THE FABRICATION of public falsehoods is a form of censorship that can be at its sharpest in what sometimes passes for science journalism, a leading judge has argued.
Lord Justice Stephen Sedley of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, who last night gave the Law Society’s annual Human Rights lecture, said not a week passed without “another piece of junk science reaching the front pages as scientific fact”.
With little scientific research being either conclusive or easy to interpret, the major scientific journals had press officers whose jobs were to publicise what they were publishing “and which to this end have been known to dumb down scientific work to the point of misrepresentation”, he suggested.
“Others use PR firms with no scientific credentials at all. With or without such encouragement, there is today a tally in the British press of supposedly scientific news stories which not only misinform or disinform but sometimes do demonstrable harm.”
In a lecture entitled The Three Wise Monkeys and the Marketplace of Ideas: Censorship in a Free Society, Lord Justice Sedley pointed to a story published this summer that reported as a fact that kidney stones affected one adult male in four – "a level of risk which might well send you to your doctor for preventive treatment, but which, it turns out, was made up by the PR firm which represents a pharmaceutical company with an interest in such treatment".
He also referred to the common belief in Britain that National Health Service hospitals were infested with MRSA. The press’s evidence of dirty hospitals came principally from a single-self-advertised microbiologist who, it turned out, “was effectively unqualified and worked in a garden shed”.
Journalists elevated him to “Britain’s leading expert” on MRSA and denounced as a cover-up every official attempt to refute him.
“On the scale set by the 20th century, the MRSA fabrication may not rank as a grand lie, but it was a sedulously managed falsehood designed to sell newspapers,” Lord Justice Sedley remarked.
He described the fabrication of public falsehoods was “a form of censorship as unacceptable as the ministry of truth which represents the media’s – and a free society’s – ultimate nightmare. Like state censorship, it distorts or blots out known or knowable fact in pursuit of a private agenda.”
