Media oversight from the unexpected angle.

Much has been written about how the Daily Show with Jon Stewart can often be the hardest hitting political show on the American networks despite being produced by and aired on a cable comedy channel. In terms of television output luminaries such as Marcus Brigstocke and Iain Lee & Daisy Donovan have tried to mine the vein of satirical current affairs but none of them have worried Jeremy Paxman and television satire in this country remains mostly the preserve of impressionists and panel games.

There is one area in this country in which a programme you might not expect is doing a fine job at holding people to account. More or Less goes out on Radio 4 after the World at One on a Friday lunchtime and is a co-production with the Open University. This seemingly unassuming half hour of statistics can be (glibly) described as doing for numbers what Ben Goldacre does for medicine. While not the first important figure they have picked apart (there is a very good piece about how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK for example) they hit the geek headlines over the weekend over "7m illegal file sharers". After first finding out that the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property was quoting a figure that came out of unpublished research commissioned for the BPI which had been laundered through another report from the same research outfit via UCL they then examined the methodology and numbers from which it was derived which brought both the small sample size and seemingly overstated overall population figure under scrutiny.

The programme is also blessed in that it has its archive online going back to 2003 so the good work can be cited.

Is homoeopathy bad science?

Ben Goldacre has written about homoeopathy in both Lancet and Gruaniad flavours.
There isn't much more for me to say apart from the second article, which is the lead article in the Guardian features section is going to to get noted down as somewhere to point people at, for it is quite one of the best bits of writing on a science topic I have ever read in the mainstream media. Actually sorry Ben, I shouldn't pigeon-hole it like that, it is a great piece in any context </fanboy>. If anyone wants to learn how special interest groups (as pointed out the techniques the homoeopaths use are also used by big pharma) to make it look like trials and studies back their point of view or indeed learn about how evidence based medicine works they should start here and then look into the references, unfortunately it looks like Sheffield libraries doesn't have the Trisha Greenhalgh book he recommends.