Click bait, published in the full knowledge that what they were publishing was highly debatable and probably bullshit. And by protesting, we just drive more traffic to them.
I don't think it is clickbait so much as going along with a very deliberately planned attack. They will have been given that story by the same people who gave it to the Daily Mail, Radio 5 (apparently doing a piece on it today) and all the other media outlets.
We saw this with O'Sullivan's book (It's all in Your head). A whole raft of articles in the broadsheets, the tabloids, R4, book tour. They pushed and pushed it. And the response of the ME community ? A letter writen by Charles Shepherd - in response to the particularly nasty Aaronovich piece - which **never got published**, and a load of tweets sent and read by other pwME.
We have it again here. Tuller's article not picked up by any media outlets, ME community tweets to itself. Nothing in the mainstream press or radio.
Three days later, Lancet Psych on PACE - coordinated media onslaught. ME community response ? Internal discussions and a statement that again will get very little attention.
We can but hope that any ethical and interested journos out there (Coyne, Tuller, Monbiot, that bloke in Bristol ?), or anyone in a position to make thier voice heard, will recognise that something stinks here in terms of the orchestration of the pro-PACE propaganda and use their platform to really draw attention to that, along with the flaws in PACE itself