Overview:
The news media website has treated the Royal Society’s discontinuing its disciplinary action against two of its Fellows in the same sloppy fashion as it handled Siouxsie Wiles’s damaging and false allegation of ‘intimidation’.
After having taken a severe beating at the hands of the Media Council over their inadequate attempts to remedy a damaging and false assertion about the seven ‘Listener’ professors, you might imagine Stuff’s editors would be keen to pay more attention to dealing fairly with them in its stories henceforth.
Unfortunately, Stuff’s coverage of the Royal Society NZ discontinuing its disciplinary action against two of the professors shows few lessons had been learned from the debacle sparked by Dr Siouxsie Wiles’s column “Academics: Use your mana to aid colleagues, not fight them”. The column, published by Stuff on December 20, had falsely asserted that some of the professors had intimidated “junior colleagues with lawyer’s letters”.
Siouxsie Wiles wrote the column to defend her reputation after she had been heavily criticised in the UK press for her role in the stoush over a letter to the Listener last July signed by the seven professors. It asserted that matauranga Maori was not scientific and therefore didn’t deserve what would amount to an equal footing with physics, biology and chemistry in the NCEA syllabus.
The council didn’t mince its words when it published its ruling on the column on March 7. It said Wiles’s statement was “inaccurate” and that it was “a most serious allegation to make, striking at the heart of academic freedom by asserting that the Professors were trying to stifle opposing views using lawyers’ threats. It required immediate public correction.”
It also noted: “The inaccurate statement remained on Stuff from 20 December to 5 January. This is in our view an unnecessarily long delay before making an unambiguous correction to an inaccurate and significantly damaging statement about the six complainants.”
However, less than a week after the council had publicly lambasted Stuff in such unequivocal terms, a completely misleading heading and introductory paragraph appeared on another story about the professors.
A Stuff journalist was reporting on the Royal Society’s recent decision to drop disciplinary proceedings against two of the “Listener Seven” — Professors Robert Nola and Garth Cooper — after complaints had been made over the letter they had signed.
The professors were Fellows of the Royal Society and thereby subject to its complaints procedure. Three of the original five complainants withdrew after they discovered they would have to identify themselves and in the end, only two complaints were considered.
The heading on the Stuff story about the society abandoning the chase was “Controversial ‘Listener letter’ deemed not worthy of Royal Society investigation”.
The first paragraph claimed: “A controversial letter signed by seven University of Auckland academics about matauranga Maori and science is not worthy of a full Royal Society investigation, the body has said.”
This assertion was simply wrong. The “body” never said — or even implied — that the professors’ letter was “not worthy of a full Royal Society investigation”.
What the society said was:
“The Panel concluded that the complaints should not proceed to a Complaints Determination Committee. The Panel referred to clause 6.4(i) of the Complaints Procedures: ‘the complaint is not amenable to resolution by a Complaint Determination Committee, including by reason of its demanding the open-ended evaluation of contentious expert opinion or of contested scientific evidence amongst researchers and scholars.’”
The fact the complaints were not “amenable to resolution” because the very nature of scientific debate makes it “open-ended” is manifestly not the same as stating that the “Controversial ‘Listener letter’ was deemed not worthy of Royal Society investigation”.
In fact, the society concluded the professors’ views and others raised in relation to the Listener letter “are of substance and merit further constructive discussion and respectful dialogue”.
Given the tardiness and sloppiness with which Stuff’s editors responded to the professors’ complaints about Dr Siouxsie Wiles’s untrue assertion in her December 20 column, the chances of its editors now correcting a misleading heading and paragraph about the Royal Society’s recent statement would seem infinitesimal.
It seems, therefore, more than a little ironic that this week Stuff published a column by “public relations and marketing executive” Cas Carter exhorting Stuff’s readers to trust mainstream media:
“The truth is there are rigorous systems in place to ensure that real journalism is fair, accurate and unbiased… When I want to find out the real story, I go to a legitimate media source, an organisation that knows it cannot be blatantly biased or misinform its audience…
“You can be sure that newsrooms have systems in place to ensure a reporter who produces questionable information will be sent back to their keyboard before anything is published or broadcast.”
However, despite Stuff’s sloppy handling of issues to do with the professors, it must be acknowledged that, in the whole inflammatory debate over the Listener letter since it was published eight months ago, one Stuff columnist contributed the most inadvertently amusing and memorable contribution of all the coverage.
In the wake of a deluge of criticism and scorn from some of the world’s most famous scientists that poured into the Royal Society’s mailbox after it announced its inquiry into its two Fellows in November, science commentator Peter Griffin grappled with the uncomfortable fact that celebrated evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was among their number.
Griffin — who acknowledged he had previously worked for the Royal Society for almost a decade — said that he was a “fan” of Dawkins, and particularly of his arguments in support of “radical atheism”.
However, he said he had “cringed” when he saw Dawkins’s “strident” criticism of including matauranga Maori in a school science curriculum — an opinion he had tweeted to his 2.9 million followers as well as emailed to the Royal Society NZ.
It was clear Griffin was struggling mightily with reconciling his respect for the famous scientist and Dawkins’s firm assertion that:
“No indigenous myths from anywhere in the world, no matter how poetic or hauntingly beautiful, belong in science classes.
“Science classes are emphatically not the right place to teach scientific falsehoods alongside true science. Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks.”
In the end, being unable to bring himself to entirely accept or reject Dawkins’s forthright opinion on indigenous knowledge systems such as matauranga Maori, Griffin decided the scientist’s views were “unhelpful”.
“Unhelpful” in this case appeared to mean: “Dawkins is undoubtedly right but it would pain me an awful lot to say so.”
As a friend quipped: “Presumably Peter Griffin found Dawkins unhelpful in the same way Richard Nixon found the Washington Post unhelpful.”