We have come to expect spin from the Bush Administration. We've had, after all, five years of distorted information, beginning with Bush and Cheney's assertions of certainty about Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction and the likelihood of mushroom clouds over Manhattan if the country did not go along with their desire for waging war on Iraq. We learned about payments of tax money to Armstrong Williams to tout the Administration's "No Child Left Behind" Act and letting Jeff Gannon pose as a real journalist in the White House press room to loft easy questions Bush's way to extricate him from any real journalistic questioning that might (on very rare days) take place. We learned about video news releases with paid PR performers distributing the White House's views of itself to local news channels and aired without attribution as though they were independent reporting. We learned about an Iraqi press bought and paid for by the Pentagon, that likely quoted its own stories to show what great progress had been made.
But did you know that medical journals were publishing pharmaceutical companies' paid propaganda under the guise of research? Anna Mathews reported on these activities in a story entitled "At Medical Journals, Writers Paid by Industry Play Big Role: Articles Appear Under Name of Academic Researchers, But They Often Get Help," Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2005, A1. She reports that articles that appear under the names of academic scientists may well have been written entirely by pharmaceutical hired hacks. The companies in some cases even have the articles already written and listed in their database, waiting with a blank for the yet-to-be-selected academic "author." There's a handy graphic in the printed edition--a drug company at the top sends money to an academic research whose name appears on a medical journal article; the drug company also sends money to a communications firm to prepare an article, and the firm hires a medical writer to actually write the article. The drug companies claim that authors "have to sign off on everything" and the result is just "a way to more efficiently make the transition from raw data to finished manuscript."
Like the Bush administration propaganda, this medical propaganda often appears without proper attribution. The Journal article indicates that only 10% of articles on studies sponsored by drug companies disclosed the help of a medical writer. In some cases (perhaps a significant number), the supposed academic researcher has had very little to do with the actual scientific research. Even so, the Journal reporter notes, "[a]cademic scientists can more easily pile up high-profile publications, the main currency of [academic] advancement."
Why is this story only in the Journal? Why isn't it on CNN and other news broadcasts? How can CNN in particular spend hours on end interviewing lawyers in connection with the latest conspicuous crime or airplane crash but find not a minute to devote to exposing this crass misuse of ghostwriting?
