Big Media Neglects to Mention Drug Conflicts

Some of the nation's most important pharmaceutical beat journalists are bad at revealing the conflicts of interest that their sources have when they talk about drugs, according to a Columbia Journalism Review article by Merrill Goozner. The story will appear here (it's not currently online) but for an advance peak, click here.

Goozner alleges that reporters routinely rely on doctors and researchers who have taken drug company money either as consultants or researchers. The papers then fail to mention that -- or bother to check -- in the stories they publish.

Reporters with conflicted sources include Melinda Beck of the WSJ, who wrote a column about the benefits of Vitamin D without mentioning that a prominent source in that article was president of a non-profit whose major funder was a maker of Vitamin D.

Also on Goozner's hit list: Gina Kolata of the New York Times, who reported that smokers' lives could be saved by giving them earlier lung scans but neglected to mention that the non-profit saying that was wholly funded by a tobacco company (the Times later printed a corrective).

Others cited for not following the Association of Healthcare Journalists' No.1 rule include Steven Sternberg of USA Today, David Brown of the Washington Post, Julie Steenhuysen of Reuters, Hilary Hylton of Time, and Melissa Healy of the Los Angeles Times.

Goozner concludes by citing a study that says of 170 stories about medical studies, 39 percent contained sources whose conflicts of interest were not revealed to readers.