The Price of Journalistic Fame

When Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980, it was a ground-breaking, defiant act. He wanted to shake journalism out of its lethargy, its tendency to prefer style over substance.

Since buying CNN in the 1990s, Time Warner has transformed it into exactly the kind of garbage Turner was fighting against. There is no better example of this than Dr. Sanjay Gupta (right).

Dr. Gupta trains doctors for Emory University at Grady Hospital, just a mile from CNN’s headquarters. Grady is the South’s leading trauma center. Grady is also a charity hospital. Grady is constantly threatened with closure. Right now a Grady official is going to suburban county meetings, hat in hand, begging them to pay something to keep the place alive, because they need its trauma services and send their own poor there. These officials are laughing in his face.

Pretty good story, huh? But Dr. Sanjay Gupta isn’t touching it, even though similar stories are happening around the country. Emergency room care, his specialty, is an absolute horror story, because poor people must use the same system for primary care. It impacts him directly. Instead, he ran this insipid "Grady’s Anatomy" garbage,  about his heroic multi-ethnic team saving lives. Nothing wrong with it except the whole thing was about the doctors and their problems, not the patients, or the institution.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta gained fame, but lost his soul.

So it goes. To see the rest of last night’s confrontation, click here and then here.

Dr. Gupta emerges from all this as a pretty boy, an Indian-American with nice teeth and regular features who CNN trots out as a corporate speaker and shill. (And have you noticed how every other recent cable news hire has also been a pretty boy, or girl, hired for their looks rather than their intelligence.)

No wonder he was happy to narrate a whack job "fact check" on Michael Moore’s movie "Sicko."  Not
that you can’t criticize Moore’s work, or this movie, which you can.
But Gupta’s "fact check" was, in fact, the same kind of hatchet job CNN had
done three years before on "Fahrenheit 911," and the facts as they
emerged showed that, if anything, the movie understated the case.

Sanjay Gupta won’t do the story in front of him, the story he supposedly lives with every day, which is the continuing collapse of emergency care in the face of a Hippocratic Oath which says you must give care and a government which says let the poor die. Instead he does nice little pieces on cholesterol, and diet drugs, and tells you to eat your vegetables.

He is a perfect example of what is wrong with CNN, and with TV news in general. He is a disgrace to my profession, and no credit to his own. He should either demand to do his job, to expose the reality of medical non-care, or he should quit. Sugarcoating the situation has not worked and will not work. He has been turned into a human placebo, and it’s disgusting.