Pharmaceutical companies are carrying out fake, pseudo-studies on humans as a marketing devices to get doctors familiar with new drugs. In such studies, called "seeding trials," drug companies invite hundreds of doctors to take part in a research study by asking them to recruit patients to serve as subjects. The companies then pay the doctors for every subject they recruit. These "studies" look like clinical trials, but are not designed to contribute to knowledge in any way. Their purpose is solely to make doctors more familiar with the new drugs being "tested,"  and make doctors more likely to prescribe the drugs in the future. Seeding trials are conducted privately and managed by the pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments, not their research departments. The results of such trials do not appear in medical journals, but in pharmaceutical marketing documents. The drugs in such tests already have FDA approval, but the investigators may be inexperience and untrained, and patients involved in such fake studies have even died. How do these studies avoid scrutiny by ethics boards? Institutional review boards (IRBs), which determine whether human studies are ethically sound, don't pass judgement on whether a study is being carried out simply as a marketing tool or not. Some IRBs are even run as for-profit businesses, and get paid by the same pharmaceutical companies that put on the studies. If a for-profit IRB fails to approve too many studies, the entities funding such studies will just go elsewhere for reviews. 

ABC is dominating other news outlets this summer with stories about pretty, white women in distress. The network's special about former kidnap victim J.C. Dugard garnered 15 million viewers, which prompted ABC to re-broadcast it at a later time and date. ABC sent out a press release boasting that its primetime Nightline special about then-accused child-killer Casey Anthony won the network biggest audience it has had in that time slot in five months. After paying Anthony $200,000 years ago for video and pictures to help bolster her story, ABC held nothing back after Anthony was acquitted, grabbing the first juror willing to speak to cameras and having Barbara Walters interview Anthony's attorney on TV. ABC devoted more than twice as much time to the Casey Anthony story as either of its two rival broadcast networks (22.9 minutes, compared to NBC's 8.4 minutes and 5.4 minutes on CBS). ABC even hired pretty, blonde former kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart to comment on missing person cases, even though this type of crime is fairly rare. ABC argues that their hiring of Smart, the extensive coverage of J.C. Dugard and Anthony are all coincidental. Critics say ABC is falling victim to "Missing White Woman Syndrome," the phenomenon where news reports disproportionately favor coverage o crimes committed against young, attractive, white, middle-class women, while crimes committed against females of lower-class backgrounds and different ethnicities, and crimes committed against males, get less coverage.