Secret Health Data News Dump Of The Week

John McCain wants to pretend he's being forthright about his medical condition, while dumping the data on the Friday before Memorial Day and controlling who gets to see them. That's straight talk.

Senator John McCain is set to release 400 pages of medical records, including documents related to his melanoma surgery in August 2000, to a tightly controlled group of reporters on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend [...]

On Friday, the campaign will allow a small pool of reporters access to the records from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. Pacific time in a conference room at the Copper Wind Resort in Phoenix, near the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. The reporters will be allowed to take notes but not remove or photocopy the records. Campaign officials said they were imposing the restrictions to prevent the actual records from wide dissemination.

Around the same time, campaign officials said, they will post medical summaries of each year from 2000 to 2008 on the campaign Web site. The summaries will not include doctors’ notes in the actual records.

The news organizations in the pool, selected by the campaign, include ABC News, The Arizona Republic, The Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, Reuters, The Washington Post and, possibly, a newsmagazine.

Each organization is allowed two representatives and is expected to file a “pool report” for other reporters detailing the information in the records.

It's completely unclear to me why any respectable media organization would agree to this, other than it's coming from John McCain and he makes sweet, sweet barbecue. Even the most experienced reporter isn't entirely equipped to make judgments on medical reports based on three hours of browsing through records without discussing them with doctors or experts. This makes a mockery of journalism and they just lay down and take it.