Wednesday, June 06, 2007

TV Stem Cell Coverage, Reijo Pera and Stanford

Television rarely covers California stem cell issues yet the medium is one of the most important sources of news for the public.

That is one reason why we like to point out TV coverage when it does occur, as in the case of a report by Erik Rosales on San Francisco station KGO.

He put together a roughly two-minute piece Tuesday, built around the lab grants approved by CIRM's Oversight Committee. Rosales filmed folks at Stanford, featuring Renee Reijo Pera, director of human stem cell research at the school.

You can see the entire piece here, complete with an ad that provides the full commercial TV experience. Click on the image of the hand in the latex glove to start the video.

On the subject of news coverage of Tuesday's grant approval, we should note that it received no TV coverage in Los Angeles as far as we can tell. CIRM called a news conference for noon Tuesday in Los Angeles but no reporters turned up. As we reported earlier, only one main stream media reporter was present for the session of the Oversight Committee, Terri Somers of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Los Angeles is a tough news town, and it usually takes more than handing out $50 million to generate coverage. Perhaps if CIRM had shot the money out of a cannon in the Rose Bowl and had researchers run for the dough....

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