I have mentioned my journo skills lecture in the past, as a force I had to contend with. Something that sparked an internal struggle in me to accept why blogging is the right tool to convey my stories. I was just not convinced that tip-tapping on my laptop and speculating about what he-said, she-said, was the best way to learn the skills I will need to be a through journalist. But last week was different.
Charlotte, our lecturer, told us she too was sick of us ripping stuff off the wires, tired of us parroting news site editorials and appalled by our endless press release rewrites. Score! (except her speech was not quite as invigorating, still this is what I took from her rants…)Then she presented us with a 25-page piece of research, the entire script of a politician’s rebuttal and a 3rd primary source and told us to find the story. Well, I’m the first to admit this was not done without whinging and moaning at the sheer amount of rubbish one has to go through in order to find the goods, but anyway i got on with it and like to think I went above and beyond the call of duty.
Drugs
The Dr. Roberts 25 pager was a killer. What caught my eye though, was not that fat people no longer just live up North, but the sponsors of the report. This apparently medically-sound and authoritative research, was commissioned by Roche Product Ltd.
Whilst the report told us that people in the Shetland Islands are the fattest in the land and provided a damning verdict on our primary health care (your doctors and nurses), it danced around the issue of assisted weight loss (through medication). However, it provided figures and stats to say that actually, certain types of pills were proven to help patients lose between 5-10% of body weight and that they have beneficial effects on diabetes and cholesterol. It quoted the NICE, the NOF, the BJM, the RCP and a bunch of other letters that have little relevance to you and I. There just wasn’t a real balance to what he was saying, but simply that we do not have enough data to disprove these findings. So this when I decided to retrace my steps and went back to see who had commissioned the report.
Roche aims to improve the health, quality of life and well-being of people in the UK. We do this through our innovative range of diagnostic and pharmaceutical products that focus on the needs of individuals.
Bingo.
When I started digging around, and again I’ll be honest I did this over the one hour we were given, I found that the sponsors clearly had an invested interest in pharmacotherpay. I was ecstatic at this discovery and told Charlotte. She, though, dismissed what I said and told me to write the story. I’ll be honest this left me a bit deflated and feeling a bit silly about about my investigations.
The aftermath
What was to come though, was glory and the respect of my classmates. Jules a friend of mine, had already pointed out that the ‘fat map’ was unquantifiable- which had raised alarm bells earlier- and so I told her about the above. We started looking around and discovered that the report had been dismissed since. Score.
So yeah, I told Charlotte this, and yeah she looked into it and pointed out that it was the ‘Shetland Times’ that were protesting and NOT because Roche had sponsored this. Dammit.
Oh Well. So people were not complaining that this influential piece of research was bias, but more concerned that it made their region look bad. Great. Just Great.
It was not Watergate I’ll admit. But irregardless of my rookie mistakes, I thought I had done something special that afternoon. So much so, that I am ‘tip-tapping’ away on my blog (!) at 7am on a Wednesday morning. And yeah I wrote about how the affluent down south are getting fatter, and yeah, Charlotte was pleased. But I still dispute that what I found that afternoon was the real story.
