by Penny, Laura
130 SSRIs for kids: See the FDA page “Antidepressant Use in Children, Adolescents and Adults,” at www.fda.gov/cder/drug/antidepressants/default.htm.
132 global patent debates: See “Dying for Drugs” series in The Guardian. A good place to start is Sarah Boseley with James Atill, “Battle Over Cheap Drugs goes to WTO,” July 16, 2001.
133 Sarafem: See Carla Spartos, “Sarafem Nation,” Village Voice, December 6, 2000, and Lisa Belkin, “Prime Time Pushers,” Mother Jones, March/April 2001.
137 top ten killers: See Health: United States 2004, National Center for Health Statistics, cited above.
138 top ten sellers: See IMS Health, at www.imshealth.com.
CHAPTER SEVEN
140 Spitzer insurance probe: See “Sins of Commission,” The Economist, February 1, 2005.
146 Premiums have gone up: For comprehensive health insurance cost data, see the Kaiser Foundation website, www.kff.org.
146 September 11: See Robert P. Hartwig, “September 11: One Hundred Minutes of Terror That Changed the Global Insurance Industry Forever,” Insurance Information Institute, online at www.iii.org/media/hottopics/insurance/sept11/sept11paper/.
149 Doctors have filed suit: The Cigna and Aetna court case documents are available courtesy of the law offices of Archie Lamb, the class action lawyer involved with the case. Online at www.hmocrisis.com/courtdocuments.html.
149 state-farm-sucks.com: See Perry Z. Binder, “Domain Names and Your Company’s Giant Sucking Sound,” online at www.gsu.edu/~rmipzb/Domainarticle.pdf.
151 45 million Americans: See the page of links on health care and the uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation website, at www.kff.org/uninsured/index.cfm.
151 The New England Journal of Medicine: See Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, and Terry Campbell, “Costs of Healthcare Administration in the U.S. and Canada,” August 21, 2003.
155 Aetna settlement: For documents related to Aetna’s court cases and settlements, see Aetna’s legal issues Web page, at www.aetna.com/legal_issues/index.html.
156 CIGNA settlement: See Tanya Albert, “Judge OKs CIGNA Settlement with Doctors,” Amednews.com, February 24, 2003; at www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2004/02/23/prsd0223.htm.
156 Aetna v. Davila: Documents related to this case are also available on the Aetna website.
157 patients’ rights legislation: See Dana Milbank and Juliet Eilperin, “On Patients’ Rights Deal, Bush Scored with a Full-Court Press,” Washington Post, August 3, 2001.
157 Gramm-Leach-Bliley: See the Financial Markets Center’s in-depth coverage of the GLB, online at www.fmcenter.org/site/pp.asp?c=8fLGJTOyHpE&b=224816.
158 Executive Life: For more on the Executive Life scandal, see Ellie Winninghoff, “The French Connection,” Forbes, September 2001, and “No Assurances,” also by Winninghoff, in Mother Jones, January 2002.
159 Leon Black: See Bernard Condon, “Black is Back,” Forbes, November 2004.
159 600 million: See “Accord Near in Suit Over Insurer’s Sale,” Washington Post, February 16, 2005.
160 “passing the trash”: See Robert Lenzner, “Passing the Trash,” Forbes, January 2000.
161 Spitzer reinsurance probe: See Thor Valdmanis, “AIG gets subpoenas from SEC, Spitzer,” USA Today, February 14, 2005.
CHAPTER EIGHT
164 Brookings Institution: See William Fulton et al., “Who Sprawls Most? How Growth Patterns Differ Across the U.S.,” Center for Urban and Metropolitan Policy, July 2001; online at www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/es/urban/publications/Fulton.pdf.
166 six billion square feet: Figures from the International Council of Shopping Centers, an industry group, online at www.icsc.org/srch/rsrch/scope/current/index.php.
169 $44 billion: See the Annual Retail Trade Data at the U.S. Census Bureau, available online at www.census.gov/svsd/www/artstbl.html.
171 Liza Featherstone: See “Down and Out in Discount America” and “Wal-Mart Values: Selling Women Short,” The Nation, December 16, 2004, and December 16, 2002. Featherstone has also written a book on the Dukes class action suit against Wal-Mart called Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic Books, 2004).
171 anti-Wal-Mart studies: Al Norman’s website, www.sprawl-busters.com, is a comprehensive resource for research criticizing Wally World.
172 $15 billion: For more on Wal-Mart and the trade deficit, check out Is Wal-Mart Good for America? a November 2004 episode of PBS’s excellent Frontline. You can watch the show online at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/.
176 more than $400,000: See Simon Head, “Inside the Leviathan,” The New York Review of Books, December 16, 2004.
176 Occupational Outlook Handbook: Online at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov/home.htm.
178 fifty thousand call centers: See “The Vanishing American Call Center,” commweb.com, September 21, 2004; at www.commweb.com/customercontact/47900751.
178 Call Center Magazine: See Brendan Read, “Finding a Home for Your Call Center,” Call Center Magazine, September 1999; online at www.callcentermagazine.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=8701482.
179 UNICOR: Check out UNICOR’s service section, at www.unicor.gov/services/.
181 Interactive Voice Response: IVR gets a whopping 1,500,000 Google hits; voice-mail hell gets a few more, with 1,580,000.
183 American Customer Satisfaction Index: The ACSI survey data is available online at www.theacsi.org/.
184 new consumer apartheid: See Diane Brady, “Why Service Stinks,” BusinessWeek, October 23, 2000.
CHAPTER NINE
187 Project for Excellence in Journalism: This group, affiliated with the J-school at Columbia, is online at journalism.org. Their report, The State of the News Media 2004, is available online at www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/index.asp.
188 decline in hard news: See Thomas E. Patterson at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, at Harvard, Doing Well and Doing Good: How Soft News and Critical Journalism Are Shrinking the News Audience and Weakening Democracy—and What News Outlets Can Do About It. The Center has a lot of research available online at www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/index.htm.
189 Pew Research Center: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducts regular surveys on the news media. Surveys from the last five years are available online at people-press.org/reports/index.php?TopicID=1.
191 Ben Bagdikian: Bagdikian has been studying media consolidation since the early eighties, and his latest book is The New Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 2004). He has a website as well, www.benbagdikian.com/.
191 entertainment as news: See Changing Definitions of News, a March 1998 study by the Committee of Concerned Journalists, available online at the journalism.org website, at www.journalism.org/resources/research/reports/definitions/default.asp.
193 September 11: See two Pew Center surveys for the rise and fall in public trust after 9-11: “Terror Coverage Boosts News Media’s Image,” November 2001, and “Public’s News Habits Little Changed by September 11,” July 2002.
195 Bush press conference: Video and text of the April 13, 2004, prime-time press conference is online at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040413-20.html.
196 Jeff Gannon: See Howard Kurtz, “Jeff Gannon Admits Past Mistakes, Berates Critics,” Washington Post, February 19, 2005, and the Gannongate links at the Media Matters for America website, at mediamatters.org/topics/gannongate.html.
199 fairness doctrine: There is a good capsule history of the fairness doctrine at the Museum of Broadcasting and Communications website, at www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fairnessdoct/fairnessdoct.htm.
201 James Fallows: See “Why America Hates the Media,” by Fallows, in the February 1996 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
204 Rathergate: See www.rathergate.com/ for links to anti-Rather bloggers.
206 less than a quarter: See the Pew Research Center’s “Public’s News Habits Little Changed by September 11,” cited
above, particularly the section on the aging news audience.
206 New York Times Magazine: See Marshall Sella, “The Stiff Guy vs. The Dumb Guy,” September 24, 2000, for more on the young getting their news from late-night TV.
209 Online NewsHour forum: The posting from the March 2002 feature on youth and the news is still available online at www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/march02/news5.html.
CHAPTER TEN
212 New York Times Magazine: See Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” October 17, 2004.
214 Garry Wills: See “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out,” The New York Times, November 4, 2004.
217 ACTA: ACTA reports are available at their website, www.goacta.org.
219 Academic Bill of Rights: David Horowitz writes about his bill in The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2004, in an article called “In Defense of Intellectual Diversity.”
219 Stanley Fish: Professor Fish responds in the same issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article called “‘Intellectual Diversity’: Trojan Horse of a Dark Design.”
LAURA PENNY is thirty and tired of being put on hold. A teaching fellow at the University of King’s College, she lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Copyright © 2005 by Laura Penny
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Penny, Laura, 1975–
Your call is important to us : the truth about bullshit / Laura Penny.
1. Propaganda. 2. Public relations. 3. Advertising. 4. Deception. 5. Manipulative behavior. I. Title
HM1231.P46 2005
303.3'75'0973—dc22 2005007533
eISBN 0-307-23836-9
Title page photograph copyright © Peter Dazeley/CORBIS
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