I can't tell if she's being ironic or not, in blogging how important it is to have independence for researchers. http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/research-councils-independence-once-lost-is-hard-to-recover/
Good grief it’s just name dropping/creeping up/self aggrandisement wrapped up as some kind of “insightful”media/political analysis.Even creeping up to Gove. The SMCs younger selves would despise this. No wonder the BPS crew get on so well with the SMC it’s all bullsh*t
It takes some skill to be part of a personality cult, and call yourselves Living Marxism while showing little sign of sentience (or marxism). The same crowd also created a documentary called 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle#Reception_and_criticism which fell afoul of broadcast regulations. Basically well paid career trolls.
I have been reading the testimony by Fiona Fox to the Leveson official inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press from 2012. Interesting and in places funny. In light of recent and past SMC press promotions it is worth a read. eg: A couple of initiatives to improve accuracy of science reporting were supposedly in the pipeline at the time; they do not appear to have been implemented(?) (she mentions ME and the XMRV episode). https://leveson.sayit.mysociety.org/hearing-24-january-2012/ms-fiona-fox
And Richard Horton writing about how much of published science is wrong and flawed while being a primary enabler, writing about how scientists sometimes get stuck believing their own hype and Michael Sharpe actually retweeting it. They are utterly blind to their own biases even as they write about the problem of bias being a large-scale problem. Even as their own biases have been pointed out specifically and explicitly. It seems pretty clear that climbing the ladder in UK medicine is entirely about politics rather than science or skill. Mediocre people are in charge of everything. How did that even happen? Is it a larger problem within the society? When I look at the people running the country, even the people being lined up to take over, the pattern seems to be pretty widespread.
Because they have more time to devote to politics than people who are busy getting on with something useful?
I saw it happening time after time where I worked as a teacher/lecturer. Subject heads were usually competent, but above that level incompetents were often put in charge. The first thing they would do would be a 'reorganisation' of all the departments, which gave them the perfect excuse to make the competent ones beneath them redundant. You could tell the ones angling for promotion by the way they dressed.
Yes, this bit had me in stitches: LOL, opinionated science reporters. So, from the horse's mouth, an explanation as to why their science coverage is so cringemakingly biased!