I THINK MY favorite moment at this year's Annual Conference of the National Task Force on CME Provider/Industry Collaboration was when Gardiner Harris, a scientific reporter for The New York Times , said, "But can't the commercial supporter view a presentation and pull funding if they don't approve?" The audience practically roared "No!" back at him.
Yep, sometimes even the mighty Times gets it wrong, as was embarrassingly clear during the Jayson Blair fiasco a while back. Almost as embarrassing as the public outing of Serono's rewarding physicians for prescribing its meds with a trip to a meeting in Cannes, to name just one recent pharma/CME scandal. But when I hear people say that all mainstream media is biased and rife with conflict of interest, it ticks me off as much as it does when they try to tar all pharma/CME providers as complicit in some big drug marketing conspiracy.
There's a big difference between an honest mistake, like that made by Harris — who, to his credit, acknowledged that he still had much to learn about the CME/pharma connection — and the mistakes of Blair, who deliberately plagiarized and falsified information in his published ...
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