Panorama, and their trusty human shield

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Tomorrow evening, the BBC will show a documentary about North Korea by its Panorama team. Even before it has been shown, it is proving to be controversial as the journalists went in as part of a visiting group of LSE students. Differing claims have been made by different sides, but the following seems to be undisputed:

·      The Panorama team went as part of the group from the Grimshaw Club – a student group affiliated to the LSE’s Department of International Relations.

·      The team claimed to be LSE students and therefore going under the cover of the LSE name.

·      The Panorama team deliberately took the decision not to inform the LSE.

·      The LSE, as with all Universities, have a duty of care towards their students. Given that they were not informed, this duty of care could not be exercised or establish whether this duty applied.

·      Panorama claim that they were under no obligation to inform the LSE as the Grimshaw Club, though a student society affiliated to the LSE, they are not formally part of it.

·      At least some of the students involved claim that they were not informed.

·      Panorama insists that they were told twice that ‘a journalist’ was going.

·      It seems that one of these occasions was whilst they were on the way to North Korea, and that the onus was placed on the students to return if they objected, not for the (apparently singular) journalist to pull out

·      The students were not told that a group of journalists were going for a major BBC documentary for Panorama. Panorama does not dispute this.

·      Panorama do claim that they carried out risk assessments for the investigation.

·      They do not claim that this risk assessment was shared with the students in full before they left.

·      The consequences for the students had the cover been blown are unknown, but could very well have been extremely severe.

Panorama’s claim is that the students were as well informed as they needed to be, and that the risks from the investigation was worth it, given the importance of producing the progamme. John Sweeney’s Twitter time-line also suggests that the students should have worked out that this was for a Panorama documentary, as he was so famous.

Investigative journalism is of course important. No-one disputes that. Contrary to John Sweeney’s claims however, the issue is not whether North Korean regime is a decent one, nor is it that no such documentaries should be made, nor is it that he was morally wrong to lie to North Korea. Nor does this episode have anything to do with Gaddafi’s involvement with the LSE, despite his attempt to somehow link it that episode with this one.

The primary charge is that Panorama placed students in severe risk without their full and informed consent.

The secondary charge is that this has undermined the possibility of the LSE, and Universities more generally, from undertaking similar research visits to politically contentious countries in the future.

Dealing with the secondary charge first, North Korea is indeed an evil, paranoid state. Eventually, the regime will certainly end and that country will need to be managed by someone, somehow. Getting quality research on the country will be an important contribution towards managing the transition. Given its extreme paranoia however, this example will only make it more likely that it will shut itself from future research – and not just North Korea, but other countries and groups of its ilk.

If the State tracked the movements of investigative journalists in order to find out the location of terrorists they’re interviewing for example, journalists would rightly complain that that would undermine journalistic freedom and independence. They would loudly protest that it created a ‘moral hazard’, making such dangerous work harder and even more dangerous. If they did it without their full consent, it would be deemed atrocious. Essentially, this is the same situation, but instead of the State doing it to journalists, we have journalists doing it to academics.

Turning to the graver first charge, it’s clear that the students were not given all of the facts. The BBC claimed they carried a full risk assessment. I asked John Sweeney whether this assessment was shared with the students, and have yet to receive a reply. Given that they were only told that ‘a journalist’ was accompanying them however, it seems pretty clear that this assessment was not given.

The BBC knew that their actions placed the students in greater risk than they otherwise would be. They knew that if they were caught, the students could very well have been sent to a Gulag for several years of hard labour, as previously discovered journalists were. They also knew that risk for the students was much higher if they were discovered enabling a BBC team for a major documentary, than if it was just for ‘a journalist’. Had the students been discovered and punished by the regime Stalinist means, the damage to to the BBC (to say nothing of the students) would have been immense. Thankfully, that is merely a hypothetical situation, but in assessing whether the BBC was right to do as it did, it needs to be borne in mind.

The fact of the matter is that there is no way it can be argued that the BBC informed the students in full. There is no way it can claim that it posed little greater risk to the students or to academic integrity.

If they thought otherwise, why did they deliberately choose not to inform the LSE? This was almost certainly because it knew it would have problems with the BBC using their students trip – and their lives – for its own ends. No University ethics committee would allow risking the lives of others for research purposes without the participants full and informed consent, yet the BBC seems to have violated that principle with little concern.

Their evasions and sophistry – of choosing to keep the University in the dark, of claiming that the LSE student society has nothing to do with the LSE, of telling the students that ‘a journalist’ would be going rather than a major BBC documentary team, of claiming that the students should have worked out for themselves what was obviously going on (whilst risking the students lives on the hope that the North Korean regime would not) – show that the BBC knew that really, they were in the wrong, but they had other priorities.

Yes, investigative journalism involves risk. That however, does not give journalists the right to place people in the line of fire without their full informed consent. All in all, this is a shameful episode in the BBC's history.

British Science goes quacky

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Imagine, if you will, a group of high-profile alternative medicine advocates calling for the government to increase expenditure on their fields by at least £2bn, year-in, year-out. Where the money for this is to come from is unsaid, although many in the community view other branches of science and research with disdain and outright contempt. The basis for this demand is that lots of people are employed in the alternative medicine industry, and economic competitors like China, India, and Germany, spend a great deal of money on homeopathy; therefore expenditure in such areas increases GDP. Imagine, when asked to provide peer-reviewed evidence for that empirical claim, the response is to provide one link – which doesn’t back their claim– and to demand that you look for their evidence that they are using to back up their claims. Richard-Hammond type acolytes soon join in, to call such polite demands for proper evidence as ‘Douchebag trolling’. What would the reactions of scientists and self-entitled ‘skeptics’ be?

Normally, the answer would be obvious. Such people clearly have contempt for the scientific method; after all, as we’re constantly told, science is all about putting ‘common sense’ claims to the test, and to publish those tests in peer-review journals. When asked to verify claims, the evidence is – or should be – there for all too see. If there’s no evidence, then there’s barely an argument to be made. Supplying ad hominem abuse instead of proper evidence is the signature strategy of the ur-quack, which skeptics would be all-over as a rash, pithily demanding ‘Evidence! Or STFU!’

In this case though, the quacks in question are scientists, and not just any scientists but the most prominent and eminent in the country. A group of them wrote a letter to the Telegraph, calling for the science budget to be substantially increased, by roughly £2bn a year. The reasoning for this is not to advance the frontiers of knowledge, or bask further in the wonder of intellectual discovery, but because of its essential contribution to GDP growth.

This is, put simply, an empirical claim: more Government expenditure on science leads to higher GDP. Given that scientists and skeptics are all about the evidence, I asked Brian Cox for the evidence to support that empirical claim. He provided a paper that was not peer-reviewed (even if written by academics), mostly comprising of cherry-picked cased studies. A long-term meta-analysis of the record of economic growth levels of comparable developed countries, cross-referenced against the level of government expenditure would have been far more credible and ‘scientific’, but that was not forthcoming. In relying so heavily on highly unrandomised cherry-picked case studies, the authors clearly had an agenda to promote science spending, but to their credit, even they conceded that the ‘science in – GDP out’ argument that the scientists used today was flawed. As the authors said:

‘Over the past 30 years, it has become clear that such a simple ‘science-push’ linear model of innovation is seriously misleading in several important respects…. [that] escalating uncertainties makes it extremely difficult to identify what fraction of a specific economic or social benefit should be attributed to a particular set of research activities.’

Call me pernickety, but I didn’t find this to be sufficiently definitive empirical proof to base spending an extra £2bn a year – and rising – every year, for ever. Cox asked for my reaction to the report, so I gave it. He didn’t respond to the criticism, only to tell me to look for the evidence that he was relying on to make the argument – assuming there is an evidence-base for the policy he advocates. No literature from peer-review journals was offered.

Michael Jennings, the European Commission spokesperson for Research, Innovation, and Science chipped in to say that governments that spend more on science generally recovered quicker from the recession. You don’t – or shouldn’t – need to be that alert to question whether wealthier countries like Germany, Sweden, Finland and Denmark not needing to cut science spending was more the reason for the correlation rather than the reverse causal pathway – particularly as according to his graph, Poland and Slovakia had the second and third highest levels of GDP growth, whilst coming bottom on R&D investment.

As is to be expected in any twit-storm, however small, the ad hominem attacks came in, but without any indication of self-awareness, the only thing that sparked this rage amongst scientists was the politely worded request for peer-reviewed evidence. Making such a request proved I was an ‘insatiable troll’ with ‘an ideology to substantiate’ and that given my insignificance (harsh, but fair!) ‘no-one owes me anything’. Certainly not decent evidence it seems.

Turning to the Telegraph letter itself, no evidence is given to back up the claim that increases in science expenditure leads to higher GDP, so I turned to the ‘Science is Vital’ website to see where the evidence-based evangelists hide their evidence. Their ‘Show me the numbers’ post does outline that Britain is behind other comparable countries (which is undisputed), but there’s no evidence for the central empirical claim behind the campaign that more government expenditure on science produces higher GDP.

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As it happens, the empirical evidence that higher levels of government expenditure on science produces higher GDP is exceptionally weak, with the most consistent conclusion coming up being that whilst there are pretty strong grounds of thinking that private R&D does increase GDP, there isn’t enough evidence for thinking that state funding of science has the similar effect. Nor is there much ground for concluding that science creates more wealth than the humanities, despite how self-evident and obvious the claim that it does ‘feels’.

Now, you may feel that science is a worthwhile enterprise for its own sake. You may think that a society with more scientists would be a better one. As it happens, I broadly agree, but that is quite a separate argument to the one being made. That is an aesthetic, cultural, or intellectual preference; it is not an empirical claim – and certainly not the argument that the scientists were making today.

You might think that modern scientists restrict themselves to their narrow fields of expertise, but in fact some fundamentalists argue that they can solve pretty much anything. And even the more moderate scientists have ideas above their station. The cream of British Science claims that by spending more money on their areas, the economy will surely develop even though there is not a jot of evidence. These are the respectable faces of the science profession and yet they happily promotes bogus economic treatments.

What this shows is that when it comes to evidence against their interests, scientists and skeptics can be just as irrational and just as indignant and offended (and indeed offensive) by requests to see evidence as the quackiest of quacks. Scientists have today proven themselves incapable of applying the same tests and evidential standards that they so loudly and so repeatedly demand of others. I severely doubt it will be for the last time.