Random blog posts about research in political communication, how people learn or don't learn from the media, why it all matters -- plus other stuff that interests me. It's my blog, after all. I can do what I want.
I need a corporate ghostwriter for my academic work.
That seems to be what's happening in medical journals, according to today's New York Times story, and there's a growing backlash among lawmakers and journal editors. Why? According to the Times lede:
The scientific integrity of medical research has been clouded in recent years by articles that were drafted by drug company-sponsored ghostwriters and then passed off as the work of independent academic authors.
That says it all.
We used to trust peer-reviewed journals, especially the big medical journals, to get it right. But of late, the big pharmaceutical/medical companies are cooking the data. Never trusted them, but I did trust university medical researchers. Apparently that trust was misplaced too.
How this affects what people know is obvious. Much of what we learn about medical breakthroughs, testing, new products, new drugs, comes through a news media filter from the academic journals. There's something magical about the New England Journal of Medicine -- so magical, it seems, that corporations and sleazy academics team up to have corporate hacks ghostwrite academic research.
Which, apparently, I need. Get more publications that way, or at least grant money.
A NYT story on passalong pr (my term). It goes like this. Coal producers and power companies have a trade group that hires a lobbying firm that hires a different lobbying firm that has a brainiac staffer who sends fake letters to lawmakers pretending that they're from nonprofit groups opposed to climate change laws. The brainiac gets fired, we're told, thus absolving anyone else of responsibility. So you pr guys out there, remember to hire someone to hire someone who then gets some low-level schmuck to fake stuff and then fall on his or her sword. Plausible deniability is a wonderful thing, especially when you make stuff up in order to persuade people.
More PR -- Kinda
PR, or lobbying, or trying to influence opinion, whatever it's called there's also a good story about pharmaceutical company hiring ghostwriters to gin up fake research reviews to say good things about their hormone replacement therapy. This is about as bad as it gets in academe, faking research or at least faking a review of the research. It came out as part of a lawsuit.
Third Person Effect and Driving While Yakking
Summit coming soon on driving while distracted, the new phrase to describe talking or texting on that annoying cell phone while trying not to kill someone while driving.
So how the heck do I work the third-person effect in all this? First, a brief definition: The third-person effect means we think media content doesn't affect us, but it does affect others. In a way this is reported in a story today about the potential of new laws aimed to stopping people from driving while, yup, distracted. Deep in the story, a survey by AAA that found "58 percent of drivers consider other motorists talking on a cellphone to be a very serious threat" and 87 percent think texting is dangerous. But ... and here's the third-person ... 67 percent said they had yakked on a phone while driving, and 21 percent had texted. Sheesh. To summarize, do as I say, not as I do.
A Story NOT from the NYTimes
Okay, the stuff above was drawn from today's NYTimes so I feel obligated to draw something from another source just so I can pretend I'm a balanced, reasoned, Renaissance kind of guy. In this one, it kinda sums up the military's relationship with social networking. This piece here says that while the Marines have banned Twitter and Facebook and other sites for one year, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will continue to Tweet, thank you very much. Wall Street Journal version here. Below, a video version of the story:
