Here's an important piece in BMJ, the online British Medical Journal. Several years ago, when the journal ran a piece on the targeting of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers, it endured a storm of emailed complaints, and this motivated the Journal to investigate the practice. Was it effective? What should publications do about it?
the BMJ was the target of an orchestrated campaign to silence criticism of Israel. And that is certainly how it felt. As well as almost 1000 emails to the editor, the BMJ’s website received hundreds of electronic responses to the article itself as well as feedback generally critical of the journal’s decision to publish it. The feedback messages began in earnest three days after publication and then streamed in, almost in alphabetical order of the senders’ names. Their wording was uncannily similar, with some authors seemingly ignorant of the article they were criticising—well described features of orchestrated campaigns. Some took us to task for covering the difficulties faced by diabetic Palestinians in Gaza; this issue had been raised not by the BMJ but by Diabetes Voice, which has no connection to the BMJ. We had been used to unfamiliar voices from unfamiliar places crowding in to debates on the Middle East before, but never on this scale.
Does any of this matter? Isn’t it just evidence that pressure groups have embraced electronic media as enthusiastically as everybody else? Shouldn’t we expect to receive thousands of critical emails where once we received dozens of critical letters—and not be swayed by the numbers? In his commentary, Jonathan Freedland recommends that we grow a thicker skin…
And yet orchestrated campaigns can succeed in closing down debate. The International Diabetes Foundation apologised for the article on Gaza, and the editor of Diabetes Voice (the foundation’s quarterly publication) resigned. [BMJ author Karl] Sabbagh sees a similarity between the campaign he describes and the one contributing to the demise of World Medicine. Michael O’Donnell, World Medicine’s editor at the time, describes in his commentary how that campaign "was directed not just at author, editor, and publisher but at World Medicine’s advertisers . . . and one of our major shareholders." Success of a campaign doesn’t require that a publication closes down or that an editor resigns or is sacked; it’s enough for the publication to succumb to the temptation "quietly to avoid the topic in future."
The BMJ concludes that publications ought to ignore the email campaigns! Brilliant.
