United Kingdom: Science Media Centre (including Fiona Fox)

Chezboo said:
This from 2017. It is a thorough investigation into the SMC, it's background and operation with a focus on examples of its bias. Includes some interesting quotes and links to other pieces.
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Thanks, that seems quite comprehensive.

Of course we are all aware of corporate corruption. The interest in the SMC is the apparent hypocrisy - the claim of being pro bono public when in fact the opposite be true.

With the current UK and US governments there seems to be no reason to think anyone in government would care about such hypocrisy. They make no claim to be guardians of the public good. And the alternative seems to be steeped in hypocrisy - as in Tony Blair taking a ride in Bernie Ecclestone's car.

I have put it in the notebook.
 
Chezboo said:
This from 2017. It is a thorough investigation into the SMC, it's background and operation with a focus on examples of its bias. Includes some interesting quotes and links to other pieces.


"Does Science Media Centre Promote Corporate Views of Science?"
By Stacy Malkan in US RTK

https://usrtk.org/our-investigations/science-media-centre/
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I have just read this quote from the article :

According to the group’s 2002 founding report, SMC was created to address:
...
the “apparently superior media strategies” used by environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to get their case across.
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My perception of current news :

I remember years ago (in the 1990s and before?) that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth would often be quoted in articles or would appear in interviews on the news. But they appear to have vanished off the face of the earth, based on the news programs I see on British TV and what I read in British newspapers on or offline nowadays. The same is true of Amnesty International - another group that would be mentioned quite often in years gone by, who now are almost never mentioned.
 
Barry said:
Not sure it is valid to infer SW as being a founder member, simply by him being on the Scientific Advisory Board? (But open to being proved wrong).
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I agree with you @Barry. My post was just to show that his name appears as one of the original members of the Scientific Advisory Board for SMC, I did not intend for anyone to read anything else into it.
 
Chezboo said:
This from 2017. It is a thorough investigation into the SMC, it's background and operation with a focus on examples of its bias. Includes some interesting quotes and links to other pieces.
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One such quote from Prof Malcolm Hooper:

“Discrediting Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

A 2013 paper by Malcolm Hooper, Emeritus Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Sunderland, UK, reported evidence that SMC promoted the views of certain psychiatrists while ignoring other evidence that contradicted the psychiatrists’ theory, in an effort to discredit people with ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

“For those not blinded by the SMC’s dazzling aura, it appears that its covert purpose is to ensure that journalists and the media report scientific and medical matters only in a way that conforms to government and industry’s ‘policy’ on the issues in question.”

“An organisation which behaves in such a blatantly unscientific way can have no legitimate claim to represent science.” “
 
It's M.E. Linda said:
“For those not blinded by the SMC’s dazzling aura, it appears that its covert purpose is to ensure that journalists and the media report scientific and medical matters only in a way that conforms to government and industry’s ‘policy’ on the issues in question.”
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It would be great for the SMC to get investigated regarding this in due course. But if, as many of us have suspected along the way, the SMC has indeed be covertly nurtured by forces aligned with government/industry ambitions, there will be equally strong forces lining up to prevent that.
 
Forward-ME Group Chair, The Countess of Mar, has written on behalf of the members of the Group to the Chief Executive of the Science Media Centre asking for the SMC “to retract and replace your factsheet on CFS/ME, published on 21 March 2018”. The letter continues that the factsheet, entitled “CFS/ME – The illness and the controversy” “……. includes numerous inaccuracies and distortions; it denigrates patients and some doctors; it fails to reflect the numerous peer reviewed papers, published since the release of some of the raw data from the trial following legal action, which demonstrate serious defects in the PACE trial, and it fails to take into account the extensive research from the USA published since 2014. This will all have been available to you.”

The full text of the letter is as follows –
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http://www.meresearch.org.uk/news/forward-me-group-letter-science-media-group/
 
CFS/ME is highly controversial with longstanding disagreements between the mainstream medical community and campaigners about its cause and treatment.
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If they had simply said:

CFS/ME is highly controversial with longstanding disagreements about its cause and treatment.
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That would have been more realistic.

But they just can't resist spinning and smearing. Understandable, I guess, when you consider how much they stand to lose from the truth.

But still completely unacceptable. They have been doing it for so long it is their default response.
 
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adambeyoncelowe said:
The societal problem with the BPS model (beyond the flaws in science, I mean) is that it's inherently ableist. If you can't heal, it's your own fault. If you're chronically ill, you didn't try hard enough. If you claim benefits, you're playing the sick roll. It's always disabled people who are to blame, and if we speak out about this, we're maligned as militants.
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Yes, it's funny how BPS in practise means psychological therapy. The external social/societal issues that hold disabled people back are rarely if ever challenged, even though that is a central pillar of BPS...
 
Arnie Pye said:
I have just read this quote from the article :



My perception of current news :

I remember years ago (in the 1990s and before?) that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth would often be quoted in articles or would appear in interviews on the news. But they appear to have vanished off the face of the earth, based on the news programs I see on British TV and what I read in British newspapers on or offline nowadays. The same is true of Amnesty International - another group that would be mentioned quite often in years gone by, who now are almost never mentioned.
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They may well have had the hack job done on them by now wherby such groups get infiltrated divided to rule and then either disbanded or fall under complete controlled opposition.

That tactic has happened since the beginning of time and is still flourishing now.
 
It dosn' t mean they are not active. Look at how media reporting is dealing with Brexit- there have been many public demonstrations in the past few months - not seen much in the mainstream media about them though....
 
large donner said:
They may well have had the hack job done on them by now wherby such groups get infiltrated divided to rule and then either disbanded or fall under complete controlled opposition.
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From what I can see on Wikipedia I have a suspicion that organisations like Greenpeace may have morphed rather in the way that the Revolutionary Communist Party and SMC have morphed. The original people started going off in weird directions. That may of course be spin but I am not sure. It may be less infiltration with subversives and more infiltration with the usual phoneys. Plus ça change...
 
large donner said:
Whats interesting is the example of Trish Groves via the Revolutionary Communist Party to the BMJ, fringe to establishment and now serving a corporate public narrative propped up by the banking system using extreme right wing policies.
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? I didn't know that Groves was a part of that group. Where did you hear that?
 
Dr_Paul said:
The Science Media Centre should not be seen as authoritative science organisation -- or a serious organisation at all. It is one of the many supposedly neutral-sounding bodies that are the product of the degeneration and disintegration of a once left-wing organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party (in Britain, no relation to the US-based group still running under that name) that gave up on itself some 20 years ago, and has since become a peculiar right-wing quasi-libertarian think-tank called Spiked On-Line. Why any proper scientists wish to be associated with it can only be ascribed to ignorance on their part or the desire to get their names at any cost into the media. Read more about them here and here: you will note how the same names keep reappearing from one organisation to another.

Following the methodology of the old political group, the SMC and all the other groups in and around Spiked like to be 'edgy' and 'controversial', and which usually means putting forward a line that -- very peculiarly -- usually ends up aligning with the most rapacious ends of big-business. Why SMC has decided to throw its lot in the Wesselyans on ME/CFS is, however, a bit of a mystery to me.
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who advertises via science media centre wouldn't be the insurance industry by any chance wh o else has the most to gain by abusing the chronically ill .
 
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