Firstly – listen to the latest Skeptic Zone Podcast interview with Dr Ben Goldacre of Bad Science. Then lend a bloggy hand:
From the Bad Science Site: ‘Bad Science Bingo‘ and the resulting ‘Haha er “help”. Legal Chill from LBC 97.3 over Jeni Barnett’s MMR scaremongering’:
Jeni Barnett is angry at the response to her broadcast being brought to a wider audience, and she is describing a nurse who rang in to disagree with her as “vicious”. Now, parenthetically, this strikes me as a slightly unkind and inappropriate thing to do as a wealthy public figure, a television and radio presenter, with an industry and (today we see them) lawyers behind you, to an individual working in the NHS for the good of the public on a low wage, with no such outlets, and no such resources. But more than that, I thought the nurse was actually very polite, despite Jeni talking over her, cutting her off, and expressing, as we have already discussed, unhelpful and ignorant views in a rather shrill and irresponsible fashion.
How can I convince you of this, if not with the audio recording?
…it seems to me that the only legally safe way to keep this sorry piece of audio in the public domain is by large numbers of bloggers posting individual brief chunks, and blogging critically about them, using “fair use” uncontroversially for brief slices, with me perhaps keeping tabs here of where people have posted these discussions and excerpts, in one reference post. Now there’s an idea. It might also be a useful project for media students as well as bloggers, and will bring google juice and visitors.
If you felt that this was an irresponsible piece of broadcasting, and an inappropriate use of the public bandwidth – which is licensed to companies such as Global Audio as a privilege by the nation – you may wish to complain about Jeni Barnett’s MMR show of 7th January 2009 to OFCOM.
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/complain/
Lastly, if they genuinely wish to “start a debate” – as the phrase is so commonly used – then I would invite LBC, Jeni Barnett, Global Audio, and their legal team to reconsider, and simply give permission for this clip to be made freely available, in the public domain, in full, as it was broadcast, so that it can be heard, understood, and discussed.
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