Reading Journal - 17 September

   The New York Times published an article yesterday Thursday, 16 September entitled “Chief of Unit With Recalls to Exit J.&J.”. While the article remains generally neutral, it seems to make the claim that Colleen Goggins (the person after whom the article is named) is leaving Johnson & Johnson due to these recent failures. This would be a perfectly intuitive assumption, seeing as Goggins has been continually slammed in the media in the last year being labeled as a “micromanager” and blamed for poor management which resulted in the series of recalls. However, when taken into account that the corporate structure of J&J is high decentralized and that only until recently McNeil (the company that produces the recalled drugs) was separate from the Consumer Unit (which Colleen commands), I highly doubt that her management directly caused the defective drugs to be produced. Nevertheless, it certainly makes a more interesting story. I remember reading a highly opinionated feature article in August in Fortune Magazine called “Why J&J’s Headache Won’t Go Away”. In this article, the writer makes a much more obvious slant against Colleen, labeling the recalls as “humiliating” and “damning” – judgments which The New York Times articles doesn’t include – and practically placing all culpability on her . Regardless, The Times’s article certainly is not in Colleen’s favor either and seems to imply that she is retiring due to these issues, when in fact she had originally had plans to retire last year. In addition, while I think it is informative and definitely something which reader’s of The New York Times’s Business section would want to read, I think it is highly invasive that it lists not only Goggin’s severance but also her recent financial activity with company stock.

            In other news, the Pope’s visit to the UK appears to be shrouded in controversy. With thousands of unsold tickets and a possible “terrorist plot” (“Pope’s visit: Six held by counter-terror police hours before historic address, The Guardian), there doesn’t really seem to be as much coverage about the Pope’s actual message. The article in The Guardian which covers the “alleged terrorist plot” is very careful not to trust the British authorities’ judgment in their arrest, labeling the plot as “alleged” and focusing on the arrest itself instead of any action which the six men themselves committed. This begins to make more sense, however, as the article doesn’t mention any laws which the men have actually broken but instead says that they were arrested “on basis of ‘overheard conversation’”. The purpose of the article therefore seems perhaps more oriented toward exposing the unfounded basis of the arrest than any real threat that the Pope was in.

            Regarding an unrelated article in The Guardian entitled “Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy deny ‘hell’ remark”, I’m having trouble understanding why this is actually considered news. In short, a new biography about the First Lady of France, entitled Carla & The Ambitious quotes Michelle Obama as telling Carla that her life in the White House is “hell”. Since both parties deny that Mrs. Obama ever made that statement, it leads one to wonder who exactly wrote the biography – which the writer of the article never tells us. Since all parties involved, including the French embassy in D.C., have denied the existence of this statement, what really is the news here? Is it that unnamed writers have lied in a biography about Mrs. Bruni-Sarkozy and have tried to pass it off as truth? Or is it that Michelle doesn’t really find life as the spouse of the President that difficult? The headline certainly made me curious (which is why I clicked on it), however I don’t really see how my knowledge of the world has been expanded from reading this article or, furthermore, why I need to know about every ridiculously fabricated claim Mrs. President has to deny.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/business/17tylenol.html?scp=1&sq=goggins&st=cse

http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/18/news/companies/jnj_drug_recalls.fortune/index.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2010/sep/16/hell-michelle-obama-carla-bruni-sarkozy

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11347073

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/17/pope-visit-terror-police-arrests-street-cleaners