As we’ve observed here before, John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel apparently missed the memo on the death of print and the dwindling opportunities for investigative reporting.
So he continues to go to work, chase documents, make calls, and produce remarkable stories that any one of us could have done–but didn’t.
The last time we shifted our focus up to the Great Lakes, Fauber was telling a charming tale about a physician who collected more than $20 million in patent royalties from Medtronic–some of it while editing a journal in which favorable studies about Medtronic’s products appeared regularly.
Fauber is now raking up further muck with a story about physicians’ financial disclosures to medical journals. Earlier this year, Fauber reports, a cancer specialist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health co-authored a paper on a radiation system developed at the university. The journal said the researcher had reported no conflicts of interest.
But Fauber reports that the researcher had told the university that he would make more than $20,000 in 2008 working for the company that sold the radiation system, and that he held options on company stock.
Fauber mined university disclosures and medical journal articles to come up with “at least nine UW physicians whose conflicts listed on financial disclosures to the university did not match what was revealed to the medical world in their published articles.”
Various editors and others told Fauber that journals operated on the “honor system,” or that there were too many authors for editors to do some checking of their own to be sure financial interests were being disclosed. They talk as if maintaining the integrity of published research were not too terribly important. Nice if you can manage it, but, hey, who’s got the time?
I’m tempted to spout my opinions about all of this, even though that isn’t my role here. My job is to say a word about Fauber’s story, not about medical conflicts of interest. But, dammit, Fauber’s story makes me mad.
And isn’t that what it was supposed to do?
There’s nothing argumentative here, no air of righteous indignation. (If you’re feeling that, it’s coming from me, not Fauber.) And that’s as it should be. The headline writer captured Fauber’s findings perfectly: “Physicians’ disclosures to UW, journals inconsistent.”
Inconsistent. Beautifully understated.
Fauber is a prime example of what a much-maligned and perverted television slogan is supposed to mean: We report, you decide.
Fauber reports, we decide–or get mad, or get even, or use the information however we like. Fauber himself just gets going on his next piece.
He’s done about a dozen of these stories, listed on the paper’s website under the series title, Side Effects.
The Journal Sentinel won a Pulitzer in 2008 for an investigation of improprieties in local pensions, and again in 2010 for an expose of Wisconsin’s child-care subsidy system. It was also a finalist in 2010 for a separate story on invasive creatures in the Great Lakes, and a finalist in 2009 for a series called “Chemical Fallout.”
What the hell is going on up there?
Fauber may be the next to win the prize. In the meantime, read his stories, be inspired, and do the same thing in your town. Your editors probably haven’t seen Fauber’s work, way up there in Milwaukee, and so you will look brilliant.
Just do it before he gets his Pulitzer.
– Paul Raeburn
Leave a Reply