Wordblog

The furore over the comment by James Watson, the Nobel prize for medicine winner who was one of the discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, is turning into a debate over free speech.

And the part journalists played in turning an injudicious remark into an international story that has disgraced a leading scientists is coming under scrutiny too.

The controversial passage in an book-promoting interview in the Sunday Times magazine last week, came 3,500 words into a 4,000 word interview. It read:

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

According to a two-page spread in the Observer today, the ST magazine staff thought it was a news story and passed it on to the news desk. They declined it on the grounds that Watson had said such things in the past. And there the story might have rested if the Independent had not picked it up and turned it into Wednesday’s front page lead.

In effect, Simon Kelner’s Independent is accused of sensationalism (my word, not the Observer’s) that promoted the comment of a maverick scientists known for his off-the-cuff remarks into much more than it deserved to be. Meetings he was to address in the UK were called off and he returned to the US to try to save his job.

Also in the Observer, Henry Porter takes up the issue, writing:

Watson’s views about the intelligence of Africans, let slip absentmindedly in an interview, caused deep offence, yet there was also something self-serving about the people screaming ‘racist!’ at this elderly loon. Compare Livingstone’s reaction with his support of extremist clerics from the Middle East and you begin to yearn for some consistency in his outrage.

The other part of my reservation was expressed by Colin Blakemore, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford, who said: ‘Jim Watson is well-known for being provocative and politically incorrect. But it would be a sad world if such a distinguished scientist was silenced because of his more unpalatable views.’

As Porter says: “Free speech is about the communication of the human experience. Without it, we are diminished: we put our minds in neutral and let others think for us.”

As journalists we should be reflecting on the issues of science, ethics, free speech and the way two editorial decisions — at the Sunday Times and the Independent — have shaped the controversy.