BBC Facilitates Grassroots Storytelling & Journalism

Richard Sambrook, Director of the BBC World Service and Global News Division, talks about the BBC's multiple efforts to put storytelling and journalism tools into the hands of thousands of people around the world and the challenges that arise from enabling so many to tell their own stories. He spoke during The Media Center's Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good seminar. Download audio as MP3 file.

From Media Center, http://www.mediacenter.org/content/6282.cfm?FLASH7=1

Comments

[kusumchoppra]

A few weeks ago, I read a piece in a newspaper in which a vague research organization in the USA claimed that the entire homeopathic system of medications was nothing but an elaborate hoax on patients, as the medicines had no healing value whatsoever.
Now this is real news.
For one, most people are painfully aware of the creditability of research institutions in the United States. For those who came in late, research in the US is done to prove a proposition propounded by pharmaceutical interests. It is the pharmaceutical interests which fund research which is aimed at proving their products’ efficacy and enhancing their marketability.
For those who are really interested, it would be very educative to read up the history of homeopathy in the United States, where at the turn of the previous century, allopathic pharmaceutical interests ran a virulent campaign to hound out homeopaths whose formulations for individual patients were not allowing their cheap manufacture and expensively markets to move off the shelves fast enough. Finally with a leg up from friendly legislators, the pharmaceutical lobby was able to demolish homeopathy in the United States.
The actual placebo effect, which homeopathy is accused off, is an open question. On the contrary many medications actually have damaging effects. There is wide spread reportage of experiences of patients who get no relief from many allopathic medications. Instead they find themselves left with numerous side effects, some of them quite painful and prolonged. In fact it is a common experience these days for patients to find themselves cured of one disease and landed with more than one more after every ‘successful’ medication.
I can state from personal, first hand experience that the research indicating that homeopathy is a hoax is nothing but bull shit. After it was the allopaths who had wrecked my system with all their so-called medications, it was a homeopath who set me back on my feet. And since then not only the entire family, but an ever widening circle of friends and family rely on homeopathy.
p.s. the first aid kit in my home consists of homeopathic products, including an obscure branch of bio chemic medicine called Father Mueller’s specifics.

kusum choppra