Should reforms “stamp ghostwriting out” of science communication?

Journalist and journalism professor Charles Seife writes regularly about physics and math, but last month in a Slate commentary he revisited old criticisms of ghostwritten scientific communication—this time not just in the biomedical peer-reviewed literature, but in the general media too.

Seife frames the piece by recalling the old criticisms. He had lots to choose from—for example, the 2010 Science magazine article “Ghostwriters in the medical literature” or the 2011 Forbes.com article “A former pharma ghostwriter speaks out.” But he selected the 2009 PLOS Medicine editorial “Ghostwriting: The dirty little secret of medical publishing that just got bigger.” It condemned “systematic manipulation and abuse of scholarly publishing by the pharmaceutical industry and its commercial partners” and “their attempt to influence the health care decisions of physicians and the general public.” It called for reforms “that will eventually stamp ghostwriting out.”

Seife indicts what he calls industrial ghostwriters as “shadowy figures” smelling faintly of the tobacco companies that, he charges, first conjured them. “Ghostwriters employed by parts of the pharmaceutical industry have been busily tobacconizing the scientific literature,” he declares. “Gaze into the depths of PubMed for long enough, and they will materialize before your eyes, promoting Wyeth’s Prempro, Merck’s Vioxx, and Pfizer’s Neurontin, just to name a few.”

Now ghostwritten science communication has become “endemic” in the popular press, Seife says. “Since the heyday of Big Tobacco, ‘independent’ experts have been drafted into becoming sock puppets—cheerfully putting their names on ghostwritten op-eds and letters to the editor.” He finds them “so prevalent that even an outlet as reputable as STAT can wind up being possessed by ghosts.”

The online news organization STAT covers health, medicine, and scientific discovery from “research labs, hospitals, executive suites, and political campaigns” with the urgency telegraphed by the medical word that it took for its name. The allegation of STAT‘s possession by ghosts arose in large part from the work of HealthNewsReview.org, which recently published the exposé “‘A blow to [STAT‘s] credibility’: MD listed as author of op-ed praising drug reps didn’t write it.”

Tacked on after that headline was this categorizing phrase: “Ghostwriting/PR influence.” The falsely bylined and attributed STAT author told HealthNewsReview.org “unequivocally” that he neither originated the idea for the piece nor composed its first draft. Between 2013 and 2016, he reportedly received more than $300 000 from the drug industry. His op-ed carried no disclosure statement and has since been replaced by this editor’s note: “STAT has retracted the article ‘How pharma sales reps help me be a more up-to-date doctor,’ by Dr. Robert Yapundich. It did not meet our standards.”

“That STAT found a big fat lie in its opinion section,” declares Seife, “is a graphic demonstration that ghosting of articles by industry is not just a problem of the peer-reviewed journals, but of the media as well—and not just outlets devoted to covering health and medicine.” He invoked the 2011 Guardian commentary “The ghostwritten op-ed: An unacceptable deception.”

That commentary noted that such deceptions have become commonly allowed for politicians and other public figures. It asked, “If I’d fail a journalism student for a paper written by another, why does the media give a pass to the rich and powerful?” It argued that whatever may need to be said by analogy about speechwriting for politicians, a false byline on an op-ed “is an outright, direct lie.” To mock ghostwriting’s absurd excesses, the commentary mentioned a famous athlete who complained that his ghostwritten autobiography had misquoted him.

Seife also raised the issue of what the Huffington Post reported in the article “How Monsanto manufactured outrage at chemical cancer classification it expected” and what CBS San Francisco reported under the headline “Monsanto caught ghostwriting Stanford University Hoover Institution fellow’s published work.”

In 2014, Monsanto—the multinational agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation—knew that its weed killer glyphosate, the foundation for the product called Roundup, was to be reviewed by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. Foreseeing that glyphosate would be judged either possibly or probably carcinogenic, Monsanto launched a preemptive public relations campaign in advance of scheduled reconsiderations of the product by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the European Commission.

Documents reportedly show, the Huffington Post charges , that a Hoover Institution fellow—Henry I. Miller—"was provided a draft article to submit to Forbes for publication under his name with no mention of Monsanto’s involvement.” Huffington Post cited the CBS San Francisco piece in adding, “Forbes learned of the deceit last month and severed relations with Miller.” The CBS piece contains a partial copy of the 2015 Forbes post, now removed from Forbes.com, that Miller allegedly didn’t draft but did sign.

The Hoover Institution calls Miller its Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy. He publishes widely, prominently, and often. When he writes for the Wall Street Journal, he’s identified as founding director of the US Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Biotechnology. The New York Times, reporting on the Monsanto glyphosate incident, stipulated that he has published on its opinion page too. In July he had a piece in Nature Biotechnology.

The incident calls to mind a passage from Seife’s cautionary lament. Media outlets “have to have a reckoning,” he prescribed. “They must learn to stop amplifying the messages of front groups and winking at practices like ghostwriting in their editorial pages.” Seife continued as follows:

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Homepage thumbnail photo credit: SlimVirgin, CC BY 3.0