Demasi suspended as ABC weighs the evidence on Catalyst

The ABC has suspended reporter Maryanne Demasi from on-air activities for three months pending the results of an internal review into the ABC’s Catalyst program, after a damning report by the audience and consumer affairs division found Demasi’s February report into wi-fi “unduly favour[ed] the unorthodox perspective” on the science.

A subsequent review into the program as a whole was announced yesterday. Crikey understands it isn’t an editorial review into standards and quality. Rather, it’s a review into the program itself and its focus, similar to reviews often done of ABC television programs from time to time. On AM this morning, reporter Lexi Metherell said “the review is focusing on whether the program has strayed from its original mission as a magazine-style general science program to an investigative one”.

[Mobiles might not give you brain cancer, but Catalyst gives scientists a headache]

Although the review is not expected to focus on Demasi’s conduct as a journalist or the editorial processes around the Wi-Fried episode, Demasi has been taken off air until it is done.

Demasi, who has spent a decade as a medical scientist and another as a journalist, has vigorously and in great detail defended her reporting, including thorough an eight-page answer to Media Watch that delved into the specifics of many of the objections against it. She also notes that many of the people criticising her were approached to take part in the original program and refused. She also says that her report on statins, the subject of another backlash that was ultimately removed from the ABC’s website, has since been vindicated and was found to be “factually accurate”. “As an investigative journalist, I am used to taking some heat from critics,” she wrote on the Huffington Post. “It’s part of the job.”

Former Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes has a different assessment of Demasi, telling Crikey this morning that he did not feel she brought sufficient journalistic scepticism to her work. He referred to criticisms he first made in a February Age column, where he wrote:

“Demasi’s modus operandi is becoming all too familiar. Find a scary thesis that is bound to resonate with many ordinary Australians: people who take statins to lower the chances of cardiovascular disease; parents of young people who are being prescribed antidepressants; people who use mobile telephones a lot, and – a far bigger cohort – the parents of children who use Wi-Fi devices.

“Find advocates in the scientific world who have plausible credentials — plausible, at least to the layperson — and who challenge the prevailing scientific orthodoxy: advocates who claim statins are not decreasing, and might even be increasing, the risk of mortality in many of those who are taking them; that antidepressants are inducing psychosis or suicidal tendencies in young people; that prolonged mobile telephone use is probably increasing the risk of brain tumours, and that all Wi-Fi devices might yet prove to be dangerous, especially to children.

“Give those advocates the lion’s share of the space on the ABC’s most popular television science program, with the absolute minimum of sceptical challenge. Include token appearances by representatives of the scientific orthodoxy, while implying that various vested interests – big pharma, big telecom, big tech – have undue influence over the regulators.

“Then, when defenders of the scientific orthodoxy cry ‘foul’, claim they are attempting to muzzle legitimate debate.”

Yesterday, Demasi retweeted a Twitter account that said she needed “whistleblower protection”, adding a line that the Catalyst team had been instructed not to comment on the matter. In recent days, she has been tweeting regularly that “mainstream media is hopelessly conflicted these days by their corporate puppet masters”.

Leading Australian cancer researcher Professor Bernard Stewart told Crikey earlier this year Demasi’s wi-fi story was “biased, and little short of misleading and deceptive”. The program relied heavily on the views of Dr Devra Davis, an American cancer epidemiologist, to argue it was too soon to know the effects of wi-fi radiation on our brains, and that caution in its use was required.

The program was widely panned by the scientific community, but it has found a supportive audience. A response to the criticism on Catalyst‘s website is followed by dozens of supportive comments thanking the program for opening their eyes. Even Media Watch‘s report slamming the story is followed by nearly 300 comments, most in support of Demasi’s journalism.

But in its review into the validity of several complaints about the program, the audience and consumer affairs division broadly agreed with the experts. It found a number of ways in which one side of the argument was given undue prominence to an unorthodox scientific perspective, without signposting to the audience the depth of opposition within the scientific community to the hypothesis. The scientific papers presented as evidence in the episode were not given their proper context. The cumulative effect of all of this, it said, breached the ABC’s editorial standard on impartiality.

The division’s 31-page report into the matter did not agree with all the complaints made about the episode. For example, on a complaint that the program would lead viewers to believe mobile phones were responsible for a rise in cancer rates in the United States, the investigation concluded that a claim that it “may be a factor” did not amount to a definitive statement that it was. On the use of a controversial image of a child with radiation superimposed over her face, this came from a peer-reviewed scientific paper, and so it was not misleading or inappropriate to use it.

There was a scientific basis to this, the review ruled. 

Nonetheless, “there is no doubt the investigation of risks posed by widespread wireless devices is an important story, but we believe greater care should have been taken in presenting complex and multiple points of view,” said ABC director of television Richard Finlayson in a statement.

The program is being removed from the ABC’s website. This has happened before with Demasi’s work — a 2013 report on the cholesterol medication known as statins was the subject of similar scientific backlash, and subsequently removed upon review. That report, which gave people reasons to stop taking their heart medication, would lead to people dying as a result of the program, ABC health journalist Norman Swan said at the time, echoing the concerns of public health groups. Another report by Demasi, produced after the statins program, looked at the use and misuse of antidepressants — Crikey understands senior editors stopped it going to air.

[Media and a scientific leap of faith: a Catalyst for thought]

Holmes told Crikey that Catalyst has suffered from a lack of strong editorial oversight. The program does not have an executive producer, though series producer Ingrid Arnott, the program’s series producer, is the senior editor on the show..

“There’s no question in my mind that Catalyst has traditionally given a lot of power to its reporters, who are all qualified scientists, and who are able to pull rank over those who aren’t,” Holmes said. “Particularly in disputes about the merits of a particular paper, for example.”

“When I wrote about this [in a February column for the Age], I spoke to [ABC head of editorial policy] Alan Sunderland. His role is to apply the same editorial policies across the ABC. He told me this program went through the normal editorial controls. If that’s the case, they’re simply not strong enough, and they need to be beefed up.”

If Catalyst is returned to a “magazine-style” program and the ABC no longer does investigative science journalism, Holmes said that would be a pity. “I think there should always be a place for investigative scientific journalism that does query the status quo. But you’ve got to have editorial controls and the skills to do it.”

Catalyst is currently housed within the ABC’s television division, which while subject to the same editorial polices, has looser structures around editorial controls (at the news and current affairs division, executive producers are culturally expected to query and have the power to change every aspect of what is going to go to air — many TV programs, outside the ABC news division, share executive producers, who have many responsibilities). Meanwhile other ABC science programs, like the Health Report and the Science Show, air on Radio National and are thus under the radio division.

The ABC’s news and current affairs division is where most ABC journalists get their training in how to do difficult journalism, says Holmes. And the fact that the ABC’s science reporters are scattered among different divisions can complicate career paths and make collaboration harder.