Modified Truth ~ George Monbiot ~ Martin Durkin ~
Breast Implants
Date: 2002-05-14 16:31:35 PST
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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