Who messed up the public's and doctor's views of autism?

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First of all, who first started the idea of autistic people lacking emotions?
Who spread that idea to the point that the idea persists?
Why do many experts, even now, have such a limited view of autism to the point that they seem like they never meant one?

If you have any answers to any of the questions, I would love to hear them.

If I were to make a guess, I'd say it's that people are oversimplifying things, overgeneralising things, and drawing connections that don't exist.

Fact: Many people with ASD have some form of deficit with Cognitive Empathy.

But then, most people don't know what Cognitive Empathy is, so they just interpret that as "People with ASD don't have Empathy of any kind."

And then they tell other people. Without using the word "Cognative". So now you've got a large population of people who think that those with ASD have no Empathy of any kind.

It's not a big stretch to go from "People with ASD have no Empathy" to "People with ASD have no emotions".

Autistics since autism have been known as not reacting or not reacting typically to emotional situations, so that was interpreted as lacking emotion, being robotic, not fully human etc.

The idea really picked up when Simon Baron Cohen in the 80s developed the theory that became largely accepted that Autistics lack "Theory of Mind or have "mind blindness". He developed the Empathy Quotient(EQ) test. It should be noted that Theory of Mind references not understanding others think and emote differently than oneself, not being unemotional. Somehow this got translated into no emotion based confusing empathy with no emotion. I guess people assume that if you do not understand the emotions of others you have no emotions. Media portrays added to the damage.

IMHO Best video about these misconceptions is this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFxWdpuyY6o

Baron-Cohen and Austism Speaks have done the most damage in the past few decades. Baron-Cohen seems to have undergone a vast inner "sea change" in the past 18 months and his public pronouncements are very different. He hasn't apologised for former denigrations though perhaps in time this will occur.

I don't have a lot of time for Baron Cohen and the way he spreads his "shower thoughts" as if they had a scientific basis.
First he spread the view of autism as a deficit of empathy, neglecting to distinguish between cognitive and affective empathy, which caused no end of harm.
Then he tried to get his "extreme male brain" theory accepted, which served only to confuse gender issues with autism, and has neither genuine scientific basis nor practical application.
He also continues to use his AQ screening tool (based on male autism characteristics) as a basis for determining male:female autism ratios. So you found more males met the criteria? Well, duh.
And now he's suggesting that maybe, since we no longer use the term Aspergers, we ought to divide the autism spectrum into subtypes, with Type 1 covering Aspies and HFA and Type 2 for classic autism. (But, someone on the forum has noted, we already have a division into Levels, so...WTF?)