[WikiEN-l] BLP, medical information, and media controversy

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/9/21 Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:
> The distinction to be made is between information about a person, and
> popularly reported claims about the person.  It needs to be made clear
> that reporting about a controversy is not identical to reporting about
> the person.  It's disingenuous to pretend that a very public controversy
> doesn't exist. Rather than suppressing anything about the controversy we
> would do better to find the appropriate language for discussing it
> neutrally.
>
> It's much easier to permeate a community with a series of doctrinaire
> rules than with a grasp of the underlying principles.

The key point with that, in general, is "undue weight" - it is easy to
give too much weight to a controversy. In this case, though, the
controversy is so high profile and it is pretty much the only thing
the public know about this person that the due weight is very high.