Dan Cooper, who helped create Fox News in the 1990s, is set to tell all about his former boss, Roger Ailes. In “a long meandering unfocussed piece” posted today, Cooper describes Ailes’ fondness for “boy’s club meetings” during the launch of Fox News that were often peppered with sexist and bigoted comments. “How about those bazookas on that Indian girl, or whatever the hell she is,” Cooper recalls Ailes saying. (In fairness to Ailes, Inside Cable News warns that it’s difficult to tell how much of Cooper’s story “is real and how much of it is BS.”)

(HT: Jossip)

Washington DC Councilmember David Catania has been pushing a bill to require the licensing of pharmaceutical representatives and to prohibit them from providing knowingly false information to doctors. Many pharmaceutical sales reps try to “influence doctors’ prescribing decisions in ways that have little to do with the best interest of the patient” by resorting to “questionable methods, including providing gifts and meals to doctors” in order to promote their drugs.

Advocates of the pharmaceutical industry responded by launching an anonymous blog site devoted to defending the industry’s practices. The site — BigPharmaRealPeople — “grabbed attention with an enemies list” which included Catania, whom it called “public enemy #1.”

The site’s editors had refused to disclose their names and instead adopted the identities from characters in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Recently, a poster named “John Galt” revealed himself to be Scott McTavish, a sales rep, sales manager and director for three Big Pharma Companies over the past 30 years. Blogging over at Pharmalot, Ed Silverman challenges the front group to disclose its sponsorship and backing:

One other thing, Scott. Since you chose not to answer any of our messages directly, we are still curious to know more about your background and those of your ‘staff.’ We would also like to know what, if any, sponsorship or backing you may have. If you really do enjoy an open debate about all the facts, more disclosure would be helpful – unless your site is merely an example of astroturfing dressed up as a social networking experiment.

The avowed mission of the Big Pharma front group’s website is to “remind the American public who is actually on their side” and to “fight ridiculous government rules and regulation that hamper Big Pharma.” The site’s authors write:

The purpose of BigPharmaRealPeople.org is the following: … To point out that corporations are not faceless, evil giants that take advantage of the individual.

The Washington City Paper responds, “Have to say, guys — this anonymous Web site isn’t doing much to combat that whole ‘faceless’ thing.” And the site isn’t having much success thus far. Catania’s bill passed the D.C. City Council on Tuesday.

I remember having been very interested in the Implicit Association Test I took a few years ago on racial bias, but then kind of forgot about the whole thing for a while. Eve Fairbanks mentioned taking one on gender in a blog post, so I thought I’d check it out. But en route to discovering what kind of a sexist I am, I was waylaid by a test that examines your biases about the presidential candidates.

I took it and discovered the results you see at left. This is a question of relative bias. They explain that “a committed Republican might have negative associations with all of these candidates, but in this display, the ones that are least negative would appear toward the top and the ones that are most negative would appear toward the bottom.” All four candidates cluster in the middle third of the spectrum, so I don’t have any really extreme implicit associations with the candidates, but as we can see there’s a distinct pro-Obama leaning.

That jibes with what I learned about myself the night of the Iowa caucuses. Thinking and writing about it beforehand, I’d definitely found Obama to be a praiseworthy figure but never really committed myself super-strongly in his favor, and in the couple of weeks leading up to the caucus felt increasingly persuaded by arguments made on John Edwards’ behalf. But when it was announced the he won I was thrilled even though my official view continues to be that the differences between the candidates in the field are non-enormous.

Meanwhile, demographically speaking I’m in Obama’s wheelhouse — young, male, college educated — and I had pre-existing pro-Obama views on the issues. I’d be interested to see what kind of results you can from people whose views are more at odds with their demographics.