Modified Truth ~ George Monbiot ~ Martin Durkin ~ Breast Implants
Date: 2002-05-14 16:31:35 PST
http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=256
Modified Truth
Channel 4 has hired a charlatan to make its science programmes
media / Modified Truth
Modified Truth
Channel 4 has hired a charlatan to make its science programmes
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 16th March 2000
In October 1998 a television producer named Martin Durkin took a
proposal to the BBC's science series, Horizon. Silicone breast
implants, he claimed, far from harming women, were in fact beneficial,
reducing the risk of breast cancer. Horizon commissioned a researcher
to find out whether or not his assertion was true. After a thorough
review, the researcher reported that Mr Durkin had ignored a powerful
body of evidence contradicting his claims. Martin Durkin withdrew his
proposal. Instead of dropping it, however, he took it to Channel 4
and, astonishingly, sold it to their science series, Equinox.
To help him make the programme, Durkin hired Najma Kazi, a highly
respected TV researcher and producer who was previously a research
biochemist. After two weeks she walked out. "It's not a joke to walk
away from four or five month's work," she told me, "but my research
was being ignored. The published research had been construed to give
an impression that's not the case. I don't know how that programme got
passed. The only consolation for me was that I'm really glad I didn't
put my name to it."
But the programme was broadcast, in May last year. Silicone implants,
it insisted, appeared to reduce the incidence of breast cancer. Women
claiming that their operations had caused severe health problems were
dismissed as cranks, malingerers and compensation chasers. The
researchers who believed that there was a problem were accused of
practising "junk science".
Mr Durkin has often been accused of taking liberties with the facts.
In 1997 he made a series for Channel 4 called "Against Nature", which
compared environmentalists with Nazis, conspiring against the world's
poor. No one would suggest that green claims should not be subjected
to critical examination, but the people he interviewed were lied to
about the contents of the programmes and given no chance to respond to
the accusations the series made.
The Independent Television Commission handed down one of the most
damning verdicts it has ever reached: the programme makers "distorted
by selective editing" the views of the interviewees and "misled" them
about the "content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to
take part." Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time
apology. After the series was broadcast, I discovered that the
assistant producer and several of its interviewees worked for the
right-wing libertarian magazine masquerading as "Living Marxism",
which has just been successfully sued by ITN. All the arguments
Against Nature made had been rehearsed in LM.
So what do you do with a director with a record like this, who has
brought your channel into disrepute, who has misled both his
contributors and his audience? If you are Michael Jackson, the head of
Channel 4, you commission him to make more programmes.
On Monday, Channel 4 will broadcast a 90-minute Equinox programme
about genetic engineering, made by Martin Durkin and called,
appropriately enough, "Modified Truth". Already it appears that the
programme-making has suffered from Mr Durkin's characteristic
approach. "I feel completely betrayed and misled", reports Dr Mae-Wan
Ho, a geneticist Durkin interviewed. "They did not tell me it was
going to be an attack on my position."
Neither Martin Durkin nor, extraordinarily, Charles Furneaux, the
commissioning editor of the science series Equinox, has a science
background. They don't need one, for science on Channel 4 has been
reduced to a crude manifesto for corporate libertarianism.
When Michael Jackson arrived at Channel 4, he cancelled a series
called Global Raiders, on which a quarter of a million pounds had
already been spent. It would have examined the adverse impacts of big
business around the world. Since 1989, according to the research group
3WE, Channel 4 has reduced its international factual output by 56 per
cent. Holiday programmes have boomed, but "ecological programming now
appears to be virtually extinct".
The station, in other words, is censoring not just a few ideas, but
entire subject areas. Serious coverage of science, the environment,
the developing world and, above all, abuses of corporate power, has
been all but stamped out. The Mark Thomas Comedy Product is a glowing
exception, but I suspect it is allowed on air only because it makes
people laugh.
Perhaps intellectual honesty is too fusty, too boring, for the chic,
post-modern Channel 4. But perhaps there is something else at work,
perhaps we should question whether senior staff have come to identify
themselves with the companies providing their revenues, and are, as a
result, seeking to modify the truth. If so, then it is hardly
surprising that they have handed so much work to a charlatan.
16 Mar 2000