Intended for healthcare professionals

Rapid response to:

Observations Medicine and the Media

Naming names: is there an (unbiased) doctor in the house?

BMJ 2008; 337 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.a930 (Published 23 July 2008) Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a930

Rapid Response:

Independent of what?

Lenzer and Brownlee rightly draw attention to the problem of
undeclared commercial interests which conflict with the public interest
and influence media reporting of medical advances, but there is a danger
that their diagnosis and proposed solution ignore the underlying causes.

Any commentator can exercise deliberate or unwitting bias in
assessing the worth or significance of a health news story, and commercial
interests do not present the only potential conflict. Ideological,
political or religious interests also have the power to corrupt. Any
affiliation, not just a link to a commercial enterprise, can lead to bias,
and almost everybody has some sort of affiliation, so few people are truly
independent. However, the absence or presence of such affiliations does
not prove or disprove bias. The actual, rather than potential,
independence of a commentator depends on qualities that are difficult to
measure, such as personal integrity and expertise, rather than proxies,
such as declarations of ‘no commercial interest’.

More importantly, while efforts to identify conflicts of interest is
important, there is an unhealthy trend towards the demonization of
everybody who is associated with the commercial sector. Commercial
interests are not always corrupting, and much high-quality, honest work is
carried outside universities and other supposedly-independent research
institutions.

But a very major contributor to the current problem is the time
pressure under which journalists have to operate. It is always dangerous
for any journalist to rely on just one commentator for opinion, even if
they do appear on an ‘approved list of independent experts’, but it can
often be difficult to get experts on the phone to express an interesting
and coherent opinion. Ideally, journalists should be able to gain a range
of expert views, allowing them to identify and detect any outlying
opinions that appear to have been influenced by bias, lack of expertise,
etc. It would be far better to encourage more experts to make themselves
available for comment, than to come up with lists of approved sources.

Competing interests:
Both Boyce and Ward have acted as experts in the media on various issues.
The views expressed are our own and do not represent our organisations.

Competing interests: No competing interests

31 July 2008
Tammy L Boyce
Research Fellow Public Health
Bob Ward, Director, Public Policy, Risk Management Solutions Ltd, London, EC3R 8NB
King's Fund, London, W1G 0AN