Anti-ScienceScience
BBC Sees Reason
After a long campaign (spearheaded by Asolepius over at JREF), and many emails from us Brits, the BBC has finally seen reason and ditched its complementary medicine website.
I am not one for censorship. I am one for balanced, fair, objective writing, especially that funded by the public. The site was nothing of the sort. It condoned unproven, ineffective medicines, and lent legitimacy to something which the BBC has no business promoting. Now it is gone. Hooray for reason!
Full details of the Beeb’s rationale here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/news/2008/02/22/53034.shtml
It'd be nice if the rationale was more along the lines of "It was hogwash", rather than "It was incomplete". But you take what you can get I guess.
They have to please everyone.
They have a public duty to entertain and inform. I don't think the phrase "please everyone" appears in their charter :-)
In my mind I hear a older, male, British voice saying, "The decision to remove the complementary medicine area of the health website was taken because we found the field to be COMPLETE AND UTTER BOLLOCKS!"
No Brit would say that!
It would be "I say! After careful consideration we have decided the purveyors of these elixirs are nothing more than common scoundrels, bounders one and all. Off with their heads! God wot!"
Americans really miss out by not having a history of beheading people. I mean, "Flip the switch!" just doesn't have the same ring as "Off with their heads!"
I think it's interesting that "incomplete and, therefore, not of a satisfactory editorial standard" was the only thing they said about the actual content of the removed site. Was the campaign against it content-related? They made it sound like it was just an internal decision about money and time.
Resources wasted handling complaints about it perhaps?