Juliette Lewis Quotes
The mainstream media is funded by pharmaceutical companies, so when you have the biggest movie star in the world at the time - Tom Cruise - coming out against anti-depressants and Ritalin... they still brutalize him.
Lewis, Juliette. "Juliette Lewis Defends Tom Cruise, Scientology." Interview by Marlow Stern. The Daily Beast, 25 July 2014.
Until the 20th century almost all American political media were shamelessly and overtly biased—left or right. Political Parties had their own de facto publications much like Fox News became for the Republicans in the 21st century. In the 20th century journalism developed into a profession that evolved standards of objectivity in reporting. That norm then prevailed for about 70 years. With the extreme polarization of the later years of the 29th Century the right wing began to accuse much of the media of a left wing bias, and the media tended to react as Krugman describes in this quotation. The model of having spokespersons for “each side” of an issue works for highly subjective political preferences with a two party system, but where it broke down is with scientific and technical issues. On these, there often really are not two scientific points of view, but there is a scientific consensus of the vast majority of scientists and almost all the prestigious and accomplished scientists are in accord. However, there may be some who have a cultural, religious and/or political concern for some science and its implications for society. They in turn find a scientist or two, often one who is unaccomplished and not recognized in the scientific field to argue a different point of view. The media have tended to equate the two and have a “debate” as if there were two sides to the science when there are not. These issues tend to cluster around scientific medical issues involving sex and birth control methods, environment and conservation, evolution, the age of the earth and the method of creation of the universe. The problem is particularly exacerbated by the general scientific illiteracy of the American population and the relatively few journalists who themselves are scientifically literate who can explain scientific issues well.
The immediate trigger for this statement was the Mylan Company’s price increase of 500 percent for Epi-pens which people—frequently children—needed to carry to contact a bad allergic reaction that would other wise put them into anaphylactic shock which could be fatal. One of the reasons the company gave for the increase was that their marketing costs were very high. The practice of paying physicians to use a drug and then give testimonials and pitch the drug had long been controversial, but in 2016 the public learned that the practice was much more widespread than anyone had known. Making the situation worse was the fact that physicians would prescribe the drug for their patients and had no obligation to tell the patient or his/her family that he was being paid by the drug company. The Congress held hearings but did nothing at the time.
Every President in recent times had been distressed with and critical of the press, not no President (or for that matter any senior government official or legislator) has ever used the famous Ibsen phrase enemy of the people or accused the major media outlets of being an enemy of the American citizens or the nation itself--of treason.
Juliette Lake Lewis is an American actress and singer known for her portrayals of offbeat characters, often in films with dark themes. Lewis became an "it girl" of American cinema in the early 1990s, appearing in various independent and arthouse films. Her accolades include a Pasinetti Award, one Academy Award nomination, one Golden Globe nomination, and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
