United Kingdom: Science Media Centre (including Fiona Fox)

JemPD said:
Re the 'low impact journal' bit, I'm sure i read an article not long ago about journal prestige not being linked to research quality. but i cant find it. Cant anyone else recall it?

This one is old & i cant read the full article w/out a subscription, but the recent article was along the same lines http://www.bmj.com/content/314/7079/497.1.full

Just thought if we could find that article, i sure it was published somehwere credible, someone could tweet it as part of the response to the 'fibsheet'.

ETA this one might also be an answer for that particular 'it wasnt in a prestigious journal therefore not worth listening to' nonsense... do you think it's any good @Jonathan Edwards? https://www.nature.com/news/beat-it...te-turns-against-controversial-metric-1.20224
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I think the point was, the BPSers control a lot of the high impact journals. They would block any counter-narrative quick smart. Do people remember that awfully biased rejection this group got when they tried to submit to the BMJ? Similar article, I think. The reviewer banging on about how he didn't believe that any of the authors were genuine patients because he hadn't diagnosed them personally.
 
Sean said:
Effective treatments basically sell themselves.

Vaccines became hugely popular when parents saw how many vaccinated children weren't dying. (And started becoming unpopular a couple of generations later when parents were not seeing how many unvaccinated children were dying, because vaccines had been so successful in controlling those diseases.)
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Yes. Vaccines are popular. Childhood vaccination rates continue to reach new highs across virtually all of the world, English speaking countries included and the impact of the now-disproven Wakefield scare only occurred in the UK with a dip in MMR vaccination rates that completely reversed in just a few years. Vaccination rates in other countries were barely affected.

Claims like anti-vaxxers are having a meaningful impact on national vaccination rates in this decade are easily disprovable.
 
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anniekim said:
One of the assertions of this reanalysis, that treatment effects seen may simply be the result of unblinded self-report measures, would not explain why patients undergoing adaptive pacing therapy (APT) did worse than those receiving CBT and GET in the original study who were also unblinded to therapy. It is disappointing that the pacing therapy data was not reanalysed as part of this study.
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Also Jon Stone above conveniently doesn’t mention, as detailed in the reanalysis paper, that only the CBT and GET manuals stressed how effective these two treatments supposedly were ramping up the bias for CBT and GET over APT.
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[My bold]

Erm ... yes it would:
  1. If one group were being prescribed pills that said on the box "these pills are similar to what you have always been taking", whilst another group were taking pills which said on the box "these are the wizzy new treatment we are trialling", then expectation bias will inevitably manifest itself into the self reporting of how people feel about their illness.
  2. Additionally, and very different to and distinct from '1', if the wizzy new treatment is explicitly designed to change how people feel about their illness, then a "treatment induced perception bias" will feed through into the self reporting of how people feel about their illness.
Self reports are all about how people feel about their illness, not how it actually is.

They seem to miss the point about unblinding, as if unblinding inflates everything? Unblinding can both inflate and deflate.
 
It occurs to me that the SMC is a registered charity and is therefore accountable to the Charity Commission.

https://www.gov.uk/complain-about-charity:
Other serious complaints
Report serious concerns to the Charity Commission, for example if a charity is:

  • not doing what it claims to do
  • losing lots of money
  • harming people
  • being used for personal profit or gain
  • involved in illegal activity
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I think one could make a case that the SMC is “not doing what it claims to do” and “harming people”.

Does anyone know if a complaint has ever been submitted to the CC? @dave30th @JohnTheJack
 
Snow Leopard said:
That is explicitly what psychiatrists care about - how patients feel about the illness. Central to the psychiatrist mindset is if patients say they feel better and don't complain to medical doctors etc, then this means they have done their job.
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Exactly. Which is why these sort of psychiatrists should never be let anywhere near patients who need objectivity from their ... Oh, wait a minute ... I think I should have stopped after 'patients'.
 
Robert 1973 said:
It occurs to me that the SMC is a registered charity and is therefore accountable to the Charity Commission.

https://www.gov.uk/complain-about-charity:


I think one could make a case that the SMC is “not doing what it claims to do” and “harming people”.

Does anyone know if a complaint has ever been submitted to the CC? @dave30th @JohnTheJack
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Isn't that a rather odd setup? The notion that most of the BBC's science reporting is vectored through a charity? I can't quite put my finger on it at the moment, but it feels not quite right. Conflicts of interests and all that. Are there any other examples in the UK of news being channelled through a charity? Are charities really allowed to do that?
 
Robert 1973 said:
It occurs to me that the SMC is a registered charity and is therefore accountable to the Charity Commission.

https://www.gov.uk/complain-about-charity:


I think one could make a case that the SMC is “not doing what it claims to do” and “harming people”.

Does anyone know if a complaint has ever been submitted to the CC? @dave30th @JohnTheJack
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I haven't heard of any.

If I'm honest, I think it would be difficult to make it stick.

I think complaints about the SMC need to be made down the political and media route. There is no way it should be receiving public money or treated as an oracle by eg Science Committee or embedded in the BBC.
 
JohnTheJack said:
There is no way it should be receiving public money
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from 2013
UK taxpayers unwittingly subsidise Science Media Centre with £370k per year to manipulate the science agenda
" It hires friendly "experts" to give carefully manufactured "expert comments" to the press, and it pretends to represent a "scientific consensus" even where no such a thing exists. It depends, for its continued success, on a pliant and uncritical media in which there are hardly any good investigative science journalists left, and in which science editors prefer to receive ready-made stories which can be regurgitated. Many of its press briefings are essentially private affairs, to which only trusted journalists are invited."

http://gmwatch.org/en/news/archive/...science-media-centre-to-tune-of-370k-per-year
 
Sly Saint said:
from 2013
UK taxpayers unwittingly subsidise Science Media Centre with £370k per year to manipulate the science agenda
" It hires friendly "experts" to give carefully manufactured "expert comments" to the press, and it pretends to represent a "scientific consensus" even where no such a thing exists. It depends, for its continued success, on a pliant and uncritical media in which there are hardly any good investigative science journalists left, and in which science editors prefer to receive ready-made stories which can be regurgitated. Many of its press briefings are essentially private affairs, to which only trusted journalists are invited."

http://gmwatch.org/en/news/archive/...science-media-centre-to-tune-of-370k-per-year
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Very interesting indeed. The SMC's shenanigans seem not to be confined to ME at all - they seem to be undermining good science on an industrial scale! What is it that actually drives them? Greed? Politics? Etc? They seem to be a scandal worth exposing all in their own right. I wonder how many other branches of science they have p*ssed off?
 
@Sly Saint 's post here ...

https://www.s4me.info/threads/scien...ss-and-the-controversy.3104/page-6#post-56250

... makes me realise the SMC's dodgy science collation is by no means confined to just ME issues, and there might well be a lot of other science sectors in the same boat with them.

So please keep this thread on track, and post links, with relevant chat if on track, of any reports you come across about the SMC's unwarranted influence on science reporting and debate. Like I say, not confined to ME ... any science, any unwarranted influence.
 
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From 2014:

https://www.scidev.net/global/journ...-lambasted-for-pushing-corporate-science.html

UK’s Science Media Centre lambasted for pushing corporate science
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But now a body of academic research is emerging that challenges the self-professed independence and objectivity of the information provided by the Science Media Centre (SMC) in London, United Kingdom, which is said to have inspired the set-up of others.

Its briefings on various issues, including those of relevance to development, such as genetic modification (GM) or renewable energy, are reported on by British mass media, such as the BBC and The Guardian, which have a global audience and influence.

Researchers are questioning two of the SMC’s claims: to provide neutral scientific views to promote better representation of science in the media, and to be independent of its many funders, who are largely the corporate world and the government.

Instead, they said at PCST2014, corporate lobbyists feature high on the agenda, which is dominated by the topics close to corporate rather than public interest.

And the journalists who uncritically report on SMC briefings and quotes sent by the centre are being taken for a ride by a lobby organisation instead of a neutral science information provider, they said.

“I would close down the Science Media Centre,” said Connie St Louis, former president of the Association of British Science Writers and a senior lecturer at City University, London. She conducted a small study on the centre’s impact on UK science reporting in the 12 national newspapers in 2011 and 2012.
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Plus lots more. It's a good read.
 
People involved in SMC have a track record of odd political affiliations and strange angles on things like GM, global warming, tobacco, animal rights etc etc. Dr Paul has some inside knowledge of the community involved and seemed to think that in most cases it did not matter too much but that the bias relating to ME was a real problem.
 
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