{"id":2244,"date":"2012-12-12T11:12:55","date_gmt":"2012-12-12T10:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=2244"},"modified":"2012-12-12T11:12:55","modified_gmt":"2012-12-12T10:12:55","slug":"we-read-the-mail-so-you-dont-have-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2012\/12\/12\/we-read-the-mail-so-you-dont-have-to\/","title":{"rendered":"We Read the Mail, so You Don&#8217;t Have To"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a couple of things that&#8217;ve been playing on my mind since the post about the <em>Daily Mail<\/em>&#8216;s coverage of the Liverpool Care Pathway a couple of weeks ago.<\/p>\n<p>One of them is <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/345\/bmj.e8240\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;text-decoration: underline\">the letter<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span> that Fiona Godlee, editor of the <em>BMJ<\/em>, sent to Paul Dacre, editor of the <em>Mail<\/em>. \u00a0It points out to him what I noted &#8211; that the LCP isn&#8217;t mentioned at all in the original piece &#8211; and adds something important that I had suspected but didn&#8217;t know: that it told us nothing about the NHS because the doctor writing wasn&#8217;t even UK-based. \u00a0(For those without institutional access, I&#8217;ll reproduce it in full below the fold.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve just done a search of the <em>Mail<\/em>&#8216;s website, and\u00a0it seems not to have been published, or even acknowledged, anywhere<em>. \u00a0<\/em>I&#8217;m not wholly surprised by this.\u00a0\u00a0It might\u00a0have appeared\u00a0in the paper version &#8211;\u00a0but that&#8217;s not enough.\u00a0 After all,the attacks on the LPC certainly have appeared in the online version of the paper &#8211; and continue to do so &#8211; and so it makes sense that any attempt at rectification should appear in the same place. \u00a0Yet it would seem that the <em>Mail<\/em>\u00a0is rather less keen to publish letters that contradict its editorial line than it is to print vexatious gibberish as a part of that line.<\/p>\n<p>(As it happens, the fact that the <em>BMJ<\/em> article was used without permission isn&#8217;t necessarily all that big a problem. \u00a0I think that there probably could be a public interest defence &#8211; a sort of fair use system &#8211; in relation to publishing things without permission when it&#8217;s in the public interest. \u00a0But the <em>quid pro quo<\/em> here is that what&#8217;s published has to be an honest representation, rather than misleading crap. \u00a0On this front, the <em>Mail<\/em>\u00a0has failed.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway: an important aspect of not having published Godlee&#8217;s letter online is that\u00a0it&#8217;s links to the electronic version of the paper that people would have been passing around. \u00a0And that leads me to the other thing that&#8217;s been playing on my mind: the question of whether I should have provided links in my previous post.<\/p>\n<p>We like to think that newspapers are primarily about news; but that&#8217;s not true.<!--more--> \u00a0They&#8217;re about profit. \u00a0This isn&#8217;t a bad thing <em>per se<\/em>: it&#8217;s just a brute fact about why people found many newspapers. \u00a0News just happens to have been the vehicle by which profit was generated in one small part of the market for goods and services. \u00a0Keeping this in mind helps explain the <em>modus operandi<\/em>\u00a0of both the dead-tree and electronic press: if <em>ersatz<\/em>\u00a0&#8220;newsiness&#8221; rather than <em>echt<\/em>\u00a0news generates more profit, then newsiness will win out.\u00a0\u00a0Some papers&#8217; newsiness is barely distinguishable from entertainment in its own right &#8211; I&#8217;m thinking of the redtop market here &#8211; but the preferred formula in the <em>Mail<\/em>\u00a0involves a healthy dose of what I called in my earlier post &#8220;the pornography of fear&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>OK: here&#8217;s the problem.\u00a0 Every time a link is followed, the <em>Mail<\/em>&#8216;s site registers a visit.\u00a0 There is, of course, no way of telling whether those visitors belong to the &#8220;ZOMG!\u00a0 Teh LCP is Evilz!&#8221;\u00a0brigade, or people who&#8217;re reading the site out of a bizarre catastrophilia, or what.\u00a0 What matters is that the more visits a page attracts &#8211; the more traffic &#8211; the more valuable the\u00a0site of which it&#8217;s a part becomes as a source of advertising revenue.<\/p>\n<p>This means, in effect, that it pays newspapers to act as professional trolls (what some have called &#8220;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff\"><a href=\"http:\/\/enemiesofreason.co.uk\/2009\/12\/29\/the-prolls-creak-into-life\/\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;text-decoration: underline\">prolls<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span>&#8220;), because they&#8217;ll get traffic from the biddable, and they&#8217;ll get it from people who just look to see what the biddable are reading.\u00a0 Either way: kerching!\u00a0 It&#8217;s all about the benjamins.<\/p>\n<p>There was a twitterstorm not so long ago about an article written by Jan Moir concerning the death of Stephen Gately: but thousands of outraged liberals reading an article in a paper they&#8217;d normally ignore means thousands of extra hits, which means more income. \u00a0But exactly the same, in a smaller way, applies here: when I linked to the <em>Mail<\/em>, there&#8217;s a chance that at least some people who wouldn&#8217;t otherwise have read the articles in question did so; and they&#8217;d have contributed in some small way to the success of the <em>Mail<\/em>&#8216;s business model.\u00a0 It doesn&#8217;t matter whether the article behind the link is awful, or what you or I think about it.\u00a0 What matters is that we click through &#8211; and then post on Facebook or Twitter or blogs asking our friends if they&#8217;ve seen the terrible article behind the link that we helpfully provide. \u00a0They then do the same.<\/p>\n<p>In providing a links, I was complicit in the <em>Mail<\/em>&#8216;s strategy. \u00a0So\u00a0I&#8217;m not sure whether I should have linked.\u00a0 The academic part of me thinks, &#8220;But of course one should always give appropriate citations, and a hyperlink is the accepted way of doing that on a blog&#8221;.\u00a0 And the denizen of the intertubes thinks, &#8220;But that&#8217;s precisely why I&#8217;m vulnerable.\u00a0 All Associated Newspapers (or Northern &amp; Shell, or MGN, or whoever else: delete as applicable) has to do is to print something idiotic, and I&#8217;ll help sell it on their behalf.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>For a while, I used Istyosty &#8211; a proxy that stripped out the advertising and wouldn&#8217;t register page hits on the <em>Mail<\/em> site (and the rationale for which <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff\"><a href=\"http:\/\/chris-coltrane.livejournal.com\/412011.html\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;text-decoration: underline\">is explained nicely here<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span>) &#8230; but then Istyosty was closed down, apparently based on a copyright violation claim by the <em>Mail<\/em>\u00a0&#8211; the same <em>Mail<\/em>\u00a0that reproduced and mangled the <em>BMJ<\/em>\u00a0article without permission.<\/p>\n<p>Since this is only a blog, rather than a journal, I think that, on balance, the citation rules can be bent a little. \u00a0In future, if I do refer to the <em>Mail<\/em>, you&#8217;re just going to have to find the stories yourself.\u00a0 I might provide a URL, but I won&#8217;t provide a direct link: if you want to see what&#8217;s what, you&#8217;ll have to C&amp;P and do a bit of work for yourself.\u00a0 But if you don&#8217;t want to do that &#8211; and I&#8217;d support you &#8211; you&#8217;ll just have to take it on trust that I&#8217;ll be quoting accurately, or noting the fact if I have to make any modifications for the sake of syntax. \u00a0I&#8217;ll try to give as accurate a representation as I can.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, you&#8217;ll have to trust me that my journalistic standards are higher than those of the articles I&#8217;m citing.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>++++++++<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the text of the letter.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Dear Mr Dacre<\/p>\n<p>Your front page story (\u201cNow sick babies go on death pathway,\u201d 29 November) is highly misleading. It says that the events described in the\u00a0<em>BMJ<\/em>\u00a0article (\u201cHow it feels to withdraw feeding from newborn babies,\u201d\u00a0<em>BMJ<\/em>\u00a02012;345:e7319), which you reproduced without our permission, are evidence of the use of the Liverpool care pathway on children in the NHS. Yet the doctor who wrote the article does not practise in the UK. Nor does the article mention the Liverpool care pathway.<\/p>\n<p>The doctor was describing an extremely difficult situation\u2014that of a baby born with severe congenital anomalies. As the article explained, these anomalies were inconsistent with a basic human experience and would have required extensive surgical and other treatment of uncertain benefit, which the parents did not want to inflict on their child. The decision to withdraw life support and allow the baby to die was made by the parents after a full discussion with the baby\u2019s medical team.<\/p>\n<p>The care of people at the end of life\u2014whether babies, children, or adults\u2014is a specialist area of medicine in which the UK leads the world. The practices of NHS staff are directed by national guidance that has been developed with expertise to deliver compassionate and dignified care at an extremely difficult time. To suggest that parents are pressurised by doctors to allow their baby to die in order to free up hospital beds is false, unfair on dedicated medical staff, and exceptionally insensitive to parents who have lost a baby in these circumstances.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly it is fact of life that some babies die. It is a highly distressing experience for everyone involved. There is an urgent need for a proper public debate how health professionals should manage such cases. By hyping and misrepresenting this story, the\u00a0<em>Daily Mail<\/em>\u00a0has missed an important opportunity to advance that debate.<\/p>\n<p>Yours sincerely<\/p>\n<p>Dr Fiona Godlee<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--TrendMD v2.4.8--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a couple of things that&#8217;ve been playing on my mind since the post about the Daily Mail&#8216;s coverage of the Liverpool Care Pathway a couple of weeks ago. One of them is the letter that Fiona Godlee, editor of the BMJ, sent to Paul Dacre, editor of the Mail. \u00a0It points out to him [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2012\/12\/12\/we-read-the-mail-so-you-dont-have-to\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1240,511,472],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogosphere","category-in-the-news","category-thinking-aloud"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>We Read the Mail, so You Don&#039;t Have To - Journal of Medical Ethics blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2012\/12\/12\/we-read-the-mail-so-you-dont-have-to\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"We Read the Mail, so You Don&#039;t Have To - Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There&#8217;s a couple of things that&#8217;ve been playing on my mind since the post about the Daily Mail&#8216;s coverage of the Liverpool Care Pathway a couple of weeks ago. 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