How Corrupt is Malcolm Gladwell?
Malcolm Gladwell is an influential New Yorker writer, the author of two best-sellers, "The Tipping Point" and “Blink.” In January the NYer published a Gladwell piece called "Open Secrets," a convoluted defense of Jeff Skilling and his fellow Enron execs. Joe Nocera of the New York Times expressed surprise that the renowned Gladwell could write something so inaccurate and slanted.
"Already 'Open Secrets' has been embraced by those who argue that the Enron prosecutions were an effort to 'criminalize' what amounted to flawed business decisions," wrote Nocera. "The efforts to weaken Sarbanes-Oxley are also rooted in the idea that the country overreacted to Enron and the other corporate scandals. In effect, the central defense argument -that Enron didn't really do anything illegal- has been given new life by Mr. Gladwell. And it isn't remotely true."
It should come as no surprise that Malcolm Gladwell is a corporate shill. In 1997 the New Yorker published his paean to hormone replacement therapy, “The Estrogen Question: How Wrong is Dr. Susan Love?,” in which Gladwell derided Love’s warning that HRT could cause breast cancer. (Love, a distinguished clinician and UCLA professor, had been publicizing The Nurse’s Health Study finding that women taking Wyeth’s Prempro had a higher rate of breast cancer.) Gladwell’s piece culminated in a plug for Eli Lilly’s new drug Raloxifene, which was about to be marketed as Evista. “Before very long,” wrote Gladwell, “women worried about raising their breast-cancer risk will have the option of taking a different kind of hormone that doesn’t affect their breasts at all —or that may even protect against breast cancer.”