George Seldes, In Fact, 1940-1950. brasscheck.com: “In 1940, Seldes began publishing In Fact, a 4-page newsletter devoted to press criticism and investigative reporting. He subtitled the weekly ‘An Antidote to Falsehoods in the Daily Press.’ In the January 13, 1941 issue of In Fact, Seldes published his first cigarette story: a report about the 1938 study by Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University that showed that heavy cigarette-smoking severely limited one’s life span.”
November 4, 1905
The Patent Medicine Conspiracy Against Freedom of the Press
Mark Sullivan, The Patent Medicine Conspiracy Against Freedom of the Press. Collier’s, 4 November 1905. “In the Lower House of the Massachusetts Legislature one day last March [1905] there was a debate which lasted one whole afternoon and engaged some twenty speakers, on a bill providing that every bottle of patent medicine sold in the State should bear a label stating the contents of the bottle…. The debate at times was dramatic–a member from Salem told of a young woman of his acquaintance now in an institution for inebriates as the end of an incident which began with patent medicine dosing for a harmless ill….In short, the debate was interesting and important–the two qualities which invariably ensure to any event big headlines in the daily newspapers. But that debate was not celebrated by big headlines, nor any headlines at all…. Now why? Why was this one subject tabooed?”