Letter to the Editor

(Editor's note: In late September 1994, the Council adjudicated a complaint from Dr Simon Chapman and Prof Richard Taylor, arising from an opinion column published in The Australian. Adjudication No 753 was published in the November 1994 News. Following further correspondence between the Council and the complainants, they were invited to submit a letter for publication, expressing their reservations with the adjudication and the Council's procedures.)

In June 1994, Mr PP McGuinness, then a columnist with The Australian, wrote an article about smoking. In it he wrote:

It is surely true that smoking increases your chances of getting lung cancer. But if, say, the increase is 100 per cent, and the probability of lung cancer is one in a hundred, this only means an increase of the probability from 1 per cent to 2 per cent. It can be perfectly sensible to consciously take such a risk ... But smoking is a lot safer than driving a car.

This statement contains three purportedly factual propositions which are demonstrably gross misrepresentations of the actual risks (ie: the probability) of getting lung cancer in Australia today. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in Australia. It is largely a preventable disease. In claiming smokers have only double the risk of non-smokers, it can be shown from Australian lung cancer data that his statement was 194% wrong in the case of smokers and 614% wrong in the case of smokers smoking more than 20 cigarettes per day. Data from the Roads and Traffic Authority show that the probability of a NSW 17 year old driver being killed while driving during their expected lifespan is 1:166 for males and 1:278 for females. Sir Richard Doll's recently published 40 year follow-up of over 30,000 British doctors shows that smoking kills about one in two smokers, thus making Mr McGuinness' road death comparison outrageously wrong.

We lodged an unsuccessful complaint to the Press Council, with Council explaining that it was "not a scientific body and is unable to rule on whether the conclusions drawn by either the complainants or Mr McGuinness are correct". A copy of Mr McGuinness' defence of his statement was given to us. Unlike us, he supplied no evidence whatsoever to support his statements, instead choosing to denigrate "the anti-smoking lobby" as "McCarthyist".

We are both specialists in the subject that Mr McGuinness wrote about. We made no complaint about any of his opinions about "the anti-smoking lobby", confining our complaint strictly to his gross misrepresentation of factual material. Mr McGuinness apparently believes that, despite having no training or professional experience in epidemiology or public health, that he has a superior grasp of risk assessment than we do. In his article he wrote "people who accuse me of understating the risks are themselves purely ignorant of this".

We find it disturbing and reprehensible that the Council should have considered Mr McGuinness' unsupported (and unsupportable) opinions about the risks of smoking as equivalent evidence to the fully documented material we tendered supporting our complaint. More fundamentally, we find it astonishing that the Press Council has no mechanism in place whereby it can refer complaints such as ours for expert adjudication whenever it feels its normal process is out of its depth.

The Council's Chair, Prof David Flint, wrote to us that if a complaint were received about Agent Orange and birth defects "the Council would only deal with the ethical issues involved, and would not, and could not, rule on the scientific issues". This emphatic disjunction of ethics with scientific matters assumes that clearly poor or untruthful science is compatible with ethical communication. We defy any serious ethical body to defend such a proposition.

Mr McGuinness has since publicly gloated that the Council's dismissal of our complaint was because it agreed (with him) that it was "frivolous". The US Surgeon General wrote in the preface to her 1990 Report "It is safe to say that smoking represents the most extensively documented cause of disease ever investigated in the history of biomedical research". In light of that remark, we urge the Press Council to attend to what is a clear failure of its process.

Simon Chapman PhD
(Assoc Prof in Community Medicine, University of Sydney, and member, WHO Expert Advisory Panel on Tobacco and Health.)

Richard Taylor
(Assoc Professor of Public Health, University of Sydney, and head, NSW Cancer Registry, NSW Cancer Council.)

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