Journalism — Good, Bad, and Ugly

The Bent Spoon, as oft we've pointed out, is the only negative press award in New Zealand. Recipients' reactions to it have varied.

The first lucky winner (in 1986) was the Woman's Weekly, whose editor was sent by us an actual piece of twisted tableware. She returned it with an angry letter. The editor of Truth (1987) was candid in his cynicism — he told George Balani that he couldn't care less whether, in this case, a fake psychic really had predicted where a murdered child would be found. People were entertained by that sort of thing and that was enough for him.

The following year, the Listener received its Spoon in silence, while in 1989 the Sunday News actually ran a story after receiving the Bent Spoon for an ugly, exploitative clairvoyant interview with murder victim Heidi Paakkonen. It said archly that' its-own psychic had predicted it would cop the Bent Spoon.

Last year, the award was spread among all media that promulgated an earthquake prediction by a Nelson homeopath, so no particular response was expected. This year, however, we were brought up sharply. Geoff Baylis, the Listener Chief Executive, was telephoned by a reporter for his reaction to receiving the Bent Spoon.

"It's rubbish," Baylis said. "I don't know who the organisation is. I've never heard of them. They've taken one story out of the thousands we print each year. Who are they to judge anyway?"

"I'm not impressed at all. There are too many knockers around these days. They

need to' take a positive attitude for a change," he said.

Without exception, my journalist friends were incredulous that Baylis had never heard of the Skeptics. Doubtless, many New Zealanders don't know about the Skeptics, but journalists and editors? Maybe so, but excuse us for being, well, sceptical.

The "knockers" charge was, however, annoying enough to prompt a return to the files for some research. There | discovered that since 1986 we have given out no less than 27 awards for journalistic excellence. Among these, Dave Wilson, Emily Flynn, Brett Riley, and Sue McTagget received awards for pieces published in the Listener. Moreover, by my count more Skeptics' journalism awards have gone to staff of the Dominion than to any other New Zealand publication. This is pertinent, because Baylis was editor of the Dominion before he left to go to the Listener a couple of years ago. The Dominion, the Press Association, and Radio New Zealand cover the awards every year. Yet Baylis claims it's all news to him.

Maybe, like the Sunday News, the Listener needs to consult a good psychic, for it had scheduled a vapid alternative-healing cover story — the man with the daffodils — immediately after the Bent Spoon award.

This wasn't lost on the satirical TV programme More Issues, which made sport af the Listener's addiction to quack medicine in a skit the following week.

In its issue of September 24th, the Listener published an answer to its "undeserved" award, claiming that the Skeptics can't distinguish between gullibility and open-mindedness. It trotted out the predictable clichés about Western medicine's having "long derided and rejected" Tibetan medicine. The Skeptics, it seems, "obviously felt threatened" by the story.

We respond that we were certainly not threatened by the Bill Hall story. The. threatened parties are (1) Bill Hall, who we all hope can beat his cancer by any: means possible, (2) other New Zealand cancer sufferers, who might in their desperation be encouraged by the Listener story to seek zany Tibetan cures instead of decent medical treatment, and (8) the Listener, which made itself look silly by its publication of the story.

The Listener also reported that a recent brain scan shows that Bill Hall's tumour may be "inactive, partially calcified, and maybe dead." As Hall has been apparently undergoing the most advanced forms..of radiotherapy (and... chemotherapy) British medicine can offer, he may have a good chance. If he survives, we wonder who'll get the credit.

Terry Snow, the Listener's editor, told the Dominion in his post-Spoon interview that it was the policy of the magazine to present a "broad spectrum of health stories." (Shades of Dorothy Parker — the whole gamut of health news from acupuncture to biorhythms.) He claimed that actually his magazine "is heartily sceptical of such unproven claims [as the article presented] and will continue to cover the field of health and medicine in a way that acknowledges the varied and complex nature of healing."

In fact, the varied and complex nature of healing — the relationships of clinical effectiveness, placebo effects, natural remission and cure, hope and self-delusion, and the presumably rational, double-blind analysis of curative claims — is the last thing the Listener is capable of understanding.

Medical reporting requires both scientific sophistication and a sensitivity toward the question of whether a story might prompt a desperately sick person to seek a foolish treatment... Listener staff. reporters have repeatedly shown themselves incompetent to treat adequately even simple issues in scientific medicine.

The Bill Hall article, in particular, was not a serious medical story. If the editor of the Listener actually believed there were some possibility that the herbs the healer gave Hall were Clinically effective in the treatment of brain tumours, he was sitting on possibly the greatest medical story since penicillin, and it was his journalistic responsibility to spare no expense in pursuit of it.

Cancer is a deadly serious medical question. For a start, the herbs should have been scientifically tested to determine their true contents. .In other words, either the point of the story is, as the Listener's defense suggests, the potential discovery by Tibetan medicine of a cancer cure or it is merely an account of one man's positive thinking.

We believe it is the latter, though some Listener readers who are fighting cancer may read it as the former. As for its overall editorial policy, it appears that the Listener is not especially concerned with whether it is recommending potentially useless, harmful, or time- and money-wasting medical therapies to ill people.

On the question of medical reporting, the Listener and Truth might share a bit in common.

Denis Dutton, Editor