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Scoop on Lilly scoop gets scooped

By Mark Obbie

The Eli Lilly settlement-talks story just got weirder. When I first saw Katherine Eban's story at Portfolio.com on the making of this story by the Times' Alex Berenson -- Eban reported that "a pharmaceutical consultant" told her that a misdirected e-mail dropped the blockbuster story into Berenson's lap -- I didn't have anything profound to add to the discussion. Seemed to me that Berenson did what any reporter would do when inadvertently let in on a big secret: He checked it out and he wrote it up. One reporter-turned-flack faulted Berenson for failing to disclose the supposed source of his scoop. But I took Berenson at his word that his sources, as he put it in his third graf, were "several people involved in the investigation" who "confirmed the settlement discussions." That meant, I assumed, that even if the story started with an e-mail meant for one of the attorneys in the case (conveniently also named Berenson), reporter Berenson didn't just run with it. He spoke to people, with or without disclosing how he'd been tipped, and ran with the story once it was confirmed by multiple sources. No controversy there.Except that I and everyone else who took the Portfolio story at face value now have to wonder if the story was true. Two lawyers blogging at Drug and Device Law report that Berenson now denies the e-mail prompted his story. I've e-mailed Berenson to confirm. I've also asked Eban for comment. No longer sure what or whom to believe, I'll simply draw the obvious lesson from all this:  Relying on an anonymously sourced story to shed light on the source for an anonymously sourced story can yield predictably squishy results.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on February 07, 2008 (boomark / email).