Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dr. Frans Leenen thought his professional reputationhad been left in tatters when the CBC broadcast a pub-lic affairs program on the use of calcium-channel blockers in 1996. Four years later, the CBC knows exactly how he felt. In a blistering judgement released Apr. 20, Mr. Justice J.D. Cunningham of the Ontario Superior Court found the fifth es-tate guilty of acting with malice against the Ottawa hyperten-sion specialist. He ordered the CBC to pay Leenen $950 000 in general, ag-gravated and punitive damages, plus his legal costs. Richard Dearden, one of the Ottawa lawyers who has repre-sented Leenen since his suit was launched in 1996, says those costs will total more than $1 million. Leenen now has the dubious dis-tinction of being part of Canadian le-gal history. “This is the largest [defamation] award against the media in the history of the country, ” says a jubilant Dearden. In the end, the hour-long broadcast may cost the CBC up to $5 million be-cause of the Leenen ruling and an ear-lier judgement in favour of Toronto cardiologist Martin Myers, who was awarded $200 000 for defamation last November.1 The CBC must also pay his costs. The hour-long TV program dealt with the safety of a calcium-channel blocker, nifedipine. Since there was ev-idence that its short-acting version posed a risk to patients, there were concerns that the long-acting version, which had been introduced in 1992, might also be dangerous. Leenen, who chaired the Health Protection Branch’s ad hoc advisory committee reviewing CCBs, had told the committee “one cannot assume that the long acting [products] are safe ” and “it is critical to get outcome studies on the long-acting agents.” However, Cunningham said the CBC never portrayed Lee-nen’s views fairly. Instead, it created “the innuendo that Dr. Leenen supported the prescribing of killer drugs.” Cunningham summarized the fifth estate’s presentation in 2 searing lines. "In order to portray [Leenen] in the role of the ‘bad guy ’ and in order to disparage his views, the CBC took an eminent research scientist, whom they knew to be a person of high integrity and reputation, and presented him as a devious, dishonest, bumbling fool in order to advance the story line.... This was sensational journalism of the worst sort and should serve as an embarrassment to this so-called ‘flagship ’ investigative program.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.442 | 0.296 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".