Informed citizens need to look beyond traditional media sources to get the full story.Press censorship belittles readers’ intelligence.

The pillars of the American democracy are the three branches of government: Executive, Legislative and Judicial, which ensures a separation of powers and facilitates checks and balances. Freedom of the press has been perceived as a fourth branch of the American democratic system. However, this soft power that the press has enjoyed has not had any check and balance structure to ensure that all viewpoints are heard. The press bias has become more real, and has been geared more towards sensationalism instead of true and checked reporting of facts. Partiality can never be eliminated completely because we are all human and do hold our own preferences. Fortunately, technological advancements such as the internet and social media networks have given ordinary people the ability to convey their views and voices.

Let me recount my experience dealing with the local media, the Star-Telegram and the Fort Worth Business Press. The local papers have bought into the propaganda and the figures presented in the business plan for a proposed second medical school, UNTMD, at the University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC). The Star-Telegram endorsed the UNTMD business plan without studying the feasibility and the merits of the plan:

1. The MD study group was set up at the end of 2008. Its mission was supposed to study the feasibility and the merits of another medical school. However, the push for another medical school and its outcome was already decided in 2006 after Dr. Ransom was hired to assume the presidency of UNTHSC. Dr. Ransom receives the highest salary in the history of the institution, close to $1million per year, which is also the most generous compensation compared to its peers in Texas.
2. UNTMD’s business plan proposed $21.5 million for the medical school’s start-up cost. The study was initially conducted by PriceWaterhouse-Coopers (PW-C), which has served as consultants for several new medical schools across the nation, and the start-up costs for those schools are at least $100 million. PW-C was reluctant to sign off on the low cost estimates in the UNTMD business plan. The business plan was then sent to another consulting firm, Deloitte – Touche, which signed off on the plan’s numbers only with the assumption that the facts provided by UNTHSC stand correct.
3. The claim of strong local community support for a second medical school does not translate into real financial support. The $25 million in pledges, while a sizable amount, are not high enough to fund the UNTMD project nor compared to other communities’ efforts building new schools across the nation.
4. The roots of a potential physician shortage in Tarrant County result from the lack of residency slots to train medical graduates and not from the number of medical students. Currently, the existing medical school, the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine (the founding college of UNTHSC), will be producing more than 230 medical graduates per year, while there are only about 70 entry-level residency positions (meaning 210-250 new residency slots are needed) per year in Tarrant County. UNTMD’s proposal to add another 100 medical students per year is a travesty; it expects Texas taxpayers to foot the bills for the $200,000 cost for each medical student, many of whom will leave for other states because there is a severe shortage of residency slots in Texas.
5. UNTMD propaganda claims it is cost-free to the state of Texas for the first 5 years (2011-16). The cost alone of educating the students from 2013-2016 amounts to $30 million, as it plans on admitting the first class of 100 students starting in 2013. Where would the $30 million come from?
• The state? Then it is not free to the state.
• The students? $50,000 tuition per year, then it is a private medical school. Maybe UNTMD should be private at first as TCOM was initially a private school for the first few years until it proved to the state that it was sustainable.
• The community? The $25 million pledge total does not match the $30 million education cost. Maybe more local financial support is needed.  The University of Central Florida provides free tuition for the charter class for their entire 4-year education.
6. John Peter Smith, a county hospital, has pledged $2.5 million to the new medical school, while the CEO has attempted to rally the underserved/rural areas to contribute funds to its rural medicine residency program. The mission of a county hospital is to take care of indigent patients within the county. The expected $8.5 million in cuts from the state as it is facing the worst budget shortfall in its history has raised warnings that the cuts would endanger the care of the indigent patients. Maybe the $2.5 million can help to care for the county’s needy residents.

The Star-Telegram has been gracious to publish my three op-eds, but it has failed to hold the proponents of UNTMD accountable to their proposed numbers, and to investigate the best and most efficient way to respond to the potential physician shortage in the county.

In addition, to its credit, the Fort Worth Business Press has never given its endorsement of the proposed UNTMD, and it has also published my two op-eds in 2009. But at the same time, it has only reported the “win-win” situation described in the UNTMD proposal without questioning the credibility of the plan and the merits of another medical school in Fort Worth.

Both newspapers have failed to recognize that the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex already has the highest concentration of medical students in the state. They neglected the fact that another region, South Texas, deserves much more the establishment of a medical school. The last legislature approved the school, but will not allocate funding for the school until 2015.

After UNTMD’s business plan was finalized in August 2010, I have tried to submit op-eds, along with well-researched documents, several times to the Fort Worth Business Press for consideration for publication. For unknown reasons, maybe the topics of physician shortage and a new medical school were irrelevant or old news to the local newspapers, my three to four attempts at submission were ignored. There was not even a courteous reply of rejection.

http://www.eyedrd.org/ was then established in October in 2010 in an attempt to bring these issues to the public. The site provides a forum for discussion of a wide range of issues, including medical/osteopathic, eye, societal and international affairs. Most of its posts are well-researched commentaries and contain no inflammatory nor profane comments. Some of the blogs were posted on the facebook fan pages of several media, including the Fort Worth Business Press. Some social media network fan pages either allow only posting comments to the official announcements, or allow posting the links under different categories. For instance, the Fort Worth Business Press fan page wall has 3 categories: Fort-Worth Business Press+ others, Just Fort Worth Business Press, and Just Others. Several blogs were posted and linked on the Fort Worth Business Press for about two months until they were all removed, including me as a fan, from the fan page. Inquiry of a possible bias was emailed to the journal. Ms. Aleshia Howe sent a prompt reply. Here is a quote: “I actually removed your posts because we don’t let any fan post anything that could be perceived as marketing on our page, because then it looks as though we are supporting that fan and his or her business.”

I believe the above comments belittle the intelligence of the Fort Worth Business Press’ fans and readers, who, if we were to believe that line of reasoning, would not be able to discern the difference between the paper’s reporting and the fan’s postings and commercial promotions.

The fact that the current fan page has 3 categories for posting: Fort Worth Business Press+ others, Just Fort Worth Business Press, and Just Others, and the removal of all the non-commercial postings discussing the physician shortage, the Texas budget shortfall, and medical education, has shown that the Fort Worth Business Press, instead of fostering debate, is stifling the debate and suppressing opinions.

In light of recent, worldwide condemnations of the Egyptian regime closing down internet access and the social media networks in an attempt to shut down communication among the protestors, one should wonder about similar, albeit more limited, censorship by news media outlets in the United States.  The role of media in the United States, which enjoys the “soft power” that makes it similar in many ways to a fourth branch of the government, has the ability to exercise that power without any formal accountability to ensure that all viewpoints are heard. In a representative democracy, it is up to citizens to recognize that fact, and to seek out news and information sources that give them the facts they need to make well-informed judgments on topics in the news.