Oliver Kamm notes the BBC’s coverage of the late Harvard physician John Mack, who treated alien abduction as a reality:
The inability to discriminate among the claims of self-interested lobbies is a common BBC failing across subjects, not confined to politics. In this case, an extraordinary claim is presented without even a modicum of scepticism, Dr Mack is depicted as an embattled fighter against hidebound orthodoxies and academic prejudice, and his cause is imbued with a romantic – almost messianic – quality.
The BBC’s output about Mack is not too dissimilar to that afforded toDr Andrew Wakefield on the “MMR causes autism” fiasco, although the BBC are not alone in providing coverage to mavericks completely out of proportion to the validity of their claims.
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However, Oliver doesn’t mention that this isn’t main-section BBC coverage, but an opinion piece in its Magazine section. Still, I agree with his view on the inspirational slant. It generally irritates me that BBC web pages; they make no effort to represent wider context or opposing opinion in their provision of links. How many sites must there be debunking alien abduction? Yet all they can find is one supporting thae belief, the John Mack Institute.
Addendum: I’ve e-mailed a comment suggesting they include a link to Alien Psychology (http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/A_P.html) – which goes into detail on physio-psychological phenomena such as sleep paralysis. Interesting to see if they include it. On past experience, BBC balance flies out of the window on fringe science topics.
PS: working on the Book Meme entry.