The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 278 No 7448 p452
21 April 2007

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The Journal Oversight Board (JOB) is an independent body set up to adjudicate in the case of complaints about the editorial content of The Pharmaceutical Journal or the handling of such complaints by its editorial staff. It has investigated the following case.

The complaint The complainant (Mr X) submitted a letter to The Pharmaceutical Journal criticising what he saw as the “pro-evolution” stance of a column “Evolution in the balance” (PJ, 3 March 2007, p254) by “Onlooker”. The managing editor of The Journal decided not to publish the letter on the grounds that he believed it would take The Journal’s correspondence columns “in a direction that would be completely inappropriate for a professional pharmaceutical journal”. He offered instead to forward the letter to the author of the column. Mr X has described this decision as “intolerable censorship and bigotry” and has argued that is amounts to a curtailment of free speech. He also commented adversely on the accompanying cartoon.

The findings Is Mr X entitled to demand that his letter be published? Decisions about the right of publication in any journal usually lie solely in the hands of the editor of the publication, who must decide what is appropriate and what will interest his or her readership. Correspondents have no right to have their views published, although it is regarded as good practice to publish challenges and corrections, where these are legitimate, and to foster appropriate debate around previous content in the publication.

Was Mr X treated fairly in this instance? It is evident that he profoundly disagreed with what he regarded as the anti-creationist stance in the “Onlooker” column and that he now feels he has been denied the opportunity to respond. That is a charge any editor must take seriously. However, the managing editor of The Journal has argued that he does not want to fill the correspondence columns with a debate over creationism, which he believes would be an inappropriate subject for a professional pharmacy journal.

The question here is whether by publishing the original article, in effect The Journal did initiate that debate itself. Having read the “Onlooker” column in question, we find it hard to see how any reader could conclude that this was starting such a debate. The column is a largely factual account of a row in the United States and it concludes by observing a possible link between political conservatism and creationism. The article does not enter into a debate about the merits or otherwise of creationism and the cartoon does not, in our view, do this either.

The decision On the basis of the above, the JOB has not upheld Mr X’s request to have his letter published. Given the convention in this area that it is the editor who decides what is and is not published, we would have to be satisfied that a reader had been wronged in some way and was being denied a legitimate right of reply for us to make any other recommendation. Even if a reader could argue that a legitimate debate was being suppressed by a refusal to publish a letter, we would be loath to do any more than suggest the editor reconsider his decision, but in this instance we are not convinced that it reaches that threshold.


Journal Oversight Board
3 April 2007