The media and “alternative” medical practice; the case of the Cebu Ozone Therapy clinic.

A parallel can be made to a point stressed in Reflections on Science and the Media. Television, according to Goodfield, has the same problems as print media, but to a level of “gross exaggeration” in comparison[9]. TV is the most potent and widespread form of mass communication, and thus extremely important for science. The nature of TV news, in terms of immediacy, severely time-restricted portrayal, and the deadlines imposed upon the production of stories, yields significant difficulties for the conveyance of the complicated topics of science[10]. 

Windschuttle’s free market model basically views media as responding to the market in a supply to demand relationship, with readers dictating what media should deliver by their “vote” of news consumption. Here, the press objectively reports reality. Such a claim means that the model fails to explain the many inconsistencies between different media, or between media and informed “outside opinion”[11]. 

Windschuttle’s bureaucratic model holds that journalists work within an organised framework which may involve the covering of certain domains via assigned “rounds”, and their associated public relations matter (principally the press release, given by the powerful such as Parliament, industry, police and courts)[12]. According to Windschuttle, media has a hunger for a 

high and consistent volume of material which can be readily tapped from predictable sources (p267) 

This leads to a reliance upon these external sources, that indeed have their own agendas to attend to. The interrelation between news source and the further selection process of journalist and news consumer, creates the news: it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So professional publicists of the powerful and wealthy begin the cycle of creation of news[13]. Karpf makes the point that “the reliance on official sources can erase a whole issue”[14]. 

The reliance upon these predictable sources can spell great difficulty in the field of scientific endeavour, as noted by Goodfield. The case of Thalidomide, where the Sunday Times actually spent a great deal of time and resources in extracting “the truth” (despite conventional expert sources who all claimed that the tragedy was not foreseeable), is all too rare a case of media commitment[15]^,[16]. The usual pattern is one where media exerts substantially less effort in research to get their science facts “right”. 

A propaganda model’s view of the bureaucratic thesis would see the generation of news in concordance with elite dogma and reliant upon elite sources as being a given part of the media process, as it is another filter to maintain debate within the bounds of the expressible. The reasons for it, though, might lay in an intentional selective silence rather than an entrenched pattern of day to day media work. 

The manipulative model looks at media as being a tool of those who own it, and the powers that they serve; Chomsky’s “national interest”. Journalists churn out propaganda and cover the truth, modeling the existing social order as the best possible world. They suppress or ridicule dissenting points of view[17]. 

The ideological consensus model proposed by Windschuttle presents ‘a broad but selective interpretation of news through a mediating ideology’, that defines what is reported and what is suppressed[18]. The model rests upon the idea of a central, elite-defined consensus, which (as an antecedent to media practices) fits novel news into preexisting frameworks that society consensually understands[19]. It is a more elaborate version of the manipulative model. 

Unfortunately, Windschuttle leaves a number of unanswered questions in regard to his critique of the manipulative and consensus ideology models. His work fails to define those points most central to his thesis, in the charge of the flaws inherent in the manipulative and ideological consensus models [20]. 

Windschuttle’s journalists who “hotly contend” the accusation of media control is a point which fails to take account of what Chomsky makes clear in his propaganda model: that many journalists internalise the values of their employers through ideological indoctrination and economic necessity, and consequently speak within the proprietor/advertiser enforced and elite delimited boundaries of the acceptable, in a self-censoring way[21].

One of the criticisms that Windschuttle levies against the models that he defines (except the free market model) is that they do not adequately account for the role of a consuming public. Karl E Meyer, Editorial Writer with the New York Times, presents this view[22]. They claim that consumers of a propaganda laden news would realise it as being such, and turn elsewhere to source their news. A suitable answer to this is as Chomsky notes: a culturally entrenched, jingoistic “home team” consensus exists, that explains an unquestioningly dogmatic approach to complex or vague issues[23]. Secondly, the fact that a great deal of the news is inherently unpredictable[24] means that so long as the reading audience does not acquire significant skills in telepathic insight, it can be presumed that such news will continue to be consumed, and that the set boundaries will be observed.[25]

The materialist theory that Windschuttle proposes is designed as an answer to this consumer problem: it is principally driven by his perceived need to account for the consumption of news by the public. However, his reference to common formulas used by the popular press[26] must be clearly defined as a different case to the media of interest in the Chomskian analysis, namely the elite media. Windschuttle’s final analysis with this materialist model is that ‘news is a cultural expression originating within the experience of the working class itself’ which is an inappropriate trivialisation, if applied to elite media propagandising. Popular press, as defined by Chomsky, is merely the fuel of diversion that is requested by ‘the eighty percent or whatever’[27]. 

The materialist theory also verifies Chomsky’s charge that the elite set limits to the boundaries of the expressible: “media controllers” dealing with the working class image, reinforce the required image upon the media. The media then regurgitates that image back to the working class with the added constraint expressed by Young, that ‘the controller ensures that this accommodation stays within limits’. 

June Goodfield evaluates the behavior that should be followed in communicating scientific work. She sees scientists as having historically held a professional ethos which was quite limited and “Mertonian” in it’s constraints[28]. The peer conformity and guarded reputations of the scientific community, releasing work only via the “learned journals”, leads to a deafening silence when it comes to explaining science adequately for those who most deserve it and ultimately give it licence to exist: the public[29]. Goodfield remarks that ‘the public’s desire to be kept fully and honestly informed is going to intensify’[30]. 

Goodfield outlines the problem of finding out whose interests should prevail to provide real-world answers to problems (as only trivial problems are unambiguous). The assessment of technology has been dominated by special interest groups: what is needed is a mechanism for knowing why these groups act in certain ways, and what they are actually doing. Since the public ultimately yields the benefit or pays the price for the technologies that special interest groups initiate, the former must “somehow” ensure that diverse interests are ‘balanced by open debate and informed analysis’.[31] The media’s search for the justification as to why special interest groups act in certain ways, and the rationale for their scientific decision making, is the only counterbalance against the dominance of potentially unprincipled elitism[32]. This is reiterated more acridly by Chomsky in his use of the concept of “necessary illusions”[33]. 

Goodfield[34] and Nelkin[35] list a number of restraints to the reporting of science by reporters and editors: in addition to the need for a predictable source are such things as the compulsion to create interest; to make news immediately graspable; to allocate limited resources; and to attempt to deal with the volume, variety, and the indefiniteness of the scientific knowledge available. All of these points contribute to media inaccuracy when it comes to grasping and conveying the “truths”[36] that may be available. 

The need to find novelty in media, according to Goodfield, drives such conspiratorial stories as the given example of laetrile, an unorthodox cancer therapy. This is a bad example to select[37]. She proposes that this case shows that the complexity of the issue can cause a media tendency to make shortcuts in time expended and effort exerted in the “correct” story; this is tantamount to the “bending of facts” into a story of sensationalist interest[38]. 

Goodfield runs through a number of contrasting examples of the media/science relationship, showing how either party can error and consequently damage society, when it lets it’s own priorities get in the way. When scientists take the time to get the point across to the media, and the media is prepared to invest the time and effort necessary to listen and fully understand, bridges can be built between the two with very positive results[39]. Goodfield’s analysis deals sparingly with the fact that science is not infallible. It puts too little emphasis on situations where expert disagreement is a significant factor, and the issues are not clear cut. In such instances as the one dealt with here, a deeper analysis of media response and interaction with other relevant entities is required. 

The event of interest is the media coverage of an Ozone therapy AIDS and cancer treatment clinic in the Philippines, organised by a Victorian named Bob Graham. The clinic was based around the “polyatomic apherisis” technology of Basil Wainwright. He has been denounced by mass media and by the medical establishment as a conman, and proclaimed by the alternative press as a gifted inventor facing a barrage of conspiratorial suppression[47]. Bob Graham’s Cebu clinic was raided and shut down by the Philippines Department of Health, and in a twist of awkwardness for Australian foreign relations, entertainer Johnny Young was ensnared in the clinic raid, and arrested for working on a holiday visa. Most of the Australians immediately returned to Australia; Young spent a smalltime in custody.

Not only did it not present the opinion of any of the patients, but even extracted little from the news team’s covertly enlisted “spy”. It ridiculed the political conspiracy theories expressed by the clinic staff, and devoted two minutes of the total nine minute report to the debunking of Basil Wainwright. The assertion here was that since the inventor had previously fallen afoul of the petrochemical and military industrial complexes, (and the consequent legal embroilments), that this in itself constituted sufficient grounds for the dismissal of the therapy. Overall, the report could safely be viewed in the terminology of the industry, as a “chuck” or “hatchet job”. 

A few further vagaries or distortions in the report are evident: for example, it is alluded that Dr. Gold is referring to drugs that he is not[49]. Also, the report showed film footage from a hidden camera taken by their spy; what the report did not say was that the A Current Affair film crew actually travelled to the Philippines with the participants, and Bob Graham & staff were happy to be filmed[50]. Channel Seven television news reportedly addressed the Cebu clinic issue with much the same approach as A Current Affair[51]. 

The newspaper coverage was far less hostile[52]. The reports mainly covered the fact that a famous Australian, Johnny Young, was involved with the clinic, and was arrested in Cebu for visa violations. Derogatory statements about the clinic were limited to quotations from the A Current Affair report, or the clinic participants Johnny Young and Mary Reilly (re. Bob Graham). The Sydney Morning Herald brought out a number of articles as the news about Young progressed, from the 26th March to the 4th April, not really even touching the scientific issues until the last article. This one, entitled “How my Jody Died,” was negative about Graham but somewhat positive towards the Ozone treatment: much of the input was from quotations by Mary Reilly, the mother of the AIDS patient, Jody Baker, that died from AIDS whilst at the clinic. It could be said that there was little new information presented by the papers, and that overall they were relatively silent on the issue. 

A interesting coincident occurred while the event was being covered; the news of the “concorde” Anglo-French study, determining that no clear benefit was obtained from AZT, was published in the Lancet and, on the same day, picked up by the media (3/4/93). It made mention that AZT made $380 million dollars last year worldwide. The trial had actually not been instigated to test efficacy of the drug, but rather to see what treatment method was optimal. A second AZT article had interesting if not coincidental placement with the “How my Jody Died” report relevant to the Cebu incident[53]. 

An article with the now standard approach of hesitancy to Ozone therapy appeared in Who magazine, on the 12/4/94[54], and it began to seriously address the issues[55]. The treatment was quoted as “dismissed as bunkum by medical experts”, but also reports the patient’s claims that the treatments were working, and debunks that via expert McKnight as simply due to “artificially high blood oxygen” (what ramifications that has is not explained). Obvious here too, is the lack of scientific argumentation and unquestioning acceptance of the medical establishment’s opinion as inviolate. 

Later, the incident sparked two articles in the Northern Herald which related to Dr. Joachim Fluhrer, a general practitioner in Manly, practising ‘Ozone therapy similar to the treatment at the centre of a recent scandal in the Philippines’[56]. The articles principally dealt with the treatment’s existence in Sydney, and the fact that Dr. Fluhrer was under investigation by the N.S.W. Medical Board after a complaint by the N.S.W. AIDS Council[57]. One of the articles describes ozone as being dangerous to living cells and non-discriminatory over what it kills. 

Ian McKnight, pharmacologist and information officer for the AFAO National Treatments Project, very quickly put out a paper after the Cebu incident[58], strongly against the character of the New York based oxygen therapies spokesman Ed McCabe. This dealt with scientific issues to a far greater extent than any of the above reports, but could not really be called scientific due to it’s lack of references and unsubstantiated claims, seemingly once again reliant on the inviolability of the expert’s opinion[59]. 

From the “alternative” media magazine, Nexus[60], Ed McCabe[61], and a WBAI (New York public access radio) interview with a journalist who was at Cebu[62], a very different story was portrayed. In addition to assertions that the Cebu treatment saw a significant improvement in the conditions of a number of the patients being treated, they claim that Ozone therapy would have yielded what was promised of it, given the time required[63]. They accuse the press of complicity with the pharmaceutical medical complex, in a conspiracy to suppress actual cases of Ozone therapy success[64]. Since at the very least the world’s second largest industry is a significant advertiser, media proprietors have their own economic interests to protect (not even accounting for any direct investment links between media and medicine). 

One comment worth noting comes from the journalist in Cebu; 

...after the raid the major of the city gave the Department of Health the opportunity that if they wanted the study to continue, he would make space available in a hospital and make the patients the guests of the city. For them to turn down that offer and shut it down without looking at the patient’s records, of which the blood tests all showed improvements, or watching a demonstration - that’s when I started to believe that there was some level of conspiracy happening right before my eyes...(p32) 

Contrastingly to the A Current Affair report of “fraud” perpetrated by Wainwright, Nexus reports that he ran afoul of the British Ministry of Defence after not relegating a politically sensitive energy related invention to the MoD. Basil Wainwright’s case has been picked up by Amnesty International, and the issue of his incarceration raised by in the UK by Lord McNair of the British House of Lords[65]. 

A critic’s role has it’s own temptations: to do a hatchet job for the sake of doing a hatchet job; to become so narcissistic or intellectual that the end and the object becomes one’s own ideas rather than those of the person or the enterprise under review. These temptations are very real...(p98) 

Goodfield also elaborates that the mass media’s avoidance of controversy is relevant, as sponsors 

underwrite the programs less to impart information than to accrue esteem and attract buyers. One way, apparently, to garner esteem is to avoid controversy. (p 28) 

In the case of the Cebu clinic it is clearly far less controversial to side with the medical establishment than to battle against it. It is also a less difficult route in terms of the resources that must be committed to research, and in obtaining expert witnesses to prove the (establishment) point. Being significant sponsors, it also emphasises the point from a different angle; It could be seen as an act of economic wisdom for the media not to “bite the hand that feeds it”. 

Goodfield indicates the vulnerability of establishment science to sensationalist attack (and also for the reason of “fashion”): it stands to reason that even more vulnerable then, is an underground element practicing methods not supported by the medical orthodoxy: they are easy prey. 

In a telephone conversation with Bob Graham, and in Ed McCabe’s paper on Cebu[68], it is remarked that the news team of A Current Affair behaved positively towards the treatment: it only turned “anti” after the request for A$250,000 for rights to the story was made by a number of the AIDS patients involved. This could certainly be seen as suitable economic justification by Channel Nine for the adoption of the report’s “angle”. It is almost understandable that the upper level management of a station might instruct a research team to “bury the hatchet” into a report, if the alternative was to pay extortive requests of that magnitude. Secondly, Graham also alleged that the A Current Affair team reported the clinic to the Philippines Department of Health. An act of raiding and shutting down the clinic would act as a further sensational verification of illegitimacy on the part of the clinic: an obvious bonus for the report angle, if not a sad day for media ethics[69]. 

As pointed out by the Treatments Officer for the N.S.W. Aids Council, such sensationalism has an impact upon the actual medical practice’s view of Ozone therapy; now that Bob Graham has the machine in Australia, and has offered it to doctors that may want to trial it properly[70], none seem to want to touch it. (With the recently reported fate of Dr. Fluhrer to go by, it seems like a wise decision[71]). In this light the media is as responsible as is the medical establishment, for the ultimate difficulty had in achieving a fair evaluation of Ozone therapy[72]. This could be seen as asserting the bureaucratic model as defined by Windschuttle, where the interaction of source, audience and media becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as they dynamically react to each other[73]. 

It seems a significant task for the alternative practitioners of ozone therapy to bring the treatment to the public’s attention, if it is indeed a viable therapy for AIDS, cancer and other diseases, as claimed. If so, it is one issue that desperately needs responsible “science interpretators and critics” as defined and called for by Goodfield[74]. The issue should by no means closed. 

The “polyatomic apherisis” machine sits idle in Victoria, at Bob Graham’s home. Against the models which emphasise media chaos, entropy and helplessness, the situation of reality creation that seems to be suggested here shows the power of the media over medicine, not just the reliance that the media has to it. The “bad communication” as noted by Goodfield, shared by both the media and the medical establishment, have fuelled each other’s rejection of Ozone therapy. Thus they must both be held to blame if Ozone therapy ultimately proves in any way successful for the treatment of life-threatening illness. Both seem to fail Chomsky’s standard test of sincerity[78]. 

The Cebu incident is a demonstration of the interrelating dynamic of mass media, public and (medical) scientist. Insofar as the public are willing to let this occur through apathy, ignorance or absolution, they are accomplices. As Chomsky says, there is a distinct percentage of the population that seeks distraction and entertainment rather than confront the issues - and this gives licence for the aberrant mechanisms of mass media and medicine, as shown by the Cebu incident, to work in the first place. But relatively speaking, how aberrant are they? In any case, the consequences are obvious; if Ozone therapy is viable, then the final loser is the public, and ultimately both the subgroups of mass media and medicine fit into that group. 

Medical issues have an obviously significant urgency in that the displacement of alternative technologies which might be useful to humanity, ultimately result in a cost which can be apportioned in terms of human lives. As pointed out by Burkett, most medical issues are transscientific[79]. In the face of the opportunity cost, it makes the negligence of both the medical profession and mass media all the more pernicious, and ultimately it serves large business interests, irrespective of the intent. Only with more appropriate and responsible science journalism and scientific commentary, as called for by Goodfield, will the public be alerted to these transscientific issues to the extent that they will hopefully be moved into action. Only then will the public’s interests be served to the best of human medical ability. If the given case is anything to go by, we still have a long way to go.