The antivivisection group Europeans for Medical Progress has been whining to the BBC about the BBC2 documentary Monkeys, Rats and Me broadcast last November. (We have bloged about EMP many times - see this one I made earlier) In contrast to most (impartial) reviewers, EMP says the documentary was biased. I guess the group is miffed that none of the long interview recorded with director Kathy Archibald was broadcast.
The BBC said in response:
We did try to set out what some activists call the ‘scientific argument’, as promoted by the organisation Europeans for Medical Progress. We filmed a long interview with their spokesperson Kathy Archibald, her taking us through her arguments. We took these arguments seriously and investigated their credibility. Thus we interviewed on camera Richard Klausner, a former director of the US National Cancer Institute, refuting Archibald’s argument and how she had used a quotation of his ‘entirely out of context’. Moreover, we had also lined up to film a Gleevec patient and some of the scientists involved in the creation of Gleevec who also wanted to refute EMP’s arguments. We also asked Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation and Professor of Ethics at Princeton University, what he thought and he said it was ‘wishful thinking’ to assert that animal experiments did not benefit medicine. In the end, we felt that we could include none of these contributions. We simply did not have the time in the programme to delve into these complicated arguments.
EMP claimed to be backed by ‘a significant strand of scientific opinion’ and to have ‘abundant scientific evidence’ for their views:
There exists a significant strand of scientific opinion that animal experimentation is largely irrelevant and frequently harmful to human health. There is abundant scientific evidence to support this view, which lies at the very heart of the fascinating story about Oxford University’s controversial animal laboratory. There are spokespeople who would like to make this case and they were made available to the BBC but were denied the opportunity to be heard. This amounts to nothing less than censorship.
We have never been able to find out how a minutely thin strand is ‘significant’ or how the vanishingly small amount of evidence is ‘abundant’. Neither it seems, has the BBC. As well as refuting accusations of bias and censorship in some detail, they quote two of the newspaper reviews:
I would refute the idea that this was a biased programme. My contention is supported by two of the reviewers in the broadsheets. Lucy Mangan, in The Guardian, wrote, ‘this BBC documentary was superbly balanced’. And Tim Teeman in The Times said, ‘What distinguished Adam Wishart’s Monkeys, Rats and Me: Animal Testing (BBC Two) was the film-maker’s ambivalence, a refreshing grey area for a subject that normally polarises opinion. Clearly, those who would like to complain about the bias of this programme are too partisan to see my equivocation.’
EMP itself states ‘The BBC’s responses all contain a dismissal of the arguments of Europeans for Medical Progress and its director, Kathy Archibald, as not being credible.’ I’m sure EMP will understand why I took that quote out of context – it’s irresistible, isn’t it?
