net.wars

The court clerk - if that's the right term - seemed slightly baffled by the number of people who showed up for Tuesday's hearing in Simon Singh v. British Chiropractic Association. There was much rearrangement, as the principals asked permission to move forward a row to make an extra row of public seating and then someone magically produced eight or ten folding chairs to line up along the side. Standing was not allowed. (I'm not sure why, but I guess something to do with keeping order and control.)

It was impossible to listen to the arguments without feeling a part of history. Someday - ten, 50, 150 years from now - a different group of litigants will be sitting in that same court room or one very like it in the same building and will cite "our" case, just as counsel cited precedents such as Reynolds and Branson v Bower. If Singh's books don't survive, his legal case will, as may the effects of the campaign to reform libel law (sign the petition!) it has inspired and the Culture, Media, and Sport report (Scribd) that was published on Wednesday. And the sheer stature of the three judges listening to the appeal - Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge (to Americans: I am not making this up!), Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger, and Lord Justice Sedley - ensures it will be taken seriously.

There are plenty of write-ups of what happened in court and better-informed analyses than I can muster to explain what it means. The gist, however: it's too soon to tell which pieces of law will be the crucial bits on which the judges make their decision. They certainly seemed to me to be sympathetic to the arguments Singh's counsel, Adrienne Page QC, made and much less so to the arguments the BCA's counsel, Heather Rogers QC. But the case will not be decided on the basis of sympathy; it will be decided on the basis of legal analysis. "You can't read judges," David Allen Green (aka jackofkent) said to me over lunch. So we wait.
But the interesting thing about the case is that this may be the first important British legal case to be socially networked: here is a libel case featuring no pop stars or movie idols, and yet they had to turn some 20 or 30 people away from the courtroom. Do judges read Twitter?

Beginning with Howard Rheingold's 1993 book The Virtual Community, it was clear that the Net's defining characteristic as a medium is its enablement of many-to-many communication. Television, publishing, and radio are all one-to-many (if you can consider a broadcaster/publisher a single gatekeeper voice). Telephones and letters are one-to-one, by and large. By 1997, business minds, most notably John Hagel III and Arthur Armstrong in net.gain, had begun saying that the networked future of businesses would require them to build communities around themselves. I doubt that Singh thinks of his libel case in that light, but today's social networks (which are a reworking of earlier systems such as Usenet and online conferencing systems) are enabling him to do just that. The leverage he's gained from that support is what is really behind both the challenge to English libel law and the increasing demand for chiropractors generally to provide better evidence or shut up.

Given the value everyone else, from businesses to cause organizations to individual writers and artists, places on building an energetic, dedicated, and active fan base, it's surprising to see Richard Dawkins, whose supporters have apparently spent thousands of unpaid hours curating his forums for him, toss away what by all accounts was an extraordinarily successful community supporting his ideas and his work. The more so because apparently Dawkins has managed to attract that community without ever noticing what it meant to the participants. He also apparently has failed to notice that some people on the Net, some of the time, are just the teeniest bit rude and abusive to each other. He must lead a very sheltered life, and, of course, never have moderated his own forums.

What anyone who builds, attracts, or aspires to such a community has to understand from the outset is that if you are successful your users will believe they own it. In some cases, they will be right. It sounds - without having spend a lot of time poring over Dawkins' forums myself - as though in this case in fact the users, or at least the moderators, had every right to feel they owned the place because they did all the (unpaid) work. This situation is as old as the Net - in the days of per-minute connection charges CompuServe's most successful (and economically rewarding to their owners) forums were built on the backs of volunteers who traded their time for free access. And it's always tough when users rediscover the fact that in each individual virtual community, unlike real-world ones, there is always a god who can pull the plug without notice.

Fortunately for the causes of libel law reform and requiring better evidence, Singh's support base is not a single community; instead, it's a group of communities who share the same goals. And, thankfully, those goals are bigger than all of us.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. I would love to hear (net.wars@skeptic.demon.co.uk) from someone who could help me figure out why this blog vapes all non-spam comments without posting them.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This year is going to be the first British general election in which blogging is going to be a factor, someone said on Monday night at the event organized by the Westminster Skeptics on the subject of political blogging: does it make any difference? I had to stop and think: really? Things like the Daily Kos have been part of the American political scene for so long now - Kos was founded in 2002 - that they've been through two national elections already.

But there it was: "2005 was my big break," said Paul Staines, who blogs as Guido Fawkes. "I was the only one covering it. 2010 is going to be much tougher." To stand out, he went on to say, you're going to need a good story. That's what they used to tell journalists.

Due to the wonders of the Net, you can experience the debate for yourself. The other participants were Sunny Hundal (Liberal Conspiracy), Mick Fealty (Slugger O'Toole), Jonathan Isaby (Conservative Home), and the Observer journalist Nick Cohen, there to act as the token nay-sayer. (I won't use skeptic, because although the popular press like to see a "skeptic" as someone who's just there to throw brickbats, I use the term rather differently: skepticism is inquiry and skeptics ask questions and examine evidence.)

All four of political bloggers have a precise idea of what they're trying to do and who they're writing for. Jonathan Isaby, who claims he's the first British journalist to leave a full-time newspaper job (at the Telegraph) for new media, said he's read almost universally among Conservative candidates. Paul Staines aims Guido Fawkes at "the Westminster bubble". Mick Fealty uses Slugger O'Toole to address a "differentiated audience" that is too small for TV, radio, and newspapers. Finally, Sunny Hundal uses Liberal Conspiracy to try to "get the left wing to become a more coherent force".

Despite their various successes, Cohen's basic platform defended newspapers. Blogging, he said, is not replacing the essential core of journalism: investigation and reporting. He's right up to a point. But some do exactly that. Westminster Skeptics convenor David Allen Green, then standing approximately eight inches away, is one example. But it's probably true that for every blogger with sufficient curiosity and commitment to pick up a phone or bang on someone's door there are a couple of hundred more who write blog postings by draping a couple of hundred words of opinion around a link to a story that appeared in the mainstream media.

Of course, as Cohen didn't say, plenty of journalists\, through lack of funding, lack of time, or lack of training, find themselves writing news stories by draping a couple of hundred words of rewritten press release around the PR-provided quotes - and soul-destroying work it is, too. My answer to Cohen, therefore, is to say that commercial publishers have contributed to their own problems, and that one reason blogs have become such an entrenched medium is that they cover things that no newspaper will allow you to write about in any detail. And it's hard to argue with Cohen's claim that almost any blogger finding a really big story will do the sensible thing and sell it to a newspaper.

If you can. Arguably the biggest political story of 2009 was MPs' expenses. That material was released because of the relentless efforts of Heather Brooke, who took up the 2005 arrival into force of the UK's Freedom of Information Act as a golden opportunity. It took her nearly five years to force the disclosure of MPs' expenses - and when she finally succeeded the Telegraph wrote its own stories after poring over the details that were disclosed.

The fact is that political blogging has been with us for far longer than one five-year general election cycle. It's just that most of it does not take the same form as the "inside politics" blogs of the US or the traditional Parliamentary sketches in the British newspapers. The push for Libel reform began with Jack of Kent (David Allen Green); the push to get the public more engaged with their MPs began with MySociety's Fax Your MP. It was clear as long ago as 2006 that MPs were expert users of They Work For You: it's how they keep tabs on each other. MySociety's sites are not blogs - but they are the source material without which political blogging would be much harder work.

I don't find it encouraging to hear Isaby predict that in the upcoming election (expected in May) blogging "will keep candidates on their toes" because "gaffes will be more quickly reported". Isn't this the problem with US elections? That everyone gets hung up on calumnies such as that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. Serious issues fall by the wayside, and good candidates can be severely damaged by biased reporting that happens to feed an eminently quotable sarcastic joke. Still: anything for a little light into the smoke-filled back rooms where British politics is still made. Even with smoking now banned, it's murky back there.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Irish author Tim Pat Coogan has commented that Ireland was colonized twice: once by the British, and once by the Catholic church. I was reminded of that yesterday when reading that the leader of the Irish Catholic church, Cardinal Sean Brady, the Irish government, and the commissioner of the Irish police have all apologized for decades of systematically covering up child abuse by Catholic priests, uncovered in the damning report of a three-year inquiry into the Archdiocese of Dublin from 1975 to 2004. It seems that the cover-up went, like Watergate, all the way to the top.

When I was living in Ireland in the late 1980s few people talked about abuse by priests. One who did was Frank Crummey, whom I interviewed for one of my first-ever published pieces, for the Guardian's women's page about the prosecution of the Irish Family Planning Association for giving away condoms at Virgin's Dublin Megastore. (Richard Branson funded the IFPA's defense, and flew in for the court hearing.) The chain of contacts led to Margaret Gaj, a veteran of contraceptive campaigns, and she sent me to Crummey.

He told me that his interest in contraception began as a campaign to redress the imbalance in subsidies between the Gaeltacht - Irish-language - and English-speaking agricultural areas. Working on that got him into the schools, where he saw that children were being abused - he mentioned in particular the Christian Brothers. But trying to engage their mothers on the issue failed: they were too poor and too dependent on their priests for help and charity to risk confrontation. Often, he told me, the priests would divulge even to abusive husbands what their wives said in the supposedly safe confessional. As the Irish writer Seán Mac Mathúna asked in one of his short stories, "Who'd be a woman in Ireland?" The situation with respect to child abuse seems not to have been much different: clergy and police cooperated to protect the guilty.

Unable to interest the authorities in the problems he was finding in the schools - a problem he encountered again, reportedly, in Ireland's industrial schools - Crummey concluded that the underlying problem was that too many children consigned them to poverty and powerlessness. That's when he began smuggling contraceptives into Ireland and, with his family's help, distributing them by post. The letters he got from desperate women telling their stories to beg for help, he said, were heart-rending.

It is hard to convey to anyone who didn't live in Ireland in or before the 1980s how deeply embedded the Church was. It owned 90 percent of the primary schools and most of the hospitals. The Irish Constitution, although it includes a US-like clause guaranteeing the separation of church and state clearly intended "freedom of religion" to mean "freedom to be Catholic". The late Leslie Shepard, editor of The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology and an early supporter of The Skeptic frequently talked about the unique position of priests in rural villages in earlier times. Often, he noted, they were the only people who could read and write.

In fact, the village priest figured heavily in one of the topics covered in the early issues of The Skeptic (and revisited in the soon-to-be forthcoming Why Statues Weep: the Best of The Skeptic from Philosophy Press). The Trinity College Dublin professor David Berman had discovered new documents showing that the local priest was behind the Knock Apparitions. (Shepard always vehemently disputed that any village priest could be so deceptive.) I'm not sure a similar strategy will work now.

Noticeable change had begun while I was living there, often attributed to economic improvement that meant that many of Ireland's emigrants could afford to return, bringing with them experiences of life in other countries. A few of these founded the Campaign to Separate Church and State; others banded together to build non-denominational charter schools for their kids. In the 1990s, of course, then along came the technology boom which, at least for a time, charged the economy.

The Church was already in trouble before the scandals broke. Writing in Disillusioned Decades: Ireland 1966-1987 (Gill and Macmillan, 1987), Coogan noted that, "...though the presence of the church is all-pervasive there has been a diminution of the grip which it is able to maintain on an increasingly well-educated society. Increasing affluence (of a sort) and mobility mean that people can move in and out of the purview of the church without permitting it to have any great influence on their conduct (unless, of course, they want an abortion or a divorce)." From 1970 to 1985, the numbers entering the priesthood dropped by a quarter.

Now, according to the Independent, the abuse scandals have not only dramatically accelerated the already notable decline in numbers applying to enter the priesthood but is emptying the churches. For a country that only a little over 20 years ago could be persuaded through the power of the pulpit to vote down a constitutional amendment allowing divorce, it's staggering. The change may be less of a hard road for Ireland than it appears: one of the key messages the CSCS tried to impart in the late 1980s and early 1990s was that the church paid for less than people thought, since the religious-owned schools and hospitals had and have considerable State funding.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, follow on Twitter, or send email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a basic principle that ought to go like this: if someone is making a claim that a treatment has an impact on someone's health it should be possible to critique the treatment and the claim without being sued for libel. The efficacy of treatments that can cost people their lives - even if only by omission rather than commission - should be a case where the only thing that matters is the scientific evidence.

I refer, of course, to the terrible, terrible judgement in the case of British Chiropractic Association v. Simon Singh. In brief: the judge ruled that Singh's use of the word "bogus" in commentary that appeared in the Guardian (on its comments pages) and which he went on to explain in the following paragraph 1) was a statement of fact rather than opinion and 2) meant that the BCA's members engaged in deliberately deceiving their patients. The excellent legal blogger Jack of Kent (in real life, the London solicitor specialising in technology, communications, and media law David Allen Green) wrote up the day in court and also an assessment of the judgement and Singh's options for discussion.

None of it is good news for anyone who works in this area. Singh could settle; he could proceed to trial to prove something he didn't say and for which under the English system his lawyers may not be allowed to make a case for anyway; or he could appeal this ruling on meaning, with very little likelihood of success. Singh will announce his decision on Monday evening at a public support meeting (Facebook link).

A little about the judge, David Eady (b. 1943). Wikipedia has him called to the bar in 1966 and specializing in media law until 1997, when he was appointed a High Court judge. Eady has presided over a number of libel cases and also high-profile media privacy cases.

Speaking as a foreigner, this whole case has seemed to me bizarre. For one thing, there's the instinctive American reaction: English libel law reverses the burden of proof so that it rests on the defendant. Surely this is wrong. But more than that, I don't understand how it is possible to libel an organisation. The BCA isn't a person, even if its members supply personal services, and Singh named no specific members or officers. I note that it's sufficiently bizarre to British commenters that publications that normally would never reprint the text of a libel - like The Economist - are doing so in this case and analysing every word. Particularly, of course, the word "bogus", on which so much of the judgement depends. The fact that Singh explained what he meant by bogus in the paragraph after the one in dispute apparently did not matter in court.

We talk about the chilling effects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but the chilling effects of English libel law are far older and much more deeply entrenched. Discussions about changing it are as perennial and unproductive as the annual discussions about how it would be a really good idea to add another week between the French Open and Wimbledon. And this should be of concern throughout the English-publishing world: in the age of the Internet English courts seem to recognise no geographical boundaries. The New York author Rachel Ehrenfeld was successfully sued in Britain over allegations made in her book on funding terrorism despite the fact that neither she, the person who sued, nor the publisher were based in the UK. The judge was...David Eady.

Ehrenfeld asked the New York courts to promise not to enforce the judgement against her. When they couldn't (because no suit had been filed in New York), the state passed a law barring courts from enforcing foreign libel judgements if the speech in question would not be libellous under US law. Other states and the federal government are following to stop "libel tourism".

None of that, however, will help Simon Singh or anyone else who wants to critically examine the claims of pseudoscientists. The Skeptic, which I founded and edited some years (look for our Best Of book, soon), routinely censors itself, as does every other publication in this country. There are certain individuals and organisations who are known to be extremely litigious, and they get discussed as little as possible. Libel law is supposed to encourage responsible reporting and provide redress to wronged individuals, but at this virulent a level libel law is actually preventing responsible reporting of contentious matters of science and the individuals who are wronged are the public who are at risk of being deprived of the knowledge they need to make informed decisions. David Allen Green, writing in New Scientist, provides an excellent summary of cases in point.

It will be understandable if Singh decides to settle. I've seen an estimate that doing so now could cost him £100,000 - and continuing will be vastly more expensive. Lawsuits are, I'm told, like having cancer: miserable, roller-coaster affairs that consume your waking life and that of everyone around you. I have no idea what decision he will or should make. But he has my sympathy and my support.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to follow on Twitter, post here, or reply by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a sense in which you haven't really arrived as a skeptic until someone's sued you. I've never had more than a threat, so as founder of The Skeptic, I'm almost a nobody. But by that standard Simon Singh, author with alternative medicine professor Edzard Ernst of the really excellent Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, has arrived.

I think of Singh as one of the smarter, cooler generation of skeptics, who combine science backgrounds, good writing, and the ability to make their case in the mass media. Along with Ben Goldacre, Singh has proved that I was wrong when I thought, ten years ago, that getting skepticism into the national press on a regular basis was just too unlikely.

It's probably no coincidence that both cover complementary and alternative medicine, one of the biggest consumer issues of our time. We have a government that wants to save money on the health service. We have consumers who believe, after a decade or more of media insistence, that medicine is bad (BSE, childhood vaccinations, mercury fillings) and alternative treatments that defy science (homeopathy, faith healing) are good. We have overworked doctors who barely know their patients and whose understanding of the scientific process is limited. We have patients who expect miraculous cures like the ones they see on the increasingly absurd House. Doctors recommend acupuncture and Prince Charles, possessed of the finest living standards and medical treatment money can buy, promotes everything *else*. And we have medical treatments whose costs spiral every upwards, and constant reports of new medicines that fail their promise in one way or another.

But the trouble with writing for major media in this area is that you run across the litigious, and so has Singh: as Private Eye has apparently reported, he is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. The original article was published by the Guardian in April; it's been pulled from the site but the BCA's suit has made reposting it a cause celebre. (Have they learned *nothing* about the Net?) This annotated version details the evidence to back Singh's rather critical assessment of chiropractic. And there are many other New Zealand. And people complain about Big Pharma - the people alternative-medicine folks are supposed to be saving us from.

I'm not even sure how much sense it makes as a legal strategy. As the "gimpy" blog's comments point out, most of Singh's criticisms were based on evidence; a few were personal opinion. He mentioned no specific practitioners. Where exactly is the libel? (Non-UK readers may like to glance at the trouble with UK libel laws, recently criticized by the UN as operating against the public interest..

All science requires a certain openness to criticism. The whole basis of the scientific method is that independent researchers should be able to replicate each other's results. You accept a claim on that basis and only that basis - not because someone says it on their Web site and then sues anyone who calls it lacking in evidence. If the BCA has evidence that Singh is wrong, why not publish it? The answer to bad speech, as Mike Godwin, now working at Wikimedia, is so fond of saying, is more speech. Better speech. Or (for people less fond of talking) a dignified silence in the confidence that the evidence you have to offer is beyond argument. But suing people - especially individual authors rather than major media such as national newspapers - smacks of attempted intimidation. Though I couldn't possibly comment.

Ever since science became a big prestige, big money game we've seen angry fights and accusations - consider, for example, the ungracious and inelegant race to the Nobel prize on the part of some early HIV researchers. Scientists are humans, too, with all the ignoble motives that implies.

But many alternative remedies are not backed by scientific evidence, partly because often they are not studied by scientists in any great depth. The question of whether to allocate precious research money and resource to these treatments is controversial. Large pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to do it, for similar reasons to those that led them to research pills to reverse male impotence instead of new antibiotics. Scientists in research areas may prefer to study bigger problems. Medical organizations are cautious. The British Medical Association has long called for complementary therapies to be regulated to the same standards as orthodox medicine or denied NHS funding. As the General Chiropractic Council notes NHS funding is so far not widespread for chiropractic.

If chiropractors want to play with the big boys - the funded treatments, the important cures - they're going to have to take their lumps with the rest of them. And that means subluxing a little backbone and stumping up the evidence, not filing suit.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)