TV-hospital relationships very cozy

Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medical reporting program in the graduate school of journalism at City University of New York, and a contributing editor of Columbia Journalism Review, investigates “the epidemic” of “TV-hospital partnerships” in America. Lieberman uncovers for CJR some major television stations that don’t disclose the existence or details of their cozy relationships with hospitals. She says, “The tremendous investment being made to devise fair and useful health care metrics may well be wasted because television’s complicity in hospital branding activities will ultimately overwhelm those efforts.”