New Publication: Ghost Management at Work: A Practical Guide for the Investigation and Mapping of Health Affairs
by
Catherine Riva – Investigative Journalist, Re-Check.ch
Serena Tinari – Investigative Journalist, Re-Check.ch
Marc-André Gagnon – Associate Professor, SPPA at Carleton University
Members of our research team have published a new set of guidelines for investigative journalists who cover the health and medical fields. This new guide is meant to give journalists the tools to recognize ghost management in the field, and to help them avoid being taken advantage of by pharmaceutical companies and public relations firms who do their best to manipulate the media to further their interests.
Executive Summary
- The health and medicine landscape is complex. Investigating health products and interventions involves navigating a labyrinth of agents, organizations, and diverse systems that operate in the shadows, often influencing journalists’ work.
- Applying the ghost management interpretive framework helps better identify constants within the complexity of issues and conflicts of interest present. It also aids in avoiding significant pitfalls that often turn journalists into mouthpieces for corporate interests.
- The concept of ghost management encompasses all operations conducted behind the scenes by major companies to shape knowledge, scientific discourses, and cultural, political, and media narratives regarding specific health products and interventions, while influencing the entire field of medicine and public health.
- The ghost management interpretive framework identifies seven types of “capture”: scientific capture, regulatory capture, market capture, professional capture, media capture, technological capture, and civil society capture.
- By utilizing a modified version of Jakobson’s communication model, which integrates the different captures associated with ghost management, it becomes possible to systematically analyze and map the mechanisms influencing discourse about the products and interventions under investigation.
- Analyzing and mapping the underlying influences provides tools for journalists eager to conduct rigorous investigations. We hope that these tools will be useful to them in future journalistic pursuits.