...is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published by the United States Government Printing Office, and is issued daily when the United States Congress is in session. Indexes are issued approximately every two weeks. At the end of a session of Congress, the daily editions are compiled in bound volumes constituting the permanent edition.

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By custom and rules of each House, Members also frequently "revise and extend" the remarks they actually made on the floor before the debates are published in the Congressional Record. Therefore, for many years, speeches that were not actually delivered in Congress appeared in the Record, including in the sections purporting to be verbatim reports of debates. In recent years, however, these revised remarks have been preceded by a "bullet" symbol or, more recently and presently, printed in a typeface discernibly different from that used to report words actually spoken by Members.

In House, Many Spoke With One Voice

In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.

Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.

Ghost-writers Hired by Drug Companies Write Journal Articles, Then Find the Medical Authors

An amazing series of documents were unsealed by a court in a dangerous drug injury case involving Prempro, a hormone drug. Injured plaintiffs argue that the drug causes breast cancer and other medical problems, but the bomb drop is not the allegations, but what drug giant Wyeth did to "help" create medical journal articles about the safety of its drug.

But the court documents reveal scandalous email and correspondence which purportedly shows that Wyeth "fraudulently and intentionally polluted the scientific literature related to hormone therapy in general and their hormone drugs in particular" in that Wyeth hired ghostwriter physicians or scientists to “author” biased scientific and medical journal articles-but the articles were largely written before the “author” was on board.

A medical journal PLoS Medicine posted about 1,500 of the documents on a website (www.plosmedicine.org/static/ghostwriting.action ). It was through the action of the medical journal and the New York Times that the court decided to unseal a massive number of documents which reveal exactly how the ghostwriting was done for the drug manufacturer-reaching the suggested conclusions well before a “reputable” doctor was ever part of the “study” findings as the study's author.

"the story told in these documents amounts to one of the most compelling expositions ever seen of the systematic manipulation and abuse of scholarly publishing by the pharmaceutical industry and its commercial partners in their attempt to influence the healthcare decisions of physicians and the general public."

1. A drug manufacturer hires a professional medical writing or communications company which prepares a preferred title, outline and a possible draft of an article;

2. The drug company or its ghostwriters later find the names of proposed medical or scientific authors for the pre-determined article including its slant or bias;

3. The outline or draft is sent to the selected author for approval.

Ghost Management: How Much of the Medical Literature Is Shaped Behind the Scenes by the Pharmaceutical Industry?

There are many reports of medical journal articles being researched and written by or on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, and then published under the name of academics who had played little role earlier in the research and writing process [2–14]. In extreme cases, drug companies pay for trials by contract research organizations (CROs), analyze the data in-house, have professionals write manuscripts, ask academics to serve as authors of those manuscripts, and pay communication companies to shepherd them through publication in the best journals. The resulting articles affect the conclusions found in the medical literature, and are used in promoting drugs to doctors.

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Because ghost management is hidden, we cannot tell how common it is from published exposés. Current practices in the medical sciences legitimately allow people to serve as authors on the basis of narrow contributions. Therefore many near-honorary authors find little reason to feel uncomfortable with their roles. Fully honorary authors may not see enough of the process of the production of their articles to know that they are ghost managed. Finally, it is not in the interests of writers, authors, or sponsors and their agents to reveal ghost management processes; hence a number of the published accounts of ghost management have stemmed from legal proceedings and investigative journalism. So how common is ghost management?

Much of the information on ghost writing does not help to answer this question. Surveys to quantify rates of ghost writing do not address the ghost management phenomenon, because management may not involve writing, and writing may not be managed [20,21]. However, information about ghost authors, people who should be receiving author credit, strongly suggests that ghost management is common. A study comparing protocols and corresponding publications for industry-initiated trials approved by the Scientific-Ethical Committees for Copenhagen and Frederiksberg in 1994–1995 found evidence of ghost authorship in 75% of these publications (95% confidence intervals, 60%–87%) [22]. Company statisticians were common unacknowledged contributors, but so were the creators of trial designs and protocols, and the writers of manuscripts. The study also found that most (172 of 274) trials for which protocols had been submitted were never begun, completed, or published.

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Originally posted by Astyanax
This is a more elaborate version of the same technique.

Originally posted by Astyanax
But demonizing the rich and powerful helps no-one...

Here we must disagree, you and I. Deception has ever been a tool of governance and always shall be, as it must. If the demos could be trusted to do the right thing on every occasion, then neither deceit nor governments would be necessary. But that day will never come, so there must be governments, and governments, to do their job, must lie judiciously from time to time.