United Kingdom: Science Media Centre (including Fiona Fox)

Yes, I saw that - via @JohnTheJack 's blog. I wouldn't read too much into it. I suspect it's written before her trip.

I don't think she thought she had ME herself, just something like it - in the same way that many are now denying having long covid, even though they have experienced post-covid symptoms for months, if not a year or more. To many, ME is something you don't recover from - she recovered, so it clearly wasn't ME to her (unless it was helped by a dose of CBT/GET!). None of it makes any sense. Beware of trying to find any kind of logical consistency. Beware too of getting drawn into the whole RCP narrative, or getting distracted by spurious quotes from holocaust poems. The reason it is there, front and centre, is to draw attention away from the contents of the chapter, and as a dog-whistle to her final paragraph.

 

The OH came up with a good one: Simon's Media Chums

 

And the hoax phone call made by Fiona Fox (pretending to be a journalist) to MP Jim Devine's office manager.



Guardian 2010:

'Employment tribunal hears of bizarre hoax phone call'

The director of Britain's Science Media Centre pretended to be a journalist investigating MP's staff expenses.'


'Few people who are familiar with the small pond that is science journalism in the UK will have failed to gulp on reading about the ex-Labour MP Jim Devine and the unthinkable bullying he unleashed on his office manager, Marion Kinley.

Devine, who was an MP in Livingston, Scotland, before being caught up in the expenses scandal last year asked an acquaintance to make a fake call to Kinley and pretend to be a journalist investigating her financial affairs. The story gets darker with every step and you can read more about it here. Devine has since been ordered to pay Kinley £35,000.

Though appalling from the off, it was not the top line that shocked many of my colleagues most. What came as a surprise was the revelation far down the story that the fake call in question was made by Fiona Fox, head of the Science Media Centre in London, a prominent venue for press conferences on all matters scientific and medical. Otherwise articulate people who read the story struggled to say more than three letters: WTF?'


https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2010/oct/15/science-media-centre-hoax-call

 

hmm, I'm starting to think having read her manifesto thingyme on dropbox that, as has been the case, ME was a stepping stone for the 'all Long term conditions' and more given that the discredited ME research of PACE is what is used as the evidence for them having branched out into that broader MUS and IAPTS. Clearly she's never liked ME, but the next column onwards is all about the minds of people outside 'the Party' vs those within it and suggestions related to that.

Putting aside whether that means ME will keep getting dragged into these new (and I suspect they will be ever-changing to keep ahead of the bailiff so to speak) categories, they've created a massive new state system running CBT for all..

Has anyone checked some of the individuals who are pushing/rolling out these larger, harder to roll back areas like IAPTS, social prescription groups, or whatever might have sprung up directly from the back of this long campaign?

 

That was quite interesting, because it is about Amy Maxmen's piece here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08965-0

SMC don't get to police what other journals write about a particular issue - or rather, it's clear that they think they do!

It's one thing to help scientists to communicate effectively with the media and the public. It's quite another to be trying to contain and dictate the message across all media.

 

Throughout my life there have been occasional "panic, panic, panic" stories in the media about the birth control pill being dangerous or deadly. Also, there have been similar stories about treatments for breast cancer. So, I suspect one of those is being referred to, but I'm only guessing.

 

I'm sure the masses of people who falsely believe they are disabled by an illness will very soon see the light and recognize they're disabled only by their own negative attitude.

 

... and that will be the end of history.

 

Yes, I suspect some of my journalist friends will be chortling into their claret over this book. Last time I had lunch with Jerome Burne and James LeFanu SMC did not rank highly on the credibility stakes. Maybe that is why Fox has to bang her own drum - nobody else ain't going to bang it for her.

 

"horribly naive" springs to mind - https://deadlinescotland.wordpress....ck-joke-left-office-manager-sick-with-stress/

Why would someone who is CEO of a major media org/charity agree to make a hoax call for someone they barely know? And then leave a trail of emails in their wake that the poor office manager has access to? It's beyond belief!

 

hmm when the second email she jammed a 'I feel so bad I did that' into the bottom of came up I thought that was no accident, she knew full well it would be read. What she was doing making the call only she knows

 

I just thought it seems unusual even for this sort of thing to have aliases doesn't it?

 

Disappointing to see that it is one of Nature's 5 Top "Science" books this week:
https://mail2.virginmedia.com/appsuite/#!!&app=io.ox/mail&folder=flhawlw01QOKSZ
Features & opinion
Five best science books this week
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a sparkling survey of female dominance in the animal kingdom, an absorbing memoir that explores science’s biggest media controversies and a journey with trilobites.


Beyond the Hype

Fiona Fox Elliott & Thompson (2022)

It is 20 years since journalist Fiona Fox set up the influential Science Media Centre in London, to persuade more scientists to engage with the media. This absorbing, detailed book is her memoir of that period — not, as she makes clear, an “objective record”. Separate chapters deal with controversies such as “Climategate”, “Frankenfoods”, the politicization of science, sexism in research and how the current pandemic epitomizes an “age-old dichotomy” between the need for simple public messaging and the messy complexity of science

 

I may be being even slower than usual, but I have been trying, and failing to deconstruct the "First they came for the communists" line, and its symbolism.

Given the acknowledged reference by Fox to the RCP the obvious interpretation is that we are the "they" and she is the "communists", -the suitably rather paranoid communists.

But that does not work. The tenor of her message should be, and is that first we came for the psychiatrists and researchers. SW's Elliot Slater lecture was in May 1994. He had been barking on about the subject for some years before that.

She seems to be trying to make it all about her.

Perhaps I misunderstood.

 

And don't forget it was his "work" for the MOD that got him his knighthood.

 

I think what she is trying to say, is that if they don't do anything about ME activism, it will spread to all sorts of other areas. Slippery slope...

She says as much further on in the chapter:

and reiterated at the end:

 

I think my journalist friends might do the nose trick with their claret reading that bit.

 

I think that must be the implication.
So ME activists are nazis. Of course if they really were suffering from a biopsychosocial condition then psychiatrists should be sympathetic to their unhelpful beliefs about them (as they would be for paranoid schizophrenics for instance) so it would not be in their interest for journalists to say things like that. But then...

 

Thanks for the additional information @Lucibee . I presumed it must be something other than my interpretation. However it does seem an unusually clumsy piece of writing, regardless of any issues of taste, to leave the issue open,especially when she alluded to, and pointed out, the other interpretation.