A REPORTER LOOKS BACK IN ANGER

...In another odd phenomenon of pro-corporate tilt, vital issues that do draw prominent press attention somehow become nonissues in the coverage of Presidential campaigns...

...It was also important—and newsworthy—that Hoechst followed two American drug companies, Smith Kline (for Sela-cryn) and Eli Lilly (for Oraflex), in being convicted and trivially fined for withholding information on foreign deaths...

...A longer version of this article appeared in the Fall 1991 issue of Nieman Reports, the journal of the Nie-man Fellowship program at Harvard University...

...He chairs the Fund for Investigative Journalism and is the author of several books, including "At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield...

...In The Washington Post's "Around the Nation" grab-bag column, on page A6, the first item was a yawn for 99 per cent of newspaper readers in an East Coast city: The headline was, Chain Collisions Kill Seven in Fog on California Freeway...

...But in stark contrast with the Sudafed case, in which a drug company was a victim, prominent press attention was denied the story of Merital, in which people were victims of a drug company...

...For what I hope was a good reason, I antagonized leaders of a broad spectrum of industries, including pharmaceutical, medical-device, automobile, oil, natural gas, pipeline, insurance, household appliance, chemical, tire, food, tobacco...

...This was not atypical...

...Why the media cover up corporate crime years, have made [advertising] contracts with between 15,000 and 16,000 newspapers...

...I know the papers will accept it...

...Thus, it was in ignorance of Mental's potential to kill that the FDA approved it, in July 1985, with an inadequate and therefore misleading official labeling...

...to its owner, Pfizer Inc., a major pharmaceutical firm, and to the FDA as well...

...the shopping hints, the how-to-get-a-better-bargain stories," Cerra wrote...

...About a decade ago, in a Washington Monthly article about The Washington Post, where I was a reporter for twenty-nine years, I was described, perhaps accurately, as "the biggest pain in the ass in the office...

...Surely the pleas and the sentences were a significant national and international story...

...The first, from late 1986, involved disclosure of the knowing and willful production and shipment, over a five-year period, of millions of jars of bogus apple juice...

...it was disclosed in a Justice Department press release on a 470-count indictment of Beech-Nut Nutrition, owned by Nestle SA of Switzerland, and two of Beech-Nut's top officers...

...Hundreds of thousands of infants were fed nutritionally deficient formula while Bush and the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] delayed rules requiring testing of infant formula, and thousands of babies and young children suffered the serious and often fatal Reye's syndrome disease while the Administration stonewalled rules to place warning labels on aspirin products linked to Reye's syndrome in children...

...Vice President (or Governor), do you agree with the Surgeon General's advisers that tobacco is as addictive as heroin...

...The chemical cocktail, albeit apparently harmless, went into the mouths of babies whose mothers and fathers had trusted the label on every jar...

...However subtly the system of rewards and punishment operates in newsrooms, people learn what kind of reporting is wanted and rewarded...

...On the basis of the survey he concluded that up to 3,000 Americans who had taken the drugs may have died prematurely as a result...

...That's when impersonal crime committed by the large corporation—and morally reprehensible conduct not violative of criminal laws—began to flourish and to inflict vastly greater harm on life, limb, and pocketbook than the traditional offenses...

...Yet Kessler's unused material was good enough and fresh enough to become a major portion of a well-reviewed book...

...By reading the March 1991 Public Citizen Health Research Group Health Letter, I learned that Hoechst and Zapf had agreed to plead guilty...

...Well into the Twentieth Century, much of the press was an appalling swamp of prostitution to corporate power...

...Cerra's experience resonates with Ronald Kessler's at The Washington Post...

...Some reporter-friends I greatly admire don't share my belief that, however subtly, the slant and bias of owners and boards of directors of our best and greatest news organizations significantly influence what stories their news departments cover or do not cover, emphasize or de-emphasize, stay with or abandon, investigate or ignore...

...Bush often boasted of his achievements...

...It's easy to forget how corrupt things once were...

...The media tilt is the net result of a gamut of causes and motives, including bias, boosterism, careerism, cowardice, libel risks, economic imperatives, friendships, ignorance, lack of resources, laziness, protection of news sources, retreats from investigative reporting, stupidity, suppression, survival instincts, and the pro-business orientation of owners and of the managers they hire...

...It is a cheap shot and erroneous to imply that blame for the pro-corporate tilt lies entirely on owners, outside directors, managers, or the economic imperatives of the mass media entities that are themselves big business...

...I am not—and have no right to be—self-righteous...

...no story ran in the newspaper...

...it landed on page one of the financial section...

...Not a word on the report appeared in the news columns of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or The Washington Post...

...As is frequently the case, the breach of trust was not ferreted out by investigative reporters...

...My obviously self-serving explanation is that I became a pain in the ass pushing at the frontiers, and that I got a good deal of grief in return...

...About two weeks before the election, on October 24, Public Citizen called a news conference on Capitol Hill to release a fifty-two-page report...

...both the agreement to plead guilty and the actual pleas and sentences went unreported...

...Association president Frank J. Cheney told an association meeting how to influence the press: "I, inside of the last two Morton Mintz left The Washington Post in 1988...

...In 1981, in his very first days in the White House, Ronald Reagan signed an executive order creating the President's Task Force on Regulatory Relief and designating Vice President George Bush as chairman...

...Reporters do not deserve to get off so easily...

...Frances Cerra, an outstanding consumer investigative reporter who joined The Times after winning a George Polk award at Newsday, upheld Nader...

...Hoechst's misconduct—violation of FDA regulations requiring prompt reporting of any serious and unexpected, or unexpectedly severe, adverse drug reactions—was nailed down at a hearing of a House Government Operations Subcommittee led by Representative Ted Weiss, a New York Democrat...

...In 1989, Dr...

...These friends say it would be unusual for them and many other colleagues even to know who the directors are...

...Merital was an occasionally lethal prescription antidepressant formerly marketed in more than eighty countries...

...How else to explain why major areas of news are left unfurrowed, important stories are unassigned, safe stories get play, sensitive stories are tortured or killed...

...Rainer Zapf, of Frankfurt, Germany, for withholding from the FDA information on two Merital users who died before the agency approved the drug...

...But it would be a grievous error to conclude that the press no longer has a pro-corporate tilt or that its closets hold no more skeletons...

...She finally resigned in 1983...

...He replied with a dismissal of the quoted phrase as my spin on what "the editors of this newspaper, honestly and with principle, call editing...

...the four-column headline, on page A3, was, 3,000 may have died from two heart drugs...

...show that the second known strut fracture occurred on July 15, 1979...

...Rosenthal denounced the criticism as "loony...

...In a letter on another topic, I mentioned to Executive Editor Ben Bradlee that I had endured many such episodes of "morale-crushing discouragement and nibblings to death...

...But often enough to make the grief worthwhile, editors helped me break through, and owners and managers—including Ben Bradlee—supported us...

...Early this year, some nut put cyanide in over-the-counter Sudafed cold capsules in Washington State...

...At the time, the Proprietary Association of America was spending about $40 million a year on newspaper advertising, much of it for quack medications, good or bad, for man or beast...

...In the early 1980s, he did a pathbreaking series on the life-insurance industry...

...The prescribing instructions warned that the drug could cause hemolytic anemia, but not that the anemia could kill...

...Given the present state of the economy, that's understandable...

...He later resigned...

...Burroughs Wellcome immediately recalled the product nationwide...

...It drew five paragraphs on page B3 of The Wall Street Journal—not much, but something...

...This definition has been ludicrously inadequate for well over a century—since the advent of the Industrial Revolution...

...The House hearing was thinly covered, and the stories on it drew predictably little prominence or attention...

...Every last one of us having been a baby, the indictment of the country's second-largest baby-food supplier might have been assumed to be worthy of page one...

...Public Citizen charged that the task force had "undermined a system of health and safety standards that has taken America over eighty years to achieve...

...These stories, and others like them, never earned me any compliments...

...I have carried this through and know it is a success...

...Attorney Paul A. Weissman, made it the first foreign drug manufacturer to be successfully prosecuted for failing to provide the FDA with reports of adverse drug reactions occurring outside the United States...

...Would the publisher or editors of The Times enjoy defending the proposition that this criminal case did not deserve better from the newspaper with a daily page-one ear preposterously bragging, All the News That's Fit to Print...

...It was not so assessed by senior editors of the three papers I read regularly, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal...

...The outstanding areas I have in mind are regulatory agencies...

...In newsrooms, the pro-corporate tilt is more often sensed than seen...

...Desensitization breeds indifference not only to news of that corporate misconduct which directly and profoundly affects life, safety, health, and the environment, but also to other important areas of news that may superficially seem unrelated...

...A defect caused a strut, a key component, to fracture while it was implanted in the body...

...I had good luck and I am damn thankful...

...Rightly, the story drew prominent press attention everywhere...

...Cincinnati, and Louisville in 1975 and was traced by the Environmental Protection Agency to an FMC plant in South Charleston, West Virginia, on the south bank of the Kanawha River, which flows into the Ohio River...

...If you agree, will you target tobacco in your war on drugs and support proposed legislation to ban tobacco advertising and promotion...

...Physician's Weekly called the trial a "sudden-death debacle...

...In January 1986, Hoechst halted sales of the drug worldwide because of rising incidence of the disease in users...

...In the Columbia Journalism Review last year, Ralph Nader criticized consumer coverage by The New York Times...

...The fourth item, judged to merit only a small headline, Chemical Dumping Agreement, said in its entirety: "One of the nation's largest machinery and chemical manufacturers, the FMC Corporation, was fined $35,000 and agreed to pay $1 million into an environmental trust fund after it pleaded guilty to charges of concealing the secret dumping of a deadly chemical into West Virginia and Ohio waterways...

...When the manufacturer, Hoechst AG, a German-based multinational, asked the U.S...

...Finally, it became a highly compressed single article, published in a typographically repellent format...

...Public Citizen, the public-interest organization founded by Ralph Nader, did investigate the task force and Bush's leadership of it...

...Yet the press constantly downplays serious corporate misconduct...

...Nor have I heard of reporters at the White House asking President Bush a question like: "Mr...

...The chemical, carbon tetrachloride, showed up in municipal water supplies in Huntington, West Virginia...

...Not until another newspaper persuaded a Federal judge to unseal the documents on which my series was based did I get a go-ahead...

...Shiley notified the FDA by phone on March 7,1980, i.e., six months later...

...One example emerged from a year's investigation of the most lethal defective medical device in American history: at the time, it was known to have failed in, and caused the deaths of, at least 250 persons...

...In an irrational, hellish process lasting more than three years, he was directed to cut the series from ten parts to six, then to three...

...For example, a subcommittee chronology said: "Records provided by Shiley...

...An estimated 190,000 Americans took the drug in the six months in which it was sold in the United States...

...Queried by the EPA, the firm said it was dumping only 100 pounds of the chemical into the Kanawha River each day, when its records, later obtained by the EPA, disclosed that more than 3,000 pounds were being dumped into the river daily...

...I don't even have an ulcer...

...This is what I have in every contract I make: Tt is hereby agreed that should your State or the United States Government pass any law that would interfere with or prevent the sale of proprietary medicines, this contract shall become void...

...Overwhelmingly, it's in terms of the personally inflicted violent offenses that have beset us since the first cave man picked up a club—murder, rape, robbery...

...Food and Drug Administration to approve Merital for sale in the United States, it knew that at least seventeen persons on the drug in other countries had died of hemolytic anemia...

...On July 26, 1989, the story appeared in Investor's Daily...

...It's also a shame...

...But I also believe that the realistic working assumption must be that even if they don't intend to, boards, owners, and the senior managers they hire send clear but generally unadmitted and undiscussed signals, particularly to editors and to fearful and on-the-make reporters...

...A Washington Post reporter attended the hearing...

...These videos are supplied free of charge by pharmaceutical manufacturers...

...Such a sequence raised the possibility of an industry-wide pattern...

...The medicines were Bristol-Myers's Enkaid and 3M Riker's Tambocor...

...Hoechst took the easy way out: It didn't report the fatalities...

...Today, it is nearly inconceivable that the head of the Nonprescription Drug Manufacturers Association could strike, or even try to strike, deals like Cheney's, let alone dare to brag about them...

...the other was a French patient whose death had been reported to Hoechst in March 1984...

...One of the users was the Italian woman...

...Examples of awesome press insensi-tivity—numbness—to horrendous corporate breaches of trust are all over the place...

...The fact is that The Times never wanted stories critical of consumer treatment by major corporations," she said in a letter to the Review...

...LILCO "silenced reporters like me," she wrote...

...Thousands of reporters represent the general press in Washington...

...For example, Weiss disclosed that Hoechst had learned in February 1981 about an Italian woman who had died of hemolytic anemia probably caused by Merital...

...Hoechst's plea, said Assistant U.S...

...They also learn what kind is unwanted and discouraged— by, say, the editing of hard-hitting stories into mush, burial of page-one stories, consignment of stories about recalls of unsafe consumer products in back pages, and denial of merit-pay increases and promotions...

...It may be conveyed to editors at a daily news conference by silence, or it may take the form of self-censorship...

...It added: "The record is brutal, indeed...

...Capitol Hill and court proceedings that produce highly revealing, important, legally privileged, and otherwise unavailable information...

...The whole process of corrupting the news, where corruption today exists, is less often the deliberate work of men bent on falsehood than a process of drifting before the winds of circumstance, timidity, and self-interest...

...It led to suppression of an important story and her removal from the LILCO beat...

...In 1987, the FDA approved two prescription drugs intended to prevent a particular type of irregular heartbeat...

...I have not heard of a campaign reporter asking a question such as this of George Bush or Michael Dukakis: "Mr...

...It did not appear in The Washington Post...

...I believe Allen's words are still true...

...Other delays "ranged from three weeks to as long as twenty-four months...

...I did a series on these issues, noting along the way the revolving door between the regulators and the regulated, and the political ties of the powerful lawyers who represented the industry...

...And, yes, the newspaper industry...

...Consider this one fact about the electronic press: With no threats or deals, mostly just to economize while deceptively looking good, local television stations, without identifying the source, have regularly been incorporating into newscasts sophisticated video "news" releases that puff potent, often dangerous, prescription drugs...

...People go along to get along, consciously or unconsciously abandoning professional journalistic principles...

...Over and over, the Washington press corps kisses off truly important Congressional hearings...

...Last December 12, the U.S...

...The Washington Post's appeared in the financial section...

...For more than a quarter-century, starting with the baby-deforming drug thalidomide, I was able to do often time-consuming, costly, and (I would like to believe) useful reporting...

...Joel Morganroth, director of cardiac research at the University of Pennsylvania's hospital in Philadelphia, surveyed 1,000 cardiologists who had prescribed the medicines during a nationwide trial...

...It also appeared in The Washington Times...

...Former Executive Editor A.M...

...That last item makes a further point: The pro-corporate tilt is nowhere clearer than in the way the press defines crime...

...Suprol caused kidney failure in more than 300 middle-aged men...

...In The New York Times, however, the filing of the criminal charges got two paragraphs at the bottom of page D4...

...I will limit my case for this proposition to corporate murder, manslaughter, mayhem, and environmental destruction, omitting mainly financial scandals...

...President, was Vice President Quayle speaking for you when he said in North Carolina, in July 1990, that our tobacco exports should be expanded aggressively because Americans are smoking less...

...But I was always far more interested in investigative stories, in seeing, for example, whether skyrocketing insurance rates for malpractice were truly justified...

...Indeed, the press conference sign-up sheets, which I have seen, do not carry the signature of a reporter from any of these most influential newspapers...

...None attended the hearing...

...The second example dates back to November 11, 1980, but I've never been able to forget it because it's so revealing...

...It throws the responsibility on the newspapers...

...On April 29, in Newark, they entered the pleas and received the maximum allowable fines, $202,000 and $2,000, respectively...

...Under Bush's leadership, the task force set into motion severe cutbacks in government protections, almost across the board, against hazards in the marketplace and the workplace...

...In May 1987, the House subcommittee that had investigated Merital held a hearing on Suprol, a needless and expensive prescription painkiller that was used by approximately a half-million Americans...

...At least 40,000 deaths and one million injuries can be traced to the Administration's delay in requiring air bags and automatic safety belts in cars...

...The Associated Press moved a comprehensive story on Morganroth's survey...

...The device was a particular model of the Bjork-Shiley mechanical heart valve...

...There is, I believe, a strange, undetected influence of corporate governance on the system of rewards and punishments in the nation's newsrooms...

...If you disagree, what is your scientific basis for doing so...

...I hung in, was tolerated, and survived...

...The investigation by a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee culminated in an all-day hearing in February 1990, which proved highly embarrassing to the manufacturer, Shiley, Inc...

...Too many reporters don't even try...

...In fact, I was called on the carpet for describing one such lawyer as 'politically connected.' " Cerra came to realize that her new bosses had hired her to answer "the criticism that The Times had been neglecting consumer coverage," and that they "had no interest in my work...

...I don't doubt this...

...Forthright disclosure of the deaths risked FDA disapproval, even though a causal relationship in some of the cases was questionable...

...Yet, subcommittee counsel Daniel W. Sigelman established, Hoechst had delayed reporting the fatality for five-and-a-half years, until June 1986, which was six months after it had stopped selling Merital...

...Here are two...

...Those who attempt serious coverage of corporate governance and misconduct often break through, even when they inflict pain on personal friends of the owners and managers...

...For reasons never made clear, a corporate-scandal series of my own languished for seven months at The Washington Post...

...At least sixty years ago, the historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote, "Editors and reporters find out what pays is to write the sort of news-stories which please the man at the top____They put their jobs first and the truth second...

...In the French case, Chertoff said, Hoechst's own Drug Safety Department had judged it highly probable that Merital had been the cause of death...

...I served as The Times's consumer reporter for six years—from 1974 to 1980— until I was demoted to Long Island reporter after I failed to report enough service stories...

...In addition to exposing the FDA's inexcusably complacent handling of Suprol, chairman Weiss and counsel Sigelman documented the failure of subsidiaries of Johnson & Johnson—the pharmaceutical conglomerate glorified for its intelligent response to the Tylenol poisonings—to make required reports to the agency...

...In May 1988, while the Presidential campaign was heating up, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report in which his expert scientific advisers on tobacco pronounced nicotine to be as addictive as heroin...

...Her investigative reporting of the Long Island Lighting Company's financial fiasco with its Shore-ham nuclear plant became the last straw...

...the White House, and Presidential election campaigns...

...Yet during the 1988 Presidential campaign, so far as I know, no major news organization undertook to probe seriously for the answer to an absolutely elementary question: What had the task force done under Bush...

...Consider an expose in 1905 by Collier's magazine titled "The Patent Medicine Conspiracy Against the Freedom of the Press...

...It is a system that leads inexorably to desensitization...

...Meanwhile, The Washington Post, in a series of elegant promotional ads, congratulated itself on going all-out to provide the voters with all of the information they needed about the Presidential candidates...

...Attorney for New Jersey, Michael Chertoff, issued a comprehensive press release on the filing of criminal misdemeanor charges against Hoechst and its former clinical research director, Dr...

...At The Post, the story was offered by the Justice Department reporter to the national desk, which rejected it...