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Chance not in the News

Medicine and the Media
Whose watching the watchdogs
Lisa M Schwartz, Stephen Woloshin, Roy Moniham
British Medical Journal, 19 November, 2008

There has been a great deal of concern of bias when a researcher is testing the effectiveness of a new drug and has financial support from the company that produces the drug. In this paper the authors say that we should have the same concerns when news writers report the effectiveness of a new drug produced by a company from which they have had financial rewards.

The authors illustrate the ways that news writers are rewarded by drug companies with the following table:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/forwiki/422.jpg

Then they give suggestions how this could be avoided with the following table:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/forwiki/423.jpg