I've got a piece up on the website of The Nation about why we should be glad Sanjay Gupta won't be the Surgeon General. Basically, there are aspects of his medical coverage that I don't think are very consistent with what we want in the nation's doctor. A brief excerpt:
And then there was the time Gupta really tried to take a stand--on very weak foundations. Purporting to do a "reality check" on Michael Moore's 2007 film Sicko, a devastating expose of the failings of the American healthcare system, Gupta accused Moore of having "fudged the facts," and yet Gupta was the only one who got anything unequivocally wrong. His report misattributed an incorrect statistic about the Cuban healthcare system to Sicko; in fact, the error was CNN's and Moore had it right all along. In some ways still more disturbingly, when the two went head to head on Larry King Live it was clear Gupta largely agreed with Moore about the systemic problems with US healthcare--and yet he nevertheless put his credibility on the line with a weak hit job on Moore's movie.
After digging into the whole Moore vs. Gupta episode for this piece, I ended up extremely down on Gupta. He took on a talented polemicist without having his facts straight, and so really got it handed to him. Here's the video; and here's the link to the Nation piece:
