By TONY JONES - AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION
Added: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:00:00 UTC

Thanks to James for the link.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2618503.htm

Transcript
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: The debate over chiropractic treatments in Australia largely mirrors that in Britain, where the celebrated science writer Simon Singh is being sued for libel by the practitioner's association there for comments he made in the Guardian newspaper in 2006 about the way children are being treated with chiropractic therapy. Singh's latest book is called Trick or Treatment: alternative medicine on trial. He joined us in our London studio just a short time ago.

Simon Singh, thanks for joining us.

SIMON SINGH, SCIENCE JOURNALIST: My pleasure.

TONY JONES: Now since the libel case against you by the British Chiropractic Society, you've become something of a cause celebre for the right to free speech, particularly in science, obviously. So let's start there: what are the implications of the case against you for those who are openly sceptical of alternative therapies and particularly chiropractic?

SIMON SINGH: I think - and one thing to possibly point out is that I think these issues go beyond me. In England there's been almost a fashion recently for suing scientists for libel. There's a chap called Peter Wilmshurst, a very well-respected cardiologist who's currently being sued and then last year there was a chap called Ben Goldacre, a very respected medical journalist, who was also sued. And I think what all of us are doing in our journalism or in our interviews is to put forward our view of the evidence. And it's a cornerstone of science - the only way that science and medicine progress is by putting forward the evidence, debating the evidence, challenging it fairly, but forthrightly. And the problem with English libel laws in particular - I'm afraid it's a very English problem is that our libel laws make it very difficult sometimes to be a science journalist, and perhaps a journalist of any kind, really. And what that means is that good articles are often withdrawn, good articles are often gutted so that the meat of the content is removed before it's published and sometimes articles that should be published aren't even published or written in the first place because of the fear of libel laws in England.

TONY JONES: Does the case against you - does this particular case impede your ability to be openly critical of therapies and particularly of chiropractic therapies?

SIMON SINGH: Gosh. I think it does to a very large extent because there are things - there's a reverse burden of proof. So, a science writer such as myself is guilty until proven innocent. The sheer costs involved. A libel case can cost 1 million pounds, and that might be over damages that are just a few thousand pounds. And so it turns journalism into a sort of high stakes poker game.
...
Continue reading
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2618503.htm

TAGGED: CAMPAIGNS, SCIENCE