KOMU's Ashley Reynolds and a team of producers covered the breakthroughs and heartbreaks of the disorder not only on the air, but online.

Our blog about Autism received 18,000 hits.

Some viewers thought our reports about a possible link between autism and mercury in vaccines scared parents. Kay Cooper called our report "biased"...."totally unsupported" and appalling. "

"Not only does it contradict every credible study done to date in regards to the issue, it is nearly guaranteed to further terrify uninformed parents into not vaccinating (read: PROTECTING) their children from what can be deadly medical conditions," Cooper wrote.

"One of the benefits of doing a long extended series like this is we get to get a lot of different points of view and have enough time to explore these points of view in these nightly stories," said KOMU News Director Stacey Woelfel. "So yes, there's not balance in each individual story giving each individual point of view but if you watch the whole series or a substantial part of it, you'll learn much more about it than you typically would on local TV news. "

Dr. Edward Fogarty of the University of South Dakota school of medicine is watching our Autism series online and writes..."Now that the epidemic is upon us, medical professionals need to pull our collective head out of the sand that keeps getting piled up by the last great American industry (pharmaceuticals) and start doing the brave science that will help these children, Fogarty wrote. "Thank you for protecting the collective conversation and thought that can lead to such a hypothesis through investigating the stories of those like the Weinmasters who have legitimate concerns that this hypothesis may be correct, as do I. " Edward F. Fogarty, M.D.Chairman of Radiology at the University of North Dakota School ofMedicine.

And this from Frances." I liked your coverage about Autism however your anchor (I believe) used the term autistics in the segments close. I believe the term that is more politically correct is "Person(s) with Autism".

"Duly noted. Frances, when we refer to a specific person, we say that person "has autism" but when we refer to a general group it is acceptable to refer to that group as Autistics. ...and one footnote about our coverage of the Salisbury civic spat between the mayor and a former police officer.

"The news media serves as a watchdog. The news media serves as a watchdog in our community. Sometimes, the news media serves to throw gasoline on the fire of that controversy and make it burn hotter," said Your View Executive producer Kent Collins. "Such was the case in Salisbury , Missouri the last couple weeks after we did a big story there. I suspect in the next couple weeks, KOMU-TV will send a news crew back to Salisbury to do a follow up story because it's a good thing that the news media serves as a watchdog and as a public forum."

And if you'd like to comment about KOMU News, we'd love to hear from you, just click on the Your View tab, then watch Friday nights at 6 p.m. as we report Your View of the news.