Sam Hornblower joined 60 Minutes in 2006 and is the winner of three Peabody awards, a DuPont-Columbia award, and two Emmy awards for outstanding investigative journalism. He has reported on stem cell therapy charlatans in “21st Century Snake Oil,” fabricated clinical trial data in “Deception at Duke,” fraudulent hospital billing in “The Cost of Admission,” and excess formaldehyde levels in flooring in “Lumber Liquidators.” More recently, he has been producing an award-winning investigative series on the opioid epidemic and is covering the Covid-19 pandemic.
Before CBS, he was with PBS broadcast Frontline, with reporting credits including the 2004 documentary “Is Wal-Mart Good for America?”, about the impact of China and big box retail on manufacturing and jobs in America’s heartland.
Sam will be speaking with our group about the current opioid crisis and is urging that DMA members look at some of his prior work as background to his talk and watch “60 Minutes” appearing on Sunday June 21 (7 pm Eastern time) to see the first part of two episodes giving the latest on the opioid crisis. The following links provide a synopsis of the project so far:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-opioid-epidemic-who-is-to-blame-60-minutes-2019-08-25/
Arranged by Alex Garnett
Bryan Hooper’s notes from the talk:
Sam Hornblower, a producer at CBS, took us through the key points of several episodes of “60 Minutes” covering a long-time investigative series into the opioid crisis. Hornblower pointed the finger at the drug manufacturers and distributors, and highlighted the incentives to sales representatives to increase revenue through payments to doctors to write prescriptions for more patients and to increase the dosages prescribed for patients. He identified the Food and Drug Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Justice and the pharmaceutical lobbyists as bearing responsibility for going too easy on the opioid industry and expanding the availability of ever more powerful synthetic versions of the drugs, such as fentanyl, which is 100 times more powerful than morphine. The illustrations from some of the “60 Minutes” episodes included several trials of major producers and distributors that resulted in prison sentences for senior executives and multi-billion dollar settlements. You can see these episodes by logging on to the CBS News website and searching the subject.
As a welcome change to the grim stories told by Sam, his father, Ray Hornblower, formerly a lawyer in the Justice Department who then took up a second career as an opera singer, treated us to an aria from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” The subject of that aria was, fittingly, planning vengeance for an untimely death!