"At one university, tobacco money is a secret,” runs the headline of a New York Times article published yesterday. On campuses nationwide, professors and administrators passionately debate the propriety of taking research money from tobacco companies," the newspaper continues in its lead. But not at Virginia Commonwealth University.

That’s because hardly anyone knows there's something to debate, writes reporter Alan Finder. VCU, he says ominously, signed a contract in 2006 with Philip Morris USA that bars professors from publishing the results of their studies, or even talking about them, without the tobacco company's permission. The Times characterizes the contract as "highly unusual" and says it "raises questions about how far universities will go in search of scarce research dollars to enhance their standing."

VCU received $227 million in research grants last year, the Times said, an amount "dwarfed" by R&D budgets at institutions such as the University of Washington and the Johns Hopkins University. Richmond-based Philip Morris is a likely source for VCU "in its hunt for dollars from a finite number of corporations." But elsewhere across the country, some 15 public health and medical schools no longer accept donations from the tobacco industry, says the Times, and "many" major research universities continue to do so only if guaranteed independence to carry out the research and publish the results." Writes Finder:

Restrictions in the contract surprised other university researchers. Stanton A. Glantz, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, told the Times, "University administrators who are desperate for money will basically do anything they have to for money."

Let me say up front that there are legitimate issues at stake here. What restrictions should universities permit on publication of research conducted by their professors? Should universities engage in research for tobacco companies in any capacity, even if the results would increase understanding of disease processes or reduce the harm from cigarette smoke. I have no problem with airing that debate.

But why pick on VCU?

The Times acted as if the research relationship between VCU and Philip Morris were a big secret in a town where the tobacco giant is completing work on a $350 million R&D center blocks away from the VCU medical school, noting that "few professors appeared to know about the contract," and that a number were concerned about its "secretiveness." Yeah, the contract was so "secret" that the Times somehow managed to obtain a copy through Virginia's Freedom of Information Act! Talk about a manufactured controversy. What the Times apparently did not think to ask the VCU professors, "Are you familiar with the terms of anyone's research contracts other than your own? Did you ever ask to see the contract? Did anyone refuse to let you see it? Or was it 'secret' simply because the VCU adminstration failed to distribute copies through university-wide email blasts or post copies of it on bulletin boards all around campus?"

The Times also didn't see fit to inquire about the nature of the research. Just exactly what were these "secretive" contracts protecting? Reporter David Ress shed a little light in an article published in the Times-Dispatch this morning based on an interview with Francis Macrina, VCU's vice president for research. In one of the research projects, Philip Morris asked VCU to "look into runoff as part of its efforts to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous flowing into the James River watershed from its Park 500 tobacco processing plant in Chesterfield County."

Oooh, that sounds controversial. What if that nitrogen was carcinogenic? No wonder Philip Morris wanted to hide it from the light of day!

The Times also appears to exaggerate the magnitude of the "secretive" contracts. Finder quotes Macrina as saying that Philip Morris gave $1.3 million in research grants last year that "included the restricted covenant and a more traditional independent grant." How much was "restricted" and how much was "independent." He doesn't tell us.

Ress provides more up-to-date information. He quotes Macrina as saying that Philip Morris paid the university $286,000 to fund research "this year. That included the money for the "runoff and lung disease" projects. It amounted to about 0.1 percent of the research grants the school expects to receive this year. Thank goodness poor, "desperate," provincial VCU has Philip Morris to fall back on to keep its R&D support from shriveling up!

Although Philip Morris has the right under the restrictive contracts to curtail publication or dissemination of results, the Times presents no evidence that it has ever chosen to do so. Nor does the newspaper present any evidence that VCU professors have created a potential ethical dilemma for themselves by selecting projects that Philip Morris might conceivably want to suppress if the results didn’t turn out favorably. The "controversy" is a purely theoretical concoction, not based upon any real-life incident.  

One last point. While the Times portrays VCU as a pariah for supplicating itself to Big Tobacco, VCU is not alone in agreeing to the "highly unusual" restricted contracts. According to Ress, Virginia Tech, Duke, Auburn, Cornell, Rockefeller University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook are among the "many universities" that give corporate funders similar rights. (I presume he based that on information supplied by Macrina, although he does not say so.)

Finders is guilty of one of two things: Either he failed to ask the questions that elicited the exonerating context that Ress managed to uncover, or he had the information but decided not to include it. (I suppose there is a third explanation for this hatchet job: Perhaps Finders included the information but an editor deleted it.) Whatever the reason, the Times article was a disgrace. I wouldn't be surprised if the story were fed to the Times by the anti-tobacco activists who dog Philip Morris' research outreach program – sources who go unmentioned in the article, incidentally. Some blogger should ask Finder, "Who gave you the idea for this story, anyway? What is their agenda?"

Once again, the "gray lady" has demonstrated how far it has fallen from its glory days when it could proclaim, "All the news that's fit to print." Once again we find, just as its detractors claim, it prints "All the news that fits."

Update: Here's my candidate for who's behind the story. Anne Landmann with The Center for Media and Democracy raised the issue back in Sept. 2007. In "It's a Tobacco Thing, You Wouldn't Understand," she opined, "Apparently VCU feels it has gotten far more positive than negative results from its long and deep relationship to Big Tobacco. As long as it continues to feel no pain over this relationship, it will undoubtedly continue, no matter how unethical it may seems to those of us who live outside tobacco country."

And who is Anne Landman? Find out all you need to know here.