Journalism Education & NPF’s Upcoming Cancer Program

by Bob Meyers 0 comments

I was called the other day by reporter Christopher Weaver of Kaiser Health News. He was doing a story for NPR's Health Blog, Shots, about a dustup in the blogosphere over our upcoming October program on cancer issues, which is underwritten by Pfizer Inc. The cause of the dust-up: we take corporate money to support some of our work. True. Newspapers take ads; TV stations air commercials. Nobody touches the content of our program, nobody dictates content or journalist selection, and nobody ever will. We talked for about half an hour, and I think his resulting piece is very good.

Mr. Weaver got an important point exactly right – the appearance of a conflict of interest (taking outside money) is not the same thing as an actual conflict of interest (fronting for an invisible controller). Nobody pushes us around. We have all kinds of firewalls in place, and a 35-year old reputation to maintain. We go for transparency at every turn: the people concerned about our taking corporate money for this cancer program know about it – gulp – because we make it a part of the public record. Further, with this as with other programs, we post the topics we select as soon as we can (this year programs director Linda Streitfeld describes the topics in a video); we list the names and affiliations of the speakers as soon as they are official. We list every outside source of revenue for a program, from for-profits or non-profits. We’ve done that since I got here in 1993. This issue arose last year, too, because the same people concerned today were concerned then, and it was quite a firestorm. Here’s the funny thing: the publicity helped increase the number of high-caliber applications we received. Who wouldda thunk it?

Bottom line: we are deeply proud of the talented and probing journalists who attend our on-the-record programs, who ask pointed questions which educate themselves and their colleagues. We will never disappoint them and we will strive to continue serving the journalism community as it – and we – evolve in the 21st century.