legal bullying of bad science blog

It's off my usual territory although I have mentioned Bad Science before but the blogstorm over LBC threatening Dr Ben Goldacre with legal action over this post is well worth covering.

Essentially Dr Goldacre blogged extracts from Jeni Barnet's LBC radio show in which she discussed the MMR vaccine with callers. Dr Goldacre was not making a specific attack on Ms Barnett or LBC and was not interested in starting discussion about whether MMR may be linked to Autism (the evidence overwhelming says it isn't). His point was that uninformed and inaccurate press coverage of health and science stories and specifically vaccine scares can be a public health danger. Jeni Barnett's broadcast was a textbook example featuring almost every anti-vaccine lie going. Rather than selectively transcribe portions of the discussion or cherry-pick shorter excerpts Dr Goldacre chose to feature the complete discussion (extracted from a much longer programme). This seems to have been to avoid accusations of selective quotation.

Within two days LBC instructed lawyers to contact Dr Goldacre and ask him to take down the clip. Up to this stage the story was relatively low-key. A number of other science and health bloggers had picked it up and readers had contacted both Ofcom and LBC to complain about the broadcast. I already considered covering the story but didn't have time. Any post would just have been a list of links really. After LBC's lawyers got involved and Dr Goldacre blogged about the threat - here - the shit really hit the fan. Suddenly the story has gone viral and the audio and transcripts are even easier to get hold of than before.

The audio can be found through WikiLeaks. Holford Watch has good coverage of the story with links to other blogs covering it. Dr Goldacre's second post on the story also linked above covers the story from his point of view and includes links to audio extracts and transcripts.

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