Science Media Centre briefing on new Hornig, Lipkin et al. immune study

[JamBob]

What I don't get is the fact that the UK has a whole raft of skeptic types like Ben Goldacre and his followers, who are normally more than happy to point out biases in reporting of science stories, but when it comes to the SMC and its obvious agenda, they keep quiet.

If skeptics really care about science and its presentation to the public, wouldn't they allocate some small amount of their campaigning time to causes such as dismantling the SMC's agenda?

 

[Esther12]

What I don't get is the fact that the UK has a whole raft of skeptic types like Ben Goldacre and his followers, who are normally more than happy to point out biases in reporting of science stories, but when it comes to the SMC and its obvious agenda, they keep quiet.

If skeptics really care about science and its presentation to the public, wouldn't they allocate some small amount of their campaigning time to causes such as dismantling the SMC's agenda?

I think Goldacre and Wessely are mates. Lots of personal connections distort things in the UK.

 

[SOC]

I don't think journalists put that much thought into the story. They need to get the story out quickly and have a huge area to cover and so don't do much research. Unfortunately they rely on people like the SMC to give unbiased opinions. Given their lack of time to research issues they won't realise the full extent of the conflict of interest. That is why it is important to point this out to the editors and complain because next time they may say hang on is this really an unbiased view.

True, but any person with half a brain (Does that include journalists? ) should wonder what's going on when the SMC sends them to psychiatrists to comment on an immunology paper. They don't have to be aware of conflict of interest or controversy around the illness to wonder why they didn't get sent to immunologists for quotes on an immunology paper. No research necessary, just a few functioning brain cells.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

What I don't get is the fact that the UK has a whole raft of skeptic types like Ben Goldacre and his followers, who are normally more than happy to point out biases in reporting of science stories, but when it comes to the SMC and its obvious agenda, they keep quiet.

If skeptics really care about science and its presentation to the public, wouldn't they allocate some small amount of their campaigning time to causes such as dismantling the SMC's agenda?

Yeah as I've often said, the UK is actually run by a web of nepotism, the "Old School Tie" is far more pernicious, corrosive and evil to our society than most folk realize, though the likes of the "David Cameron -- Rebekha Brooks -- Phone Hacking" issue showed it starkly

 

[jimells]

I think people have seen it happen enough now in the US that they wouldn't give SMC the benefit of the doubt which it's getting in the UK. Hence it's unlikely they'll be expanding into the US, since their usual tactics aren't particularly effective there anymore.

I wish I could share your optimism. Americans are incredibly uninformed and impervious to facts that contradict the relentless propaganda machine. We're talking about a population where a substantial proportion actually believes the Bible creation story is the literal truth:

As you might expect, the evangelical [Hobby Lobby president Steve ] Green is passionate about his new project. He's called the Bible “a reliable historical document,"

“We're not trying to convince anybody of anything," [Creation Museum consultant Cary] Summers told the New Republic. “We're simply presenting the facts."

 

[Kati]

I did write and offer my services some time ago but the offer was declined!

Says it all @charles shepherd

 

[Valentijn]

I wish I could share your optimism. Americans are incredibly uninformed and impervious to facts that contradict the relentless propaganda machine. We're talking about a population where a substantial proportion actually believes the Bible creation story is the literal truth:

Even the Faux News crowd would be quite willing to believe that a organization is partisan, especially if there's some way to attribute a socially liberal bias to it. In many ways Americans are naive, but bias has been a public theme too long now - putting "Science" in the name isn't going to be a magic ticket. I think we're closer to paranoia than naivety as a country, but maybe that has its uses

 

[jimells]

putting "Science" in the name isn't going to be a magic ticket.

Yes, I was trying to think of a name that would work here. Anything with "Science" in it could be problematic, lol.

 

[Joss]

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

George Orwell

 

[snowathlete]

I wonder what their official process is for selecting appropriate experts to provide an opinion, and whether they followed it.

 

[Hip]

Many SMC articles on ME/CFS are significantly biased towards CBT / GET and Wessely school academics.


Here are a number of criticisms of the Science Media Centre's general biases:
How independent is the Science Media Centre and its experts?
Science Media Centre - Powerbase
‎www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=121
Science Media Centre Spins Pro-GMO Line | PR Watch
The Role of the Science Media Centre, the Insurance Industry and the PACE trial in ME/CFS
UK’s Science Media Centre lambasted for pushing corporate science - SciDev.Net
Science Media Centre - SourceWatch


Links to other Science Media Centres around the world:
Science Media Centre UK
AusSMC - Australian Science Media Centre
Science Media Centre of Canada
Science Media Centre New Zealand
Science Media Centre of Japan
The US Science Media Center is going to open in 2016.


The director of the UK Science Media Centre is Fiona Fox. There is a good article about Fiona Fox and her Science Media Centre in the Nature journal. To quote from this article:

Fox and the SMC have also attracted some vehement critics, who say that they foster uncritical media coverage by spoon-feeding information to reporters, that they promote science too aggressively — the SMC has been called 'science's PR agency' — and that they sometimes advance the views of industry.

Regardless, the SMC model is now spreading around the world, with the latest franchise slated to open in the United States around 2016. The centres are all run independently, but they abide by a unified charter crafted by Fox. This means that Fox is about to take her message to a much wider audience. “I think there are problems with her reach,” says Connie St Louis, director of the science-journalism course at City University London and one of Fox's loudest critics. “She's becoming one of the most powerful people in science.”

 

[Wildcat]

.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2010/oct/15/science-media-centre-hoax-call
Friday 15 October 2010

'Employment tribunal hears of bizarre hoax phone call'

'The director of Britain's Science Media Centre pretended to be a journalist investigating MP's staff expenses.'

' Few people who are familiar with the small pond that is science journalism in the UK will have failed to gulp on reading about the ex-Labour MP Jim Devine and the unthinkable bullying he unleashed on his office manager, Marion Kinley.

Devine, who was an MP in Livingston, Scotland, before being caught up in the expenses scandal last year asked an acquaintance to make a fake call to Kinley and pretend to be a journalist investigating her financial affairs. The story gets darker with every step and you can read more about it here. Devine has since been ordered to pay Kinley £35,000.

Though appalling from the off, it was not the top line that shocked many of my colleagues most. What came as a surprise was the revelation far down the story that the fake call in question was made by Fiona Fox, head of the Science Media Centre in London, a prominent venue for press conferences on all matters scientific and medical. Otherwise articulate people who read the story struggled to say more than three letters: WTF?.......' .....

.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

No surprise ot me
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fiona_Fox

Fiona Fox, also known by the pseudonym Fiona Foster, is head of the Science Media Centre and member of the Sense about Science Working party on peer review.
Fox was previously senior Press Officer for the Equal Opportunities Commission, head of media relations for the National Council for One Parent Families, and Head of Media at the aid agency Catholic Agency For Overseas Development (CAFOD).[1]

Fox was a member of the LM group and contributor to Living Marxism, through which she was associated with controversial views regarding the Rwandan genocide.[2][3]

She is sister of Claire Fox, head of the Institute of Ideas.

During 2002, she took part in a Workshop on Communication of Science Policy to the Media for the Department of Trade and Industry, along with Rebecca Bowden of the Royal Society, shortly before the SMC was created

oh, see? the web of connections again
and one extreme is as bad as another, in fact they went from extreme Communism (most actual Communists here couldn't stand the arrogant uncaring, inhuman, elitist twats) to extreme Corporate Fascism
way extremists go, justifying, getting power to FORCE folk into their mould
And that extremes in the end pretty much become the exact same, just with different badges.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Living_Marxism

Note: I've got/had family who were actual Communists, not sodding well off politicians, but Working Class folk who were fed up being cannon fodder, treated like slaves, and the hypocrisy and lies of the religions and sectarian divisions and violence. Hell of a difference.

 

[WillowJ]

I think people have seen it happen enough now in the US that they wouldn't give SMC the benefit of the doubt which it's getting in the UK. Hence it's unlikely they'll be expanding into the US, since their usual tactics aren't particularly effective there anymore.

A number of US papers quoted bits from the SMC

 

[MeSci]

All the SMC articles on ME/CFS are heavily biased towards CBT / GET and Wessely school academics.


Here are a number of criticisms of the Science Media Centre's general biases:
How independent is the Science Media Centre and its experts?
Science Media Centre - Powerbase
‎www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=121
Science Media Centre Spins Pro-GMO Line | PR Watch
The Role of the Science Media Centre, the Insurance Industry and the PACE trial in ME/CFS
UK’s Science Media Centre lambasted for pushing corporate science - SciDev.Net
Science Media Centre - SourceWatch


Links to other Science Media Centres around the world:
Science Media Centre UK
AusSMC - Australian Science Media Centre
Science Media Centre of Canada
Science Media Centre New Zealand
Science Media Centre of Japan
The US Science Media Center is going to open in 2016.


The director of the UK Science Media Centre is Fiona Fox. There is a good article about Fiona Fox and her Science Media Centre in the Nature journal. To quote from this article:

Wow - some (metaphorical) dynamite there! I made sure to say 'metaphorical' to avoid suspicions that I was planning to dynamite those saintly psych 'scientists'.

 

[MeSci]

putting "Science" in the name isn't going to be a magic ticket.

I just read that as 'magic toilet'! Maybe appropriate - the SMC flush the good science down there...

 

[Hip]

I wonder if Fiona Fox actually realizes that she is providing a platform on her Science Media Centre (SMC) website for these Wessely School psychiatrists and their psychobabble ideas about ME/CFS.

Does Fiona know that these Wessely School researchers used a deceptive trick to make their PACE trial of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET) for look like these treatments lead to recovery from ME/CFS, when in fact they do no such thing?

The SMC claim to be "unashamedly pro-science," but in the case of chronic fatigue syndrome, the SMC would appear to be "unashamedly pro-psychobabble."

 

[redviper]

I think our brothers and sisters in the UK (or close to it) should be considering ALL options for ensuring the permanent closure of the Science Media Centre. Doesn't matter how it's achieved, the most important thing is that this institution is silenced and it's propaganda machine are destroyed.

 

[worldbackwards]

Wow - some (metaphorical) dynamite there! I made sure to say 'metaphorical' to avoid suspicions that I was planning to dynamite those saintly psych 'scientists'.

Harrassment! Harrasment! Vexatious claims! etc.

 

[natasa778]

I reckon there are a number of potentially-conflicting 'interests' that have gone undeclared in the piece, not least those of the SMC themselves.

I am comforted by the fact that this all seems to have been rustled up in some haste, as witness the numerous typos. I like to think that there may have been an atmosphere of panic when the proper science was cited in the media.

Ah to be a fly on the wall there! Come to think of it even a fly would find the stench of deceit in that place unbearable