SIRC Media Watch Archive
Comment and Opinion – November 1999
Shining examples.
In contrast to the current Warning Season epidemic of unfounded health scares and alarmist or preachy 'education' campaigns, two initiatives stand out as useful and sensible.
Paying the piper.
The findings of research funded by private-sector companies are often (and sometimes rightly) treated with suspicion, while public-sector research grants are assumed to be untainted by vested interests. David Blunkett's recent attack on research which dared to criticise government policy, including threats to "review" public funding of social science research, demonstrates what some of us already knew: that public-sector research funding comes with strings attached.
Recent articles in Le Monde indicate that the arguments used by the French to support a continued ban on British beef are exactly the same as those used by the British government to defend its own refusal to lift the beef-on-the-bone ban.
