badscience
As reported last week, Dr Ben Goldacre received legal warning from the Global Radio legal team after posting audio from a 44 minute LBC radio programme about the dangers of the MMR vaccination on his Bad Science blog.

The team claimed Goldacre did not have rights to reproduce the material in the manner he did (see Global Radio statement here).

In the last chapter of his book 'Bad Science', Goldacre, who is a junior NHS doctor and writes the weekly 'Bad Science' column for the Guardian, as well as running a blog and forum community, describes his belief that the media has been irresponsible and ill-representative in its reporting of the alleged dangers of the MMR vaccination.

In a 30-minute recorded interview with Journalism.co.uk, published below, Goldacre gives the background on the LBC legal warning - against which a support campaign for Goldacre has been started on Facebook; details his views on 'PR puff pieces'; tells us why television is a 'dead medium'; and how 'neglecting our nerds' is at great cultural and economic cost.









Extracts from audio:


On the LBC case:
He doesn't know his legal standing but what he does think: "The law on copyright is for rich people and for corporations, not for individuals. The law here is a very grey area (...) There's no way I could resist their legal demands.

"I find it actually quite offensive that we can't frame laws in clear ways that say you can do that; you can't do that. It seems absurd to me.

"It didn't occur to me (...) that what I was doing was illegal (...) I heard some of the most irresponsible and ridiculous scaremongering I've heard in a long while, but more importantly, 44 minutes that were really, really illustrative of an ongoing problem, of the way the media has repeatedly misrepresented and misunderstood the evidence on basic health issues, but specifically on MMR."

On MMR
"This clip was a perfect illustration of the problems in the media, the problems in the way the media communicates science and evidence; the way it has this spurious 50-50 debate kind of stance on things, which are very very clearly not 50-50."

Goldacre wants to flag up situations "where it's very obvious the media has selectively only reported on very, very thin, often completely unpublished speculation; where people often don't even have a track record of doing research in the field (...) and then have have completely ignored, fully-published, very competent proper academic research, because it didn't suit their agenda, didn't suit their scaremongering."

On expressing opinions
"To me it was a useful clip to have up; freely available and freely discussable.

"The answer is not to flag it [e.g comment pieces] up with 'opinion' - would the public notice that? I don't see the point of broadcasting something with that level of ignorance [the LBC broadcast] - it's like being smacked around the face repeatedly with the stupid stick.

"I don't think there need to be reasons about the way people discuss things (...) I'm very suspicious of the mainstream media's childish and thoughtless notion that the truth in any question lies precisely in between the two most extreme voices you can find."

On bad science reporting
The mainstream media 'often put incompetent people to write stories'.

"There a lots of very, very good specialist scientists correspondents," Goldacre says, but when items become popular or big news items, generalists are called in to write the pieces. 

"If there are people who know about science and health - people [editors] don't tend to go to them (...) senior editors tend to have very little respect for science because it's not part of their kind of educational background.

"I think people in senior [editorial] positions are contemptuous of science."

On PR 'puff' pieces and Goldacre's Law
"A few scientists agree to participate in these studies. I think it's the job of the journalists to critically appraise the piece of information or evidence that's being given to them and decide if it's worth running with."

There are 150,000 to 200,000 doctors in the UK; millions around the world; tens of millions of academics around the world, Goldacre says. "I don't think there is any claim - and we can frame this as Goldacre's law if you like - any claim so stupid anywhere in the world that you couldn't find at least one doctor or academic who was willing to put it forward."

"So the fact [there are] these press releases isn't an excuse to say 'scientists today said...'" Journalists 'have a responsibility' to appraise whether a story is valid, Goldacre says.

Science is particularly 'dumbed down'
"I genuinely think there is something unique and special about science when it comes down to dumbing down."

"The main way it's mediated through a lack of faith in the notion that your readers will be interested in slightly challenging material."

"The people who are most seriously neglected are the people who did biochemistry at Leicester and now work in senior management at Kraft or Unilever."

"We neglect our nerds at great cultural and economic cost - the mainstream media doesn't have anything to offer to people who are a bit nerdy like me."

Fewer editors; more non-staff writers is the answer
"What blogs show you are there are a lot of [potential writers] out there - people enthusiastic and capable of expressing themselves."

What is needed, Goldacre says, are fewer staff writers and more staff editors who can shepherd their [blogger] voices onto the page.

Television is 'dead'
"Television is a dead medium (...) because of the expense of making. It's so expensive it has to play to big commercial necessities. I don't really there's anything for me on telly - no specially factual content on telly that I would want to watch."

"I get approaches from television companies every week but it's always 'oh will you come and do this thing taking the piss out of crystal therapists'."

On being a full-time doctor and writing alongside

His writing and blogging interests haven't yet got in the way of his medical work, Goldacre says, laughing at the idea of being a 'celebrity doctor'. But, he says, 'maybe everybody secretly hates me...'

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