Special Report - Online activists are silencing us, scientists say Reuters March 2019

Unable said:
Thinking of the last Kate Kelland piece on the anticipated Cochrane review withdrawal. I thought in that piece she included enough detail for an astute reader to pick up some concern on the real issues.

And this article too (as I said up thread somewhere) gives strong hints towards an underlying problem. I’m not sure the BPS folk will be as pleased with the article as all that. Sure the headline is all their side, but deeper reading does give readers hints about where to find more about patient concerns.

Mentioning the CDC change is good too. Thinking folk will wonder about that detail.
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The problem is online most people skim read and only read headlines or titles, if you’re lucky the first sentence or two. Beyond that it is a very small %.
 
BeautifulDay said:
Article: "Monsanto fed Reuters reporter Kate Kelland info to discredit IARC researcher"

https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/lat...rter-kate-kelland-with-info-to-discredit-iarc
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Here's more on the Kelland/Monsanto story, for anyone that's interested. I thought the last couple of paragraphs were particularly relevant, (and they support what @JaimeS just wrote about why Reuters turns a blind eye)...

"And finally, in an odd exclusion, the story fails to disclose that Kelland herself has at least tangential ties to Monsanto and friends. Kelland has helped promote an organization called the Science Media Centre, a group whose aim is to connect certain scientists such as Tarone with journalists like Kelland, and which gets its largest block of funding from corporations that include the agrichemical industry. Current and past funders include Monsanto, Monsanto's proposed merger partner Bayer AG, DuPont and agrichemical industry lobbyist CropLife International. Kelland appears in a promotional video for SMC touting the group and authored an essay applauding the SMC that appeared in a SMC promotional report.

As a Reuters reporter for 17 years (1998-2015), I know the value of an "exclusive." The more such scoops a reporter garners, the more bonus points and high praise from editors. It's a system seen in many news agencies and it works great when it encourages dogged, investigative journalism. But powerful corporations like Monsanto also know how eager reporters are to land exclusives and know that handing favored journalists cherry-picked information with the promise of exclusivity can serve their public relations needs quite well. Follow up the hand-fed story with a press release from an industry-funded outlet and calls for an investigation from the industry group American Chemistry Council and you have propaganda gold."​
 
JaimeS said:
Too bad re: the source. It looks like good reporting, honestly, having read the whole thing -- but it would be better coming from something not called "GM Watch". :confused:
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You don't have to quote GM Watch. The story originally came from Le Monde 31 Jan 2019 (paywall, and in French of course).
Monsanto, poids lourd des pesticides et spécialiste des infos en kit
La dernière livraison des « Monsanto Papers » montre comment l’entreprise tente de décrédibiliser les chercheurs et organismes qui lui déplaisent.
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https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/arti...pecialiste-des-infos-en-kit_5417225_3244.html
 
DokaGirl said:
A "biological condition that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors".

Has anyone in the PS group said exactly this before? If memory serves, I haven't noted ME being described as "biological" this group.
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I think they have used this before. The way I read it is they believe ME starts with an infection and then patients get deconditioned or afraid to recover so psychological factors lead to the continuation of the disease.
 
JaimeS said:
The science is really, really poorly done, but it's like people desperately WANT to believe in it. We've spoken before about how deeply people wish to believe their health is in their own hands, but this goes to a deeper and weirder place, IMO. And the more we push, the more the True Believers seem convinced that they must be right, because you need to believe that to put yourself in a "fighting mood".

So then also they're genuinely hurting people with this. I've just gone through the Forward ME responses to GET and there were a few questions that have probed deeper and... the effects of GET are really, really grim. I mean, I knew they were grim, but GRIM. Actually, somehow, worse than I thought. I'm not trying to toss out a 'teaser', the results aren't released yet, but I'm trying to help you guys conceptualize how I'm feeling as I'm trying to tell these people that:
  • The science is genuinely bad
  • Your actions will lead to bad things for patients
  • You're telling everyone we're violent and not to be trusted
  • You're characterizing a very powerful man and his powerful friends as heroic underdogs
  • You're casting disabled people in particular as The Shadowy & Powerful Enemy
Ok, yeah, seems like about as good an idea as that NPR pain article.

I'll reiterate that even though my blood is on fire that attacking these people (as opposed to their work) is bad news. Most people are convinced by patience and science and reasonableness, if they're to be convinced at all.
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Those bullet points are a great summary of where we are. Love it.
 
Lucibee said:
Please stop it with the conspiracy theories already - it's not helpful. Kelland did seem to handle the glyphosate story responsibly. Sometimes journalists get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong.
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I've got no idea whether Kelland's other work has problems with it or not, but I think it's well worth sticking to the areas where we're 100% certain that we're right.
 
For the SMC's tenth anniversary hoo-hah, Kate wrote a testimonial about how helpful the organization was when she covered the Japan nuclear accident. Basically, she acknowledged outsourcing her independent editorial judgement to the SMC. Why bother finding your own sources when the SMC provides better ones?:

"The SMC made that happen. We could not have done it without them. Yes, we could have gone through the same motions, and certainly we could have made the same number of phone calls and asked the same questions every day. But I have no doubt that the people we would have talked to would have had less credibility and fewer answers. Our sources would have been less intelligent, less scrutinised, and less newsworthy."
 
Barry said:
Yes, and I'll bet it's very much about the quotes that were omitted. The simplest form of bias is to omit what you don't want people to know, and then the bits you are left with - join them up out of context so their implied meaning gets screwed.
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Exactly how the Franco - Prussian war started. Bismarck selectively edited a telegram to make it insulting.
Some things don' t change.
 
chrisb said:
Does anyone else suspect that strong editorial control may have prevented publication of the report that some might have wished for?
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I agree. The article comes across as being very poorly written because it's choppy and there's no flow to it. My first thought was to wonder if the lawyers had done some extensive pruning of anything that might be construed as being too libellous.
 
@Barry

Thank you for your comment re the deconditioning portion of PS theory of ME being the biomedical part. I am aware of their theory.

Amazing that on the one hand they have said all the symptoms of ME are just due to deconditioning, and
on the other, have also denied any of these
symptoms exist for pwME.

They seem to say whatever, whichever way the wind blows, as long as they stick within the PS parameters. :)
 
Stewart said:
Here's more on the Kelland/Monsanto story, for anyone that's interested. I thought the last couple of paragraphs were particularly relevant, (and they support what @JaimeS just wrote about why Reuters turns a blind eye)...

"And finally, in an odd exclusion, the story fails to disclose that Kelland herself has at least tangential ties to Monsanto and friends. Kelland has helped promote an organization called the Science Media Centre, a group whose aim is to connect certain scientists such as Tarone with journalists like Kelland, and which gets its largest block of funding from corporations that include the agrichemical industry. Current and past funders include Monsanto, Monsanto's proposed merger partner Bayer AG, DuPont and agrichemical industry lobbyist CropLife International. Kelland appears in a promotional video for SMC touting the group and authored an essay applauding the SMC that appeared in a SMC promotional report.

As a Reuters reporter for 17 years (1998-2015), I know the value of an "exclusive." The more such scoops a reporter garners, the more bonus points and high praise from editors. It's a system seen in many news agencies and it works great when it encourages dogged, investigative journalism. But powerful corporations like Monsanto also know how eager reporters are to land exclusives and know that handing favored journalists cherry-picked information with the promise of exclusivity can serve their public relations needs quite well. Follow up the hand-fed story with a press release from an industry-funded outlet and calls for an investigation from the industry group American Chemistry Council and you have propaganda gold."​
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"Shaken by the Reuters article, IARC defended the integrity of its scientific approach. Its rules, explained the agency, require that it does not consider unpublished results, "be they those of the AHS or any other study". Its expert groups base their work exclusively on openly published studies, most of which appear in scientific journals and have thus passed through the filter of peer review.

The update of the AHS was finally published in November 2017.

After the recent revelation of this correspondence between the lobbyist and Kelland, Christopher Wild, at the time the director of IARC, reacted on Twitter on January 28. Noting that the journalist had won a prize for her "misleading" article, the researcher asked if it would be withdrawn.

But in response to Le Monde's questions, Reuters said it was "convinced that the article constitutes a complete, fair and accurate representation of the facts, including in the attribution of the cited legal documents".
 
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