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The paper's Op-Ed pages have long been a platform for political assassination. But their latest target is a rival paper that is competing for a Pulitzer Prize.
Apr 6, 2002 | At 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon the sounds of champagne bottles popping open will be heard in a select number of newsrooms across the country as the winners of the newspaper industry's most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize, are officially announced. While the list of finalists is supposed to remain secret until the winners are declared, word always leaks out in advance. This year is no exception; among the reported Pulitzer finalists in the investigative reporting category is "Uninformed Consent," a six-part series that ran in the Seattle Times during March 2001. The report, written by Duff Wilson and David Heath, alleged that during the 1980s a number of patients at Seattle's prestigious Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle (aka the Hutch) died while undergoing experimental bone-marrow transplation, and that patients were not informed of the clinical trials' risks or of the center's financial interest in those treatments. The series was years in the making and was based on an exhaustive review of 10,000 pages of documents as well as 100 interviews, and was overseen by an independent expert in bone-marrow medicine who reviewed it for accuracy. "Uninformed Consent" has already picked up scores of elite journalism prizes in the past few months, including a George Polk Award, a Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting presented by Harvard's Shorenstein Center, and the Newspaper Guild's Heywood Broun Award.
Up until three weeks ago the series seemed to be a Pulitzer front-runner as well. But that changed on March 19, when Laura Landro, an assistant managing editor for the Wall Street Journal, penned a blunt critique of "Uninformed Consent" for the Journal's Op-Ed page. Titled "Good Medicine, Bad Journalism," the piece complained that the Seattle Times series was guilty of "gotcha" journalism and that the series' central allegation was "fundamentally false."
A cancer survivor who was treated at the Hutch 10 years ago and wrote about her experience in the book "Survivor: Taking Control of Your Fight Against Cancer," Landro lashed into "Uninformed Consent": "Rather than racking up prizes, it should be used as a textbook case on how the media can convey biased and misleading information about biomedical research. It left out crucial facts, distorted others and ignored everything that didn't fit its sensational thesis."
At first glance the column appeared to be a welcome break from today's media norm, where journalists, afraid of offending colleagues, are reluctant to critique one another's work by name, especially work as widely praised as "Uninformed Consent." A closer reading, though, reveals Landro's criticism was mostly hollow, and she seemed more intent on using the Wall Street Journal's influential Op-Ed pages to settle a personal score.
Even more startling was the fact that the broadside came an entire year after the Seattle Times series ran, but just weeks before the Pulitzer's 16 judges would make their final decisions. The Journal column appeared to be an unprecedented attempt to step in and derail a Pulitzer finalist.
Media observers point out that Landro failed to sufficiently back up her explosive charges. "There's no evidence given by Landro or the Journal that indicates any part of the Times series was 'fundamentally false,'" noted Sanjay Bhatt, a medical writer for the Palm Beach Post, and a board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists. (The association itself has taken no official position on the controversy.) "The Journal violated a basic journalistic principle: Show me, don't tell me."
Landro and the Journal have also come under fire for neglecting to inform readers of the full extent of her relationship with the Seattle medical center. As she acknowledged in her column, Landro was treated at the Hutch in 1992. But what she didn't reveal was that she and her husband created the Laura Landro Salomon Endowment Fund for the Transplantation Biology Program at the medical center, that they have continued to make generous donations to the center and that proceeds from her book go to the Hutch. "Laura didn't feel it had any relevance, and neither did the Op-Ed page," Wall Street Journal spokesman Steve Goldstein told Salon. That's curious, because when Landro first wrote a letter to the Seattle Times last year protesting "Uninformed Consent," she noted, "I am writing as a former patient [and] financial donor to the Hutch."
Defending his paper, Seattle Times executive editor Michael R. Fancher raised the obvious points of Landro's allegiance. "Laura Landro owes her life to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Unfortunately, Ms. Landro is unable to separate her own experience as a patient from her duties as a journalist," wrote Fancher in the pages of his own paper.
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