Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And now for a few of your letters. Our report on conflicts of interest in medical research and medical journals prompted several letters like this one from John Cartsonis, a family physician in Phoenix, Arizona. He wrote: "I really appreciated your excellent report on drug companies and their stealth marketing to physicians and the public. I'll use a transcript of this piece to dissuade my department from accepting drug company research money." And this from Joy Overstreet of Vancouver, Washington. "I saw this kind of industry-funded and vetted 'research' in the early '80s when I was writing a dissertation on federal nutrition and tobacco policies. How innocent that now seems compared to the seemingly inextricable webs between the drug companies, researchers, physicians, PR flacks and medical journals."
BOB GARFIELD: And we received a correction of sorts from Lynn Howard Ehrle of the National Association for Public Health Policy. He writes that Dr. Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal when I interviewed him for the story, left that job on July 30th. Quote, "After a long career editorializing against conflicts of interest, Smith now assumes the post of chief executive officer of United Health Group's new European Division." Ehrle notes that UHG, with sales of about 28 billion dollars in the United States, quote, "now hopes to turn a few quid at the expense of Britain's Public Health Service, and has hired Simon Stevens, Prime Minister Blair's health minister, to oversee the operation." "This power play," Early writes, "underscores the continuing slide down a very slippery slope, aptly described as the corporatization of medicine and the commodification of human life."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And this update: We've covered the New York Times's examination of its own coverage in the run up to war. We've also noted that the Washington Post buried some of its most critical and prescient stories, many by Walter Pincus, in its back pages. On Thursday, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz anatomized his paper's coverage prior to the invasion of Iraq and came to similar conclusions. Kurtz quotes executive editor Len Downey who said "We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."
BOB GARFIELD: Keep writing to us at onthemedia@wnyc.org, and don't forget to tell us where you live and how to pronounce your name. [MUSIC]