habituated to follow the breadcrumbs of rational-sounding speakers, even if their only rational thoughts are to voice obvious grievances. However, it no longer goes without saying — just because people are right about the way the system is broken doesn’t make them right about anything else.

Our refusal as a society to properly fund journalism by embracing “free” information on the internet is directly responsible for proliferating misinformation.

Distrust of our institutions has ultimately fostered an environment where people distrust professionals. The majority of us are not doctors, haven’t attended medical school, and therefore rely on trained doctors for good/best information. When trust in that system breaks down, the next line of defense is journalism. When trust in that system breaks down, whistleblowers come forward. When trust in whisteblowers breaks down, you have millions of people basing important medical decisions on uneducated readings of partial and/or decontextualized information online or on television. In the case of vaccines, this creates unnecessary dangers and has already lead to unnecessary deaths.

To be extra clear: shaming people for their refusal to vaccinate is profoundly unhelpful. Shaming people for looking for explanations and answers…also profoundly unhelpful. Shaming people for blatantly not doing their jobs is completely acceptable.

To that end, I’d like to publicly shame the writers at mainstream media outlets who pressured the Tribeca Film Festival to pull Vaxxed from their line-up, not because I think the film has an ounce of validity (…how could I know? I haven’t seen it…), but because we have a problem with people not vaccinating their children. When film critics and science writers suppress a film that illustrates a real problem, namely broken trust in our institutions, they feed the narrative on both sides of the vaccine issue (Andrew Wakefield’s a quack/Andrew Wakefield’s being suppressed) and perpetuate a serious problem. A journalist’s job is to convey the necessary facts in order to resolve the issue. When journalists publicly decline to see a film AND assert it is quackery, they squander what little trust remains in the institution of reportage.

If the answer to our vaccine problem is as simple as debunking a quack doctor, then journalists should sit through a two-hour movie, wade through the information yet again, debunk the father of this misinformation and demonstrate to a skittish public that no stone has been left unturned. Journalists should do this not because Vaxxed has any validity, but because anti-vaxxers think it does, and those people are not vaccinating their children. The number of people who will see Vaxxed is negligible compared to the millions of people who will read a widely shared takedown piece. The stronger the case science journalists and film reviewers make against a film like Vaxxed, the sooner this issue will be resolved.

If journalists can’t make a strong enough case for this problem to be resolved — and I doubt they can because the task is too big; a “strong enough” case today entails renewing people’s trust in the entire healthcare system. We’re that far down the path of suspicion — then the issue should continue to be treated with skepticism while a second case is made for the public to accept and weigh the alternatives: potential return of deadly disease versus potential vaccine-autism links. There is no third option at present. “Waiting” for a different vaccine is equivalent to not vaccinating and carries consequences. You vaccinate or you don’t. Personally, I encourage people to do as much investigation of the diseases they aren’t vaccinating against as they do of the vaccines. That precious airtime spent looking at Robert De Niro’s headshot should be filled with information on what happens when we don’t prevent preventable diseases. (I expect he would agree.)

This issue will continue to worsen until we respectfully acknowledge that people’s trust in their institutions is broken, and behave accordingly. Yelling at people to trust something never works. The vaccine debate, like so many debates cropping up across the country, came about due to systemic distrust. The way forward is for institutions to demonstrate their trustworthiness, not their disdain, and to give the public a free, considered, informed alternative to Dr. Phil and his ilk.