United Kingdom: Science Media Centre (including Fiona Fox)

Where did Fiona Fox write that @Adam pwme ?

Fiona Fox appears to have written a universal get-out clause for anything she wrote in her book. On page 13 of 'Beyond the Hype' Fox writes:

"This book is not intended to be an objective record of science in the media during the 21st century: it is my account of my time in it. Or to put it another way - this is my book, and all the things in it are what I remember"

In the Acknowledgements section Fox says she had help with fact checking, and writes
"If the book is wrong in places that is my failing"

 

The quote was at the top of page 78.

Thanks I'd not seen that. Wow, quite the disclaimer...

 

Yes, well, we can see that, since nobody who had checked the facts at all would have written chapter 3.

 

Not sure if this is related or not ...

https://me-pedia.org/wiki/PACE_trial

[my italic]

 

Thanks Barry that's really helpful. It looks like Fox is probably referring to the Countess of Mar but got the details wrong saying it was an MP during a parliamentary debate.

 

Good heavens - she got a point of detail wrong ... I find that so very hard to believe!

Probably confusing with Carol Monaghan, who described PACE as possibly the greatest medical scandal ...

 

Haha, so out of character

 

Can someone post on social media re the claim about "fraud" - Hansard is the official record but I'm not sure if you can e.g. check for "PACE" & "fraud" - used together.
Or simply ask her when this occurred? Might be interesting if it turned out they were self identifying!

 

Trial by Error by David Tuller Science Media Centre Chief Compares Patient Advocates to Nazis

quote:
In a widely hyped new book–“Beyond the Hype: The Inside Story of Science’s Biggest Media Controversies”–Fox recounts her escapades as the head of this purportedly neutral science communications agency. As anyone who has followed events in the ME/CFS world knows, the SMC, founded two decades ago, has played an influential and unfortunately negative role in shaping how the British press has regarded and covered the ME/CFS saga. Chapter 3 of Fox’s book involves what the subhead calls “the bitter row over ME/CFS research.”

The title of this chapter–“First They Came for the Communists”—leaves little doubt about Fox’s perspective.

 

Probably for the same reason why brand new movies, often before their actual release have a rating of 9/10 on IMDB, then once widely released in cinemas, the rating drops to 6.3. Mysteries, mysteries everywhere.

 

The book has an Amazon rating of 2.6 out of 5 at the moment.

I'm not sure how someone who did any research at all could believe that opposition to CBT/GET is a fringe movement among patients when researching this for 10 minutes should make it very clear that major patient organizations in the US, UK, Netherlands, France, Australia, Spain, Germany, Austria, Norway, Canada are strongly against CBT/GET. The only answer is that she never researched this at all, naively believing everything she was told by the PACE authors. For a journalist who claims to be working against misinformation this is an embarassing failure.

Or perhaps she sees her role more as supporting the perceived authorities against those with different opinions than anything to do with finding out what is true and what is false.

 

Sharpe mentions "false allegations about the trial", including of fraud, in the briefing document he sent ahead of the Westminster Hall debate on 21 June 2018.

He also emailed Carol Monaghan to tell her that her behaviour was "unbecoming of an MP" before the WH debate, but I can't remember what this was in relation to. It might have been something she had said in the HoC previously (in the run up to the debate), but I can't track down exactly what.

[eta] She did say, in the earlier February 2018 WH debate that, "From the very start the PACE trial was flawed."

[eta2] Or maybe it was this article in Politics Home on 18 June 2018 - "flawed and unreliable"

 

In the US the book has a 3.4 rating. 61% are 5 stars and 39% being 1 star.

One review is positive.

 

I have tried once again to leave a star rating for some thing i bought - a book and another item, without leavinbg a written comment. Its not possible so one does wonder how those 5 star ratings got there

 

Thanks Lucy.

 

Thinking more about this, and trying to recall the order of events at the time (tricky). Things have got somewhat conflated here.

What I think we know (maybe):

Sharpe emailed Monaghan about the upcoming debate, presumably to include his briefing doc.

Monaghan mentions the email, and that Sharpe said her conduct was unbecoming etc. (or maybe he warned her not to say anything that might be unbecoming? I'm trying to be charitable)

Sharpe then takes to Twitter to say that what he said was misrepresented, and that she used "parliamentary privilege" to do so.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1010171101148844032


and...


I don't think anyone actually mentioned that the trial was fraudulent - that was all in the briefing doc (that he provided), and not in the debate.
MPs tend to be careful about that sort of thing.

 

I think you're right. The only mention of fraud appears to be from the Countess of Mar mentioned earlier in the thread.