PHA-Exchange> The media and their control

[Claudio]

Laurie Garrett, the only reporter to win all three of journalism's big "P
awards (the Peabody, the
Polk and the Pulitzer). The author of two major public health books,
Betrayal of Trust and The Coming Plague:
Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance, she was a science
correspondent at National
Public Radio before joining the science-writing staff of Newsday in 1988.

Garrett resigned from Newsday earlier this year after winning the paper both
the Polk and Peabody
awards. She cited a deteriorating climate for journalism: "All across
America, she wrote, "news
organizations have been devoured by massive corporations -- and allegiance
to stockholders, the
drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps
everything that the
grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions."

Specifically,  the newsroom conditions that allowed her to
travel to Africa and India to report on AIDS, or take six months to report
from the former Soviet
Union, no longer existed. "A 32-part series on the collapse of public health
in the former Soviet
Union?" she said. "I don't know any institution today that would publish
that."

Today, Garrett is Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign
Relations. Her story
"The Next Pandemic?" was published in the July/August issue of Foreign
Affairs, the Council's
bi-monthly magazine.