In recent days, Columbia University’s School of Journalism announced its 2015 Pulitzer Prize winners, and the list contained many of the usual suspects.

The New York Times picked up a couple more awards for a political corruption story, Ebola coverage and international reportage; The Wall Street Journal won for an investigative hit piece against healthcare providers who manipulate Medicare; the Los Angeles Times won for reporting how the state’s extreme drought has affected the “human condition”; a smaller South Carolina paper won a prize for reporting violence against women; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch picked up a Pulitzer for photography during the Ferguson riots; some guy won the Poetry Pulitzer for revealing the “scope of African-American experience” through poems that drew from “slave narratives.”

And so forth. In other words, these mainstream papers “went after” stories where reporters and editors had already decided the outcome, and as usual, Columbia University rewarded their pre-conceived orthodoxy as members of the journalistic “cool kids club.”

Dr. Oz no longer a “cool kid”

Why does this matter? Because it helps explain how a man like Dr. Oz could be so savagely attacked by a media so willing to pile on this suddenly not-so-cool kid without bothering to actually investigate the charges being made against him and, more importantly, by whom: When you’re out of “the club,” the cool kids have already decided you must be guilty as charged because that sounds about right.

As noted by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), a non-profit organization advocating for more openness in the food industry, recent hit pieces against Dr. Mehmet Oz, host of a popular daytime television program that often focuses on bogus conventional health treatments and alternative medicine choices, were perpetrated willingly by a mainstream media too trusting of “establishment” medical sources, most likely because Dr. Oz doesn’t toe the cool club line. Continue reading →