Friday
Mar142014
Interlude
Friday, March 14, 2014 at 9:43 Several things to comment on today,
They include Tony Benn and this letter in the Lancet which references Forest and the IEA:
BBC must ensure commentators' tobacco industry links are made public
I'm in meetings or travelling most of the day but if I can find a moment to write something I will.
Reader Comments (4)
Double standards?
The Lancet says: ‘The BBC's editorial guidelines require it to provide the credentials of contributors so that audiences can judge their status.’
Presumably then these guidelines also extend to Anti-Tobacco Control (which you will note isn’t mentioned in the Lancet article), and therefore they will disclose their links with the pharmaceutical industry, since this lobby group suck up huge amounts of taxpayers’ money as well.
After all, if the tobacco control lobby which includes the health lobby is funded by the taxpayer…then why would they want extra funding from Big Pharma? Maybe they should be stripped of their taxpayer funding.
Of course we know that charlatans like ASH are funded also by Big Pharma because they help to peddle their smoking cessation products.
Tony Benn
Nice tribute to Tony Benn on Daily Politics, and thumbs up to the BBC for showing Tony with his beloved pipe in a photo and then when speaking in front of an invited audience lighting his pipe.
I didn't always agree with him but he was a great speaker and you always knew exactly where he stood on political issues - and the fact that he smoked his pipe fearlessly always endeared me to him.
R.I.P. Tony.
I've already read the Lancet article. Note the signatories.
This seems to me to be an attempt to silence all opposition and fits nicely into the decision of the BMJ not to publish ANY articles funded by tobacco companies. These people know very well that the only organisation with sufficient funds and the will to help organisations which are against tobacco control and control in general.
Note this:
"AG receives funding from Cancer Research UK and Economic and Social Research Council for TobaccoTactics.org. JB and MM declare that they have no competing interests."
You might reasonably ask where CRUK gets the money from to finance Gilmore, and why is it spending money contributed for cancer research to these academics? Where does the Economic and Social Research Council for Tobacco Tactics Org get its money from?
Who pays the salaries of Britton and McKee and the other 17 signatories and where do those funds come from?
Are we seeing signs of weakness and paranoia?
Once again, it seems that the Tobacco Control lobby are opening up a can of worms that they didn’t intend to open, because although they appear to still stubbornly adhere to the view only the tobacco industry will be affected by obligations such as these, more and more people, it seems to me, are getting wise to these “links to ….” from spokesmen and self-proclaimed “experts” on all number of subjects – not just tobacco.
Many a time these days, after some great pronouncement or another, I’ve heard (and seen in comments sections) people saying “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He works for the …… industry” or “He sits on the board of ….. company, so of course he supports that policy.”
As more and more neo-Prohibitionist groups jump on the bandwagon with their own little hobby-horses (alcohol, salt, sugar etc), having started the ball rolling, the BBC (in its puffed-up pride at being “objective”) will be obliged to extend this ruling to all “links” from their commentators, and ultimately this must surely include Tobacco Control’s extensive funding from Big Pharma, too. This is a short-sighted demand from members of the Tobacco Control industry within the Lancet which may well come back to bite them on the bum, big time. They’ve largely hidden their links to the pharmaceutical industry for many years, and – media savvy as they are - they haven’t done that for no reason. If the BBC follows their demands in this instance they could well find that their own well-concealed cover is blown thoroughly out of the water, and that really will be a revelation to the viewing/reading public, most of whom remain in blissful ignorance of the funding of anti-smoking groups. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the most powerful of those groups haven’t already suggested to the Lancet that they quietly bury this demand and don’t bring it up again.
It is entirely reasonable to argue that CRUK funding activists such as Gilmore is obtaining money under false pretenses as CRUK does not mention that it funds political activism at the point of donation. In my opinion, this is immoral.
Fair play to the BBC for giving Forest a right to stand up for people who smoke. Provided that Forest is honest that should not be a problem and Forest should be judged on what it says not who funds it. What these people are trying to do is argue that the value of an opinion, analysis or viewpoint can be rendered meaningless as a consequence of its source of funding. Fine by me so long as the BBC recognizes that anyone funded by CRUK and talking about tobacco control needs to be introduced as an activist funded by money immorally extorted from people who thought that they were funding Cancer Research.