This page is material from the award-winning investigation by Brian Deer for The Sunday Times of London, with spin-offs for a UK TV network and a top medical journal, which exposed vaccine research cheat Andrew Wakefield | Summary | Read the book

Dinah Lord Caravan Media — Dinah Lord: Caravan Media company took Deer’s findings without agreement and sold them to Channel 4

Dinah Lord and Caravan Media in Channel 4 plagiarism dispute

Dinah Lord’s
big break

In June 2021, the UK’s Channel 4 Television screened “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy,” produced by Dinah Lord of Caravan Media, Eamonn Matthews of Quicksilver Media, and Flora Bagenal, plagiarizing my investigation of vaccine research cheat Andrew Wakefield

[A second piece, focused on Quicksilver Media, is here]

OPINION BY BRIAN DEER
August 10, 2021

DINAH LORD licked her lips. At last, she’d found the story of a lifetime. It had human interest, public interest, sick children, and frightened parents. It had death, money, scientific malfeasance. And, behind all this, there was fraud.

Here, laid bare, was a narrative of the moment: how the modern anti-vaccine movement was launched on the world—discovered, exposed, and proved.

Dinah Lord didn’t doubt she’d found a journalistic coup that had plenty to revitalize a humdrum career as a former BBC producer. Here was even a route into the coronavirus pandemic, events in the United States, which meant travel, foreign sales, and money for her tiny television production company, Caravan Media.

She might even get entered for an award.

The only snag for Dinah Lord was the story wasn’t hers. The story, to be blunt, was mine. It was the story I’d been unravelling since February 2004, when the first of my Sunday Times reports on the “MMR doctor” and vaccine research cheat Andrew Wakefield sparked a media firestorm in Britain.

My investigation would continue for years and years, with dozens of exclusive newspaper reports, a spin-off TV current affairs programme, and a series for a medically-qualified readership in the British Medical Journal. Finally, after two failed vexatious lawsuits from Wakefield, came my book on the scandal, The Doctor Who Fooled the World, published by Johns Hopkins University Press and Scribe.

Under intense editorial and legal supervision (described at this website) I alone did this work in the face of sneering hostility from the medical establishment and the fury of anti-vaccine campaigners.

Other reporters on the subject came up with jack shit. They either showcased Wakefield, platformed crossfires of “experts” (usually vaccine developers) or repeated, with acknowledgments, what I’d found.

Dinah Lord saw all this and wanted it bad. But what would she do to get it?

Here’s my account of the nastiest incident in all the abuse I’ve experienced over the years since I published my first inquiry into vaccine safety in November 1998. I’ve fought off the lawsuits, weathered endless online fabrications about me, been targeted with stalking and harassment by Wakefield’s people, and suffered a barrage of lies from the man.

But then, among it all, came Dinah Lord and others: her business partner Eamonn Matthews of Quicksilver Media, and a freelance producer, Flora Bagenal.

I say they feasted on my work like pigs.

Not only do I allege that they disgracefully plagiarized from my investigation of Wakefield (and artfully strove to cover up this misconduct) but caused falsehoods to be broadcast, either knowingly or recklessly, and drew the UK’s once-admired Channel 4 network, as well as the respected Association for International Broadcasting, into what I regard to be one of the most shameful media incidents I’ve witnessed firsthand during my career as a national news journalist.

Lord’s prayer

Dinah Lord’s strategy began softly softly. Who could ever expect what would follow?

In February 2020, just a couple of months after The Doctor Who Fooled the World was distributed for reviews and announced to the book trade, I received an email from a London company called All3Media, which has a financial stake in Caravan. It was from someone called Hannah Griffiths, “Head of Literary Acquisitions,” and was headed, “A question about TV rights.”

Hannah Griffiths wrote:

“I work in TV, finding books to develop into TV shows for various different production companies. One of the documentary producers in the group is keen to talk to you about your forthcoming book on THE DOCTOR WHO FOOLED THE WORLD. I wonder, are you already talking to people about a documentary? Can we find a time to meet you?”

Fair enough. Can’t argue with that. Before, during, or after the launch of The Doctor Who Fooled the World, I or my New York agents received around seventy or eighty such approaches from TV companies in the UK, the United States, and elsewhere.

My agents said thanks, but no thanks, sorry. We weren’t interested in licensing them the rights. The advice I got was that Dinah Lord and Caravan lacked the calibre and personnel for such a project.

TV rights, of course, are a major issue in publishing, and the other companies all seemed to know the rules, or at least respected my intellectual property. But not so Dinah Lord and Caravan Media.

Lord wasn’t taking “no” for an answer.

So, on July 21, 2020, I received another email: from Dinah Lord herself with a transparently slippery routine. She was attempting to work up my investigation as a “series,” she said, for which (according to innumerable TV people) there could be only one authentic source.

On a caravan-media.com email account, Dinah Lord, 64, wrote to me:

“We have been developing a documentary series about Andrew Wakefield for some time now, and are in conversation with networks on both sides of the Atlantic… [sentence partially redacted on grounds of commercial confidentiality], but wondered if that precluded any involvement or consultancy with a documentary series.”

If I said I gave ten seconds to Dinah Lord’s email, I’d be stretching the meaning of “second.” At the time, I was deluged with inquiries from around the world. I’d two publishing companies preparing for our book launch, interviews with journalists, articles to write, and such relentless pressure to answer questions from the public that I sometimes responded with an apologetic generic email saying I just couldn’t cope with the traffic.

There was, moreover, another paragraph in Dinah Lord’s email that I found, at face value, troubling. She claimed personal association with Dr Fiona Godlee, who edited some of my work a decade back in the British Medical Journal. And yet, Lord misspelt Godlee’s name:

“Fi Godley is a friend, and I know would vouch for Caravan’s journalistic integrity. It would be good to have a conversation with you, to explore whether we could work together.”

So here was Dinah Lord of Caravan Media (stressing “integrity”) in “conversation” with people to whom she hoped to sell my story, and trying to get me to allow her to declare she was in “conversation” with its copyright owner. Yeah, right.

I never even responded with my generic reply. I’ve long known the ploy where you tell Brad Pitt that a studio has eyes on a project you dream of, and you also tell a studio you’re in talks with Brad, when in reality you’ve nothing but guile. So I didn’t give my time to get involved in such shenanigans, and Dinah Lord’s email scrolled down my crowded in-box, not to resurface for nearly a year.

I didn’t remember Dinah Lord or Caravan Media. But Lord remembered me all right. After failing to obtain legal rights over my journalism—to sell for her own profit after contributing nothing to it—she evidently resolved to help herself.

So she caused choice elements from my fifteen-year investigation to be skimmed and, without my knowledge, pitched them to the UK’s beleaguered Channel 4, which, in my view, contemptibly joined her, Eamonn Matthews, also 64, of Quicksilver Media, and producer Flora Bagenal to seize and exploit my published material in a ninety-minute programme focused on Wakefield which they titled “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy.”

They never reached out to me in any way whatsover and withheld any shred of credit.

“The Anti-Vax Conspiracy”

I’ve made TV current affairs programmes for Channel 4’s Dispatches strand, and I know the drill for approaching potential contributors. You tell them what you’re doing, who you’re doing it for, and invite them to discuss participation. If they’re people with legitimate interests or a reputation to protect, you might ask them several times if necessary.

But the first I knew that Dinah Lord and Caravan Media had lifted what I say is great swathes of my journalism (and you can make up your own mind from the comparison here) was just a few weeks ago, on June 1, 2021, when I was alerted by Tweets with my name in.

People wanted to know why I wasn’t in the programme (which they were then watching in real time on Channel 4) recognising what they knew to be my story.

Biophysicist and statistician David Colquhoun, for instance, Tweeted:

“On the #Channel4 prog about Anti-vax conspiracy, @fgodlee is superb, but so far no acknowledgment of Brian Deer @deerbrian, the brave journalist who did so much to expose Wakefield.”

I was stunned when I saw the programme, streamed after broadcast. Even the opening sentence made my jaw drop. “It started with a lie,” were the first five words, overlaying images from the Dispatches programme I’d made years back (Credited when I made it: “An investigation by Brian Deer”). So I looked up the script of what I’d written for that.

My first sentence was: “It started with fear.”

Could that be a coincidence? What do you think? If it’s meant to be a tribute, I’m not flattered.

So there was the inspiration for the beginning of their programme. But now look at the end of “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy,” where I might almost think that some repressed sense of decency on the part of Flora Bagenal was breaking through from an unconscious better nature. The hardback edition of The Doctor Who Fooled the World bore the cover subtitle “Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines” and this is how the producers closed the Channel 4 show (my underlining):

“And the man who lit the touch paper of this modern movement, who led this march through telling people not to be fooled by this conspiracy against them? Science should have prevailed. It was a lie all along. But whether it’s down to timing or personality, he got away with it and, in the end, makes fools of us all.”

But it wasn’t just the bookends framing the programme that I say were based on my work. Again and again, between my words at the beginning and “fools of us all” at the end, I say this programme took the findings, ideas, and narrative of my original journalism while cunningly disguising this debt.

Since watching “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy”, I’ve been taken away from journalism to perform an analysis so tediously painful that I gave up transcribing and documenting what I found when I reached thirty examples—an average of one every two minutes—where I say the frame, premise, narrative, thought-lines, findings, word-phrasings, judgments of Wakefield’s character and motivations, or accounts of his misconduct, were harvested from my investigation without acknowledgment.

The comparison at this website link goes into detail. But take, as an example, the opening sentence of Chapter 27 of The Doctor Who Fooled the World:

“On the day that his career as a doctor ended, he looked like he couldn’t give a damn. Leaving his seat vacant at the hearing in London, he instead took a chair in New York City. At NBC’s Midtown studios. With no prosecuting counsel, or investigative journalist rooting through the evidence, at 7:43 he settled for six minutes with the ‘face of the Today show,’ Matt Lauer…”

And then compare that with its paraphrase in “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy,” where before using a clip I quote in my book, the programme offers this abridgment in commentary:

“On the day that the General Medical Council finally ruled against Andrew Wakefield, stripping him of his medical license, Wakefield wasn’t in London to hear it. He was in a TV studio in America. Matt Lauer…”

I don’t believe this was a coincidence. But most of what I call plagiarism wasn’t in commentary. It was in the contributions of four individuals whom the programme makers recruited to voice my findings for the express purpose of evading acknowledgment of the primary source of the material. Two were doctors, and two were lay people with no background I’m aware of in this area.

None of the four (or anybody else in “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy”) were involved in revealing Wakefield’s fraud (that was me in The Sunday Times in February 2009). Dr Godlee of the BMJ, however, did co-author an editorial accompanying reports by me in her journal in January 2011 (a decade before the programme) where she expressed a pivotal fact in the Wakefield affair that Flora Bagenal appears to have read during production but any recognition of which was suppressed from the broadcast:

“It has taken the diligent scepticism of one man, standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud.”

That one man was me.

Dr Godlee was manipulated by the programme makers to voice my findings, with her contribution edited by the producers to summarise my discoveries as if they were hers: an achievement of medicine not journalism. For example, she dutifully recited these facts I revealed in The Sunday Times as if they were matters she’d brought to light:

“Andrew Wakefield had been paid to do this by a lawyer who was aiming to sue the manufacturers of the vaccine, was being paid £150 an hour, and ended up earning more than £400,000 for the work he was doing. And none of this was declared in the publication in The Lancet.”

And:

“Andrew Wakefield deliberately rigged the results to support his claims.”

Everything they used from her was drawn from my work: even a little burst of colour from the Prologue of The Doctor Who Fooled the World, where I wrote:

“And from a PhD student on the North Island of New Zealand: ‘I hoped he’d just crawled under a rock.’”

Dr Godlee opined:

“The big surprise for most people was that Andrew Wakefield did not crawl under a rock and disappear.”

I don’t blame Dr Godlee. She’d been exploited and manipulated precisely to keep my name out of the programme. Indeed, she’d expressly warned Flora Bagenal and the director Colette Camden that she wasn’t the right person to deal with these matters. She hadn’t handled my investigation for nearly a decade, didn’t have access to my materials (which Bagenal requested), and couldn’t be expected to recall the detail, as she explained to Bagenal and Camden in an email:

“I think there is more here than I can with full confidence and credibility cover. In particular, the second list where you ask for more detail—these are things that should be covered by Brian Deer rather than me… Again, Brian Deer is the person to ask for documentation.”

But they didn’t give damn about “confidence and credibility.” Their aim was to take, take, and take. With Dinah Lord’s game in play, Flora Bagenal disregarded the journal editor’s request and instead elicited a performance that would have misled viewers to believe Dr Godlee was the source of my revelations.

Another of the four that Caravan’s Dinah Lord recruited (in roles I characterize as sockpuppet surrogates) was an American financial journalist, Roderick Boyd. After being hired to represent himself as a knowledgeable source regarding Wakefield, and before being filmed in phony scenes driving a car (like I was, of course, in my Dispatches), Boyd wrote to me saying he was reading The Doctor Who Fooled the World and asked me for a briefing on Wakefield’s finances (to which I replied with my generic email apology).

Boyd was hired to bring the story up to date. So he finished reading my book (about a quarter to a third of which concerns Wakefield in America). And you can see from my thirteen-page analysis at this website link whether you think he took it from me.

He did.

Boyd wouldn’t have known what was going down here. And after the broadcast of “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy,” he emailed me:

“It took me (then a relative newbie to this forever war) about 8–10 hits to get to your stuff. Obviously, once I did, I used it as a foundational text…”

Obviously.

Unfair to Wakefield

At the heart of the “Anti-Vax Conspiracy,” Dinah Lord, Eamonn Matthews, and Flora Bagenal claim that Wakefield’s research was a “lie” and “fraud”—judgments stripped from the core of my investigation—but, astonishingly, they produce no evidence.

Having ignored Dr Godlee’s warning and her request that they contact me, they went ahead and made serious broadcast allegations they’d no credible prospect of standing up. They simply offered a parasitic echo chamber, bringing nothing of their own, eschewing basic professional standards.

As I’ve told the UK broadcasting regulator Ofcom (which rejected my complaint, evidently on grounds that I wasn’t in the programme):

“Notwithstanding (a) Wakefield having been struck from the medical register in May 2010 as a result of my investigation as of that time, (b) what I’ve established to be heinous wrongdoing on his part, impacting on the safety of children, and (c) a carded statement at the end of the Channel 4 programme that he was “asked to contribute… but was unavailable,” Wakefield was nevertheless entitled to fair treatment, and viewers were entitled to be reasonably and accurately informed as to both the basis and the provenance of such serious allegations.”

Lord, Matthews, and Bagenal’s strategy to try to remedy this shortcoming was to enlist Dr Paul Offit, the (unstated) de facto spokesperson for US vaccine manufacturers, to hold forth as if he was the source of the fraud disclosure that ended Wakefield’s career in medicine.

In particular, they invited him to explain what he said was in Wakefield’s notorious research paper in the Lancet journal of February 1998 that my investigation caused to be retracted (eleven years ago) in which my years of journalism proved the fraud.

Dinah Lord’s problem here in mocking up my findings was that Dr Offit is sometimes unreliable. And in an interview I assume was conducted by Flora Bagenal, he made such serious mistakes about Wakefield’s paper that, had Lord, Matthews, or Bagenal actually read the material around which they framed “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy,” they ought to have known was wrong.

Offit’s mistakes weren’t trivial but went to the heart of Wakefield’s claims and the public’s reaction — causing viewers to be grossly misled.

According to Dr Offit:

“Andrew Wakefield in 1998 published a paper in the journal Lancet claiming that the combination measles–mumps–rubella vaccine, MMR, caused autism.”

This is false. Wakefield’s paper made no claim that MMR caused autism but stated:

“We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described. Virological studies are underway that may help to resolve this issue.”

Dr Offit continued in “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy”:

“What he had was he had a series of twelve children, eight of whom had autism, and those eight had presumably developed autism within a month of receiving the vaccine.”

This is false. The paper reported a sudden onset of behavioral symptoms following MMR. The reported mean time to onset was 6.3 days.

Extemporizing on his theme for Fiona Bagenal, Dr Offit dismissed Wakefield’s paper as, on the face of it, absurd and unworthy of publication:

“The most amazing part of the paper was that there ever was a paper. That it was ever published. He might as well have published a series of children who within a month of having eaten a peanut butter sandwich developed leukaemia.”

This is false. At face value, the paper was a conventional case series reporting apparent parental testimony that children showed the first symptoms of autism in dramatic close association with MMR. It also claimed the discovery of a new “syndrome” involving a novel inflammatory bowel disease. These claims (which, in a massive journalistic investigation for The Sunday Times, I later proved to be fraudulent) were why it caused such public concern.

The matters raised by Dr Offit involved no complex issues or medical terminology. They were dealt with prominently in Wakefield’s paper, expressed in the plainest English, with a table restating the text’s sudden-onset data. A nine-year-old should be able to understand it.

But not, apparently, Dinah Lord, Eamonn Matthews, or Flora Bagenal. Which leads me to two possible explanations:

Either Lord of Caravan Media, Matthews of Quicksilver Media, or Bagenal, the producer they hired:

(a) Knew that what Dr Offit said was wrong, didn’t care, and so knowingly allowed falsehoods to be broadcast in “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy”; or they

(b) Never even read the foundational document they held up as their example of “fraud.”

Astonishing, you might think. But it’s what you should expect. Here were people who I think knew next to nothing about the matters they were reporting and had solicited surrogates (who played no role in unmasking Wakefield) to pour into the script elements of my investigation that the executive producers—Lord and Matthews—and the producer, Bagenal, hadn’t made a fair effort to understand.

And Dr Offit’s were by no means the only errors I noted in Dinah Lord’s Caravan car crash. So ill-prepared were Lord, Eamonn Matthews, and Flora Bagenal that the programme was spattered with elementary mistakes—not only revealing that they didn’t know much about what they were telling viewers, but that they’d failed to take advice from those who might.

For example, trying to echo something explained in my book, they get the age when MMR is given to children wrong. They place Wakefield living in the wrong location, give wrong information about a woman named Jane Johnson, get the name of Roderick Boyd’s organization wrong, broadcast an error by the BMJ‘s editor, and make two mistakes about a rich couple in New York.

Such is the state of today’s Channel 4.

Steve Boulton leads denial

Dinah Lord and Eamonn Matthews (with whom I’ve had shocking previous dealings — about which I’ve found time to write a companion opinion here) were well ensconced inside Channel 4’s tent. And when I complained to the network, the day after the broadcast, it didn’t claim honest mistake.

Instead, I got responses from Steve Boulton, the commissioning editor who supervised production of “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy,” who defended it by blaming me.

Denying any plagiarism and stating that “the production team have conducted themselves entirely appropriately throughout the production process,” Boulton claimed:

“It is important to note at the outset, in the context of your complaint that you were unfairly and intentionally excluded from the film, that you were approached on two occasions in February and July 2020 to take part, either on a consultancy basis or as an on-screen contributor. You decided not to take part.”

False. Although Boulton (who elsewhere calibrates himself as a “university dropout who got lucky when TV was less choosy who it hired”) craftily reframes my complaint to make it look like my concern was about not appearing in the programme, when it was actually about the lack of attribution of my material. I’m entirely sure he knows I never “decided not to take part,” as no such opportunity was offered.

Nor was there ever any invitation for an on-screen contribution. Somebody made that up.

Nevertheless, Boulton persisted with his gaslighting strategy:

“If you had chosen to take part, it may have been you who was used to explain this background.”

I repeat: I was never at any time given a choice to take part, and I was never contacted by the production team. Nevertheless, citing that “production team,” Boulton again falsely alleged:

“They have approached a whole host of contributors, including yourself…”

And in the same dishonest reply, Steve Boulton—occupying a job one might assume called for high standards of professional integrity—makes a mockery of a basic tenet of ethical journalism:

“Given you were not appearing on screen your name was not referenced specifically as it would not have materially furthered viewers understanding of Andrew Wakefield’s conduct.”

False again. Leaving aside Channel 4’s duty to acknowledge the programme’s principal source so as to avoid a charge of plagiarism—actionable misconduct—”The Anti-Vax Conspiracy” distorts the record by fabricating the impression that Wakefield was exposed by doctors or some scientific process.

It’s one of the most remarkable features of the MMR scandal that the ex-doctor was able to launch a global crisis in confidence over vaccine safety based on a fraudulent research paper, in plain view of the medical and scientific establishments, and was caught by a lone newspaper reporter.

But there we are. In Channel 4’s view, as seen by Steve Boulton: Dinah Lord and her (apparently four-person) production company asks me for a “conversation” to help them sell my investigation as a “series” for their own profit and glory. And this, in the producers’ fetid imaginations, constitutes an invitation to participate in a programme that hadn’t even been commissioned by Channel 4 in July of last year and which they told me nothing about.

And it doesn’t stop there. Since all of their sockpuppet surrogates knew my work, Flora Bagenal and the director/cameraperson, Colette Camden, were inevitably asked about me. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone they interviewed named me on– or off–camera.

Indeed, Fiona Godlee of the British Medical Journal wrote to me after the broadcast making it clear she was misled by the programme makers as they strived to place my journalism in her mouth:

“I am sure that I said on camera more than a few times that what we published in The BMJ was an investigation by Brian Deer. My understanding from the film makers was that they had contacted you but you had declined to be involved. I have to say that I was surprised on viewing the film that there was no mention of you in it.”

“Declined to be involved.” Just incredible. Did Dinah Lord and Caravan Media or Eamonn Matthews and Quicksilver Media mislead Flora Bagenal to say this? Was Steve Boulton misled (he says he wasn’t). Was Bagenal even in on the truth?

I doubt I’ll ever know. But I’m not taking this abuse and disrespect from these people, who exploited my work without revealing what they’d done because they were incapable of finding anything of their own. So, to start with, I wrote to Ian Katz, Channel 4’s Director of Programmes and Chief Content Officer, enclosing my analysis of what was done, and among other things pointing out this:

“Clearly, if the production team had wanted me to participate in a Channel 4 programme about Andrew Wakefield and the anti-vaccine movement, they would have asked me. They didn’t because, plainly, they didn’t want me to. Moreover, even if I’d declined (which I didn’t), they still weren’t licensed to ransack my journalism without attribution, misrepresenting products of my years of research as their own.

“This isn’t about me wanting to be on television. That novelty wore off long ago. This is about attribution. So, I’ll put it to you straight: If you believe what was done is acceptable, or not worthy of your comment, then I’ll infer Channel 4 thinks it can seize substantial content from others without attribution; that it may have done this before; and may do it again. In my view, such conduct would be a significant concern both to the public and to journalists.”

I doubt he’ll reply, or even acknowledge my complaint [he didn’t], and I’ll then move on to the independent directors of Channel 4 Television and a government consultation now taking evidence on whether the floundering publicly-owned network would be better sold off and put in private hands. Yes. It would.

Steve Boulton: dropout supervised Channel 4 plagiarism.

Why did they do it? I think Dinah Lord learned through my agents of considerable interest in The Doctor Who Fooled the World, so she wanted to thwart any potential rivals, and so pocket the profit and credit for herself.

Oh, how Ms. Integrity must have chuckled over my failure to reply a year ago when she was fishing for the rights to sell a series from my book. Now we don’t need to tell Brian Deer anything, or say anything about him, Lord must have thought, (and most likely shared the gist with Matthews, Bagenal, and Boulton) as she supervised my years of work being gutted. We’ll just take it.

Ironically, if they’d behaved honestly, with decency and professional ethics, they might have gotten themselves a programme worth watching. But, regarding the wider “So what?” of all this, I offered my opinion to Louisa Compton, Channel 4’s Head of News, Current Affairs, and Sport, who likewise shrugged off her department’s misconduct. I told her:

“It would undermine the economic base of investigative journalism if the product—as in this case—is effectively stolen from the person whose skill and labour lay behind it. It was me, not anyone involved in that programme, who endured the personal cost, and risk (including two defamation lawsuits in which I might have lost my home if I’d been wrong) in bringing forward crucial public interest information pertaining to the safety of children.”

But, of course, there’s more in the damage caused by Channel 4 in its broadcast of false information. Not only will this undermine perceptions of what I’ve reported but will surely inflame attitudes among the many thousands of anti-vaccine campaigners and sceptics who know Wakefield’s paper better than Lord, Matthews, Bagnel, and yes, Dr Offit, and be encouraged in already widespread beliefs among them that Wakefield is a victim of lies.

Plagiarism, moreover, is an offence of dishonesty. Sources characterize it as theft. For years, I’ve had this page at my website where I quote the view of plagiarism.org:

“According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, to ‘plagiarize’ means [their parentheses]:

• to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
• to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
• to commit literary theft
• to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

“In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward.”

On the same page, I further quote plagiarism.org:

“Any ‘facts’ that have been published as the result of individual research are considered the intellectual property of the author.”

Dinah Lord, Eamonn Matthews, and Fiona Bagenal must surely have known the risk they were running. But they couldn’t ethically fill the prime time slot they’d snagged off the back of my years of work without tipping me off to the game they were playing. And they clearly didn’t want that.

So I say they packed their ninety minutes (nearly one third was commercials) with my findings, thought-lines, and judgments on Wakefield (who featured, to my count, about every sixty seconds, from the programme’s start to its finish), and ensured I was neither forewarned nor acknowledged.

As one Tweeter put it online after “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy” was broadcast by Channel 4:

“How could anyone read the word ‘Wakefield’ and not think of Brian Deer?”

They thought of me all right—throughout production—like pickpockets think of free money. I would have welcomed original journalism: adding value and confirmation to my findings about Wakefield. But this is the state of British current affairs TV.

I say the only fraud and conspiracy these slimeballs could substantiate in “The Anti-Vax Conspiracy” was their own collective dishonesty and theft.