Ghost management at work
Uncovering the behind-the-scenes strategy to influence medicine
Raise your hand if you have never been puzzled by false, misleading, or contradictory information on health care and medicine. These are recurring phenomena in our days, and as critical thinkers have long realized, the biggest players in this game are not always the "usual suspects" only. Governments, healthcare stakeholders, and pharmaceutical companies spend vast resources to downplay risks of medical intervention, and to selectively produce ignorance or uncertainty. How does this work? We believe that the most promising framework to make sense of the complexity is the "ghost management" approach. It's defined as the systematic behind-the-scenes efforts and strategies to shape knowledge, ideas and narratives. Ghost management influence experts by nurturing conflicts of interest, capture regulation and policymakers, and shape media and culture.
Re-Check is part of the Ghost Management Research Project with the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. This project was awarded a three-year research grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian federal funding agency that promotes and supports research and training in the humanities and social sciences. An additional grant was provided by the Joint Initiative for Digital Citizen Research. We just published an extensive Guide we wrote with Prof. Marc-André Gagnon on how to apply this framework to in-depth research in the field of health and medicine.
It's in open access, you can download it here.
We presented this Guide in a free online webinar, whose recording is available HERE.
Mastering Health Reporting: new on-demande course
Re-Check partnered with Epistudia to release a on-demand course on Health Reporting. This module, ran by Catherine Riva, Serena Tinari and the epidemiologist Nadia Elia, comes with 240 minutes of tools, tips, and trouble-shooting strategies for journalists and researchers. It is part of a comprehensive learning package on Evidence-based medicine.
You can enroll to the course HERE.
New edition of the GIJN Health Guide
In 2020, Re-Check authored a Health Guide on commission by the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN). It comes with many examples, plenty of hands-on tools and the basics of our methodology, that combines the standards of investigative journalism and of evidence-based medicine (EBM).
Just out: its updated edition. It's in open access.
Lessons from Covid coverage: the media can drive you crazy
We contributed with an original piece to a very interesting book published in Switzerland under the coordinating magic hand of Myret Zaki, an experienced editor and a brilliant mind. The book is in French, but we published on our website the English translation of our piece. You might want to read it and enjoy the bizarre story of the inventor of the never-heard before "Flatten the Curve" and "The Hammer and the Dance". Spoiler alert: he's not a public health expert, not a medical doctor.
Read our piece in English, "Lessons from Covid coverage: the media can drive you crazy": it's available as PDF here.
Follow the science?
We recently joined a public event organized by Linksbündig. That is a network of left-leaning people that work on a reckoning process about what actually happened in the Covid era. "Follow the science?" hosted Aya Velàzquez, a Berlin-based journalist that has published leaked and damning evidence on the disconcerting relationship between the German government and the Robert Koch Institute (RKI).
If you missed them, the RKILeaks are a really important read.
Our German-speaking readers can watch the recording of the event, here, and read a blog post Linksbündig published about Re-Check's work.
New International Advisory Board Member
Last but not least, we are humbled and honored to welcome a new member of Re-Check's International advisory board. Australian Maryanne Demasi is a black belt in digging deeper on public health and medicine. For over a decade, Maryanne worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and for Channel 7.
A former medical scientist, she completed a PhD in Rheumatology and has co-authored several scientific studies. Maryanne was awarded the National Press Club of Australia prize in 2008, 2009 & 2011 for “Excellence in Health Journalism”.
Today she works as a medical investigative journalist, with bylines, among other media, on the British Medical Journal. Her Substack hosts her original investigations in the field of health and medicine. Her work focuses on holding governments and public health authorities to account, investigating medical advice, and remaining independent of Big Pharma. Welcome Maryanne!
Our Substack posts will always be free of charge.
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Excellent work. 🙏