Under British libel law you're guilty until proven innocent, and the newspapers seem to be okay with that

You probably already know this, but the science writer Simon Singh is currently being sued by the British Chiropractic Association for referring to chiropractic treatments of some conditions as ‘bogus’. You probably know that British libel law perversely assumes guilt until innocence is proven. (Sign this petition to change that.) You probably know that Judge Eady ruled in a preliminary hearing that ‘bogus’ means ‘deliberately fraudulent’, even though this is not what Singh meant, and that unless he can get this changed on appeal he has little hope of winning the case. This is, of course, roughly the same as if someone sued you for calling them a bitch and the judge ruled that you had to pay £100,000 if you couldn’t prove the plaintiff was of the genus canis.

I assume that you know all this because you are reading a blog, and at that a blog which frequently mentions science and political issues. You are exactly the kind of person I would expect to know exactly this kind of thing. Let’s take a step back and see what you’d know if you got your news from newspapers and TV.

The Guardian, whose paper carried the in-no-way-offending comment in the first place, have published precisely one follow-up that I have found:

Singh said he would like to fight it, because he is unhappy about the interpretation put on his words. "But there is a bigger issue about the state of our libel laws and how easy it is to be a science journalist or any journalist," he said.

They elected not to mention what that wider issue is or that the interpretation put on Singh’s words was totally unreasonable, although they did mention that they bankrolled his legal defence (as they did for Ben Goldacre when Matthias Rath sued him) – frankly if newspapers do stop being able to make money then the Guardian should consider applying for charitable status. They do more good than many groups that have it.

The Times has published, as far as I can find, exactly one sentence on the subject, which was totally uncritical of the case and which they used to make Singh sound like a bad person and to put words in his mouth:

On Thursday the [Edinburgh Skeptics] society is addressed by Dr Simon Singh, the author who is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association for his dismissals of the efficacy of chiropractise.

The Telegraph have not mentioned it, nor have the Independent. BBC.co.uk has nothing on it, as does channel4.com. Bizarrely, Sky News can’t sort search results by date so I have no idea whether they’ve deigned to mention it. (The above searches were performed with the sites’ own search functions, so they’ve only themselves to blame if I’ve missed anything.)

That’s a bit crap, considering this is a story about newspapers. The Telegraph, having exhausted all the abuses of the Parliamentary expenses (which a Guardian journalist did all the legwork for), have set about listing everything else MPs have claimed for and trying to insinuate a scandal around each one where generally none exists, and yet don’t apparently have room for even one article about a genuine scandal that is representative of a massive and unwarranted threat of litigation that hangs over them every time they publish any kind of comment piece.

I’ve said before that I get my news from blogs, Twitter, friends and the Internet. I said at the time that newspapers were still a vital primary source, but they’re just not. We know about this from Nature, NewScientist, nerds on Twitter, blogs and so forth, not from newspapers – despite it being about them. The same was true of the planned law to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act – despite their willingness to cash in on the fruits of that victory.

We don’t need the newspapers any more. Clearly we can do this on our own.