How The Media Was Beclowned By Research Hacks With a Discredited Alcohol Study

Why trusting the NY Times on alcohol and health reporting is proven foolish

The entire media (and I mean all of them—the NY Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and numerous others) just got beclowned by a group of biased, hack researchers with a discredited study of alcohol’s impact on health. The beclowning of the media was so thorough that it’s almost worth asking if the duped writers and reporters will ever be able to remove the paint from their faces.

This is the story of how the entire American mediasphere was so willing to poke a presidential administration that they were able to be duped into promoting a study on alcohol that had been discredited months ago by a bipartisan collection of lawmakers, by a congressional committee, and by the entire state of Canada.

Let’s start where all tragedies begin: with good intentions.

For many years, the U.S. Government has provided citizens with Dietary Guidelines with the goal of promoting healthy living and longer lives. For many years, those guidelines have offered advice on alcohol consumption. That recommendation you see everywhere that men should drink no more than 2 drinks a day and women no more than one drink per day originated with various editions of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.

It was during the development of the 2020-2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines that some members of the panel charged with evaluating the evidence on alcohol consumption and health for the coming Guidelines, and who hoped to throw a punch at alcohol, recommended that the previous 2-drink/1-drink advice be halved. That advice was rejected. It was determined that their evidence for cutting the recommendation just didn’t exist. But the anti-alcohol cabal working within to remove alcohol from society would get another bite at the apple. They just had to wait another five years for the 2025-2030 U.S. Dietary Guidelines.

In the meantime, more assaults on moderate consumption were underway.

THE MOVE TO DISCREDIT MODERATE ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION
Between the release of the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines and the development of the 2025-2030 U.S. Dietary Guidelines, the World Health Organization declared there was no safe level of alcohol consumption. This announcement came even though the data upon which this extremist view of alcohol was made (The Lancet 2022 Global Burden of Disease (2020) did not support this view.

In 2023, a panel at the Canadian Centre For Substance Use and Addiction released a report suggesting that Canada change its alcohol consumption guidelines to 2 glasses per week. However, due to faulty methodology used to create this report, including the fact that the authors of these recommendations used their own research as the basis of the recommendations, the Canadian Health Ministry rejected these guidelines and stuck with their 3-drinks-a-day for men and 2-drinks-a-day for women guideline.

A CABAL OF SIX
At this point in the story, I need to draw your attention to a few people.

Tim Naimi is an American physician-epidemiologist and public health researcher who has become better known as an advocate for population-level controls that restrict alcohol marketing and access to alcohol. Naimi led the team whose recommendation that Canada reduce its drinking guidelines to 2 drinks per week that were rejectec by the Canadian Health Ministry. Naimi has worked for years to attempt to dismiss the idea that there is a thing called the J-Curve, which is a well-accepted description of the data showing that at low-to moderate levels of consumption, alcohol has a protective effect from heart disease among other health problems. Naimi has frequently worked with Movendi, the leading anti-alcohol and Prohibitionist organization in the world. He helped organize their conferences and appeared on their podcasts. He has consistently acted as an anti-alcohol propagandist while working to maintain the appearance of a researcher. He was also a member of the group working to devise alcohol recommendations for the 2020-2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines that suggested recommending no more than 1 drink per day for all. His suggestion was rejected.

Take note of Dr. Kevin Shields. Dr. Shields is a Canadian who worked with the World Health Organization to update their alcohol guidelines to the “No Safe Level” declaration. He also worked with Dr. Naime to come up with the recommendations for Canadian alcohol consumption guidelines that were, as you recall, rejected. His work aims to provide public health officials with ways to combat alcohol harm, in particular, with higher taxes and minimum pricing on alcohol.

Then there is Priscilla Martinez. Ms. Martinez is the Deputy Scientific Director at the Alcohol Research Group. Martinez specializes in breast cancer and alcohol research. She has spent a good deal of time blaming the alcohol industry’s marketing for women’s lack of interest in the small impact alcohol consumption has on breast cancer, insisting that there is “no safe level” of alcohol consumption, claiming that a single sip of alcohol per week is “unhealthy” and believes that warning labels on alcohol should outline every cancer that alcohol consumption might impact, despite the absolute impact being miniscule.

Dr. Katherine Keyes is a Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University, where she studies the cross-generational impact of substance use. Among her public statements on alcohol is her contention that the numerous studies showing light to moderate alcohol consumption leads to lower mortality compared to non-drinkers are all flawed. She has also publicly stated, like Martinez, that the alcohol industry, through its advertising and marketing, is involved in an effort to stop people from focusing on alcohol consumption and health.

Another person I want you to pay attention to is Dr. Adam Milam. The Senior Associate Consultant of the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Milam has argued that any business that sells alcohol should not be near a residential area. Additionally, he has argued that the numerous studies showing light to moderate consumption of alcohol leads to lower mortality than teetotaling are not valuable.

Finally, Dr. Jurgen Rehm is the Senior Scientist at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research in Canada and a long-time and well-known researcher in the alcohol field. Rehm advocates for higher alcohol taxes, reduced access to alcohol, and marketing restrictions on alcohol in order not to reduce excessive drinking but to lower all drinking, including responsible, moderate alcohol consumption.

THE POLITICAL SETTING
To tell the rest of this story, it’s important to examine the cultural and political setting that emerged between the creation of the 2020 U.S. Dietary Guidelines and the 2025 Dietary Guidelines. Between 2018 and 2025, the country became more politically polarized than at any time since the U.S. Civil War in 1860. Yes, we can thank Donald Trump. His first term, January 6, his rhetoric, and the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign in particular saw the vast majority of the media make every effort to attack Trump and paint him in the worst political light.

Like Trump or not, it’s impossible not to identify his rhetoric, particularly toward the press, as one important reason the mainstream media has shown him no quarter. It’s also true that the public’s appetite for a media focusing 24/7 on him appears insatiable, incentivising the media to focus its attention on the president.

So what does this have to do with the beclowning of the media?

ALCOHOL, CONTROVERSY, AND THE 2025 U.S. DIETARY GUIDELINES
By the last half of 2022, the U.S. Congress was contemplating its Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023. This act of Congress, among other things, would fund the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines work, including the funds necessary to carry out an investigation of alcohol and health to inform the coming Guidelines. This was always how Congress funded the work that led to the Guidelines.

In December 2022, the Appropriations Act was passed with $1.3 million dollars appropriated and directed to the National Academies of Science and Engineering to study the relationship between alcohol consumption and negative health outcomes, particularly related to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. The legislation directed that the work of NASEM and all work for the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines be “based on the preponderance of the scientific and medical knowledge which is current at the time the report is prepared”. Moreover, the legislation required that the Secretaries of the USDA and Health and Human Services approve any guidance, including studies or other information consulted, for the Guidelines.

That should have been that.

Until someone at the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCUPD) decided that, despite no congressional authority to weigh in, the agency really ought to take on the alcohol portion of the Dietary Guidelines. Note, ICCPUD’s expertise and charge are to address underage drinking. Not Dietary guidelines and not alcohol and health, and certainly not how many drinks per day is safe. It’s a subject matter they have never waded into. ICCPUD got around this dilemma by reckoning that since parents drink, and since underage people live with parents, any study of alcohol and health is justified. Clearly, ICCPUD wanted to get into the game.

But it’s not just this. It turns out that ICCPUD was under no statutory obligation to make public any of its deliberations, meeting notes, or communications. However, the Congressionally authorized NASEM is required to do this.

So, all of a sudden, what you had was two government institutions, one authorized by Congress and responsible for being transparent, and another institution with no obligation to be transparent in its work, each supposedly investigating alcohol and health and informing the upcoming 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines.

Now, the sudden appearance of the ICCPUD group weighing in wouldn’t have concerned many folks if they could be assured its process would be transparent and that its process was free of bias. In fact, the congressional authorization for the NASEM (not ICCUPUD) alcohol study required that “The process…is fully transparent and includes a balanced representation of individuals who are unbiased and free from conflicts of interest.”

Can you guess which 6 individuals (just 6) were appointed to the ICCUPD process for studying the health effects of alcohol consumption? Scroll up a few paragraphs. That’s right:

Tim Naimi
Kevin Shieds
Prescilla Martinez
Katherine Keyes
Adam Milam
Jurgen Rehm.

Tim and Kevin worked together on the Canadian recommendations that sought to recommend no more than two drinks a week, while Jurgen’s work was heavily cited by the Canadian report. And you can read about the bias of the other three in the paragraphs above.

This perfectly obvious bias on the part of the six people named in a secret process to lead the ICCPUD study outraged the American alcohol Industry. It led to a Congressional investigation. It led to more than 100 Republican and Democratic Congressional Representatives signing a letter to the head of the Health and Human Services demanding the ICCPUD work be dropped, if only because the bias was so apparent.

In the end, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Majority Staff issued a report, based on subpoenaed documents, entitled, “A STUDY FRAUGHT WITH BIAS: How the Biden Administration’s Alcohol Intake and Health Study Tried to Undermine the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans”. The Report concluded, “The Committee concludes that the ICCPUD Alcohol Intake Health study is irretrievably flawed and should not be considered in the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines.”

The Committee came to its conclusion based not just on the obvious anti-alcohol bias of the six members of the ICCPUD working group, but also on documents that showed the process was pre-determined to come to a “Canadian” conclusion and due to a lack of transparency so bold that the person running the ICCPUD Study, Alicia Sparks, instructed the ICCPUD study group members how to encode documents so they would not be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

So, was the ICCPUD work really all that bad? How did it compare with the NASEM work that was authorized by Congress? These are important questions. Here’s what we know about just how bad the ICCPUD Study was

-ICCUPUD: Not Authorized by Congress
-NASEM: Authorized (twice) by Congress

-ICCPUD: Completely unknown how its members were chosen
-NASEM: Members nominated by the public

-ICCPUD: Sought to create original research—unprecedented for Dietary Guidelines
-NASEM: Only reviewed the currently available data, as required by Congress

-ICCPUD: All members associated with anti-alcohol causes, including associations with WHO and the prohibitionist MOVENDI
-NASEM: Members gathered from a variety of disciplines and ideologies

ICCPUD: Held closed-door meetings and never offered a meeting just for the public
NASEM: Held continuous public meetings and took comments from the public

The draft report created by ICCPUD and released in January 2025 unsurprisingly came to the dire conclusions that men having 2 drinks per day and women having 1 drink per day significantly increased risks of death, injury, and illness, and that among the U.S. population, the risk of dying from alcohol use begins at low levels of average use. The release of this draft report led to a significant number of comments by interested parties.

Of all the organizations that commented on the ICCPUD process and findings when a draft report was finally released, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) provided the most comprehensive analysis of the deception, bias, and bad science that was the ICCPUD effort. In fact, the DISCUS comments, drafted primarily by Amanda Berger, Senior Vice President, Science & Research at DISCUS, is one of the most brutal takedowns of any report of any kind I’ve ever seen. Ms. Berger left a wasteland in her wake. CLICK TO READ THE DEVASTATION.

THE ALCOHOL GUIDELINES FALLOUT
In the end, the shoddy, biased ICCPUD work wasn’t included among the materials considered in putting together the alcohol recommendations of the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines.

Not only did Tim Naimi not get his Canadian recommendations adopted by Canada, nor get his recommendation for reducing the amount of daily alcohol intake lowered in the previous 2020-2025 Guidelines he worked on, but he and his crew and their recommendations during this go around of the Guidelines were dismissed with prejudice by a Congressional Committee as well as by a bipartisan group of more than 100 congressional representatives.

However, the professionals following the charge of Congress at NASEM found after doing an exhaustive review of the scientific literature that light to moderate consumption of alcohol led to LOWER ALL-CAUSE MORTALITY than among those who abstained from drinking.

I would imagine Tim Naimi, the five anti-alcohol activists who worked on the ICCPUD report with him, and their Prohibitionist friends around the country who were counting on them to nudge Americans to fear moderate alcohol consumption, were feeling a little butthurt from being called hacks in public and having their work thrown in the trash bin.

When the U.S. 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines were published this January, they came without the 2-drink/1-drink recommendation that had become so familiar. Instead, the Guidelines offer limited advice beyond “consume less alcohol for better overall health”. Notably, there was no declaration of “no safe limit” of alcohol consumption, no warning that alcohol will give you cancer, no Canadian-style 2-drinks-per-week recommendation, and no call for warning labels on alcohol containers. The entirety of the alcohol guidelines reads:

+ Consume less alcohol for better overall health.

+ People who should completely avoid alcohol include pregnant women, people who are recovering from alcohol use disorder or are unable to control the Sodium amount they drink, and people taking medications or with medical conditions that can interact with alcohol. For those with a family history of alcoholism, be mindful of alcohol consumption and associated addictive behaviors.

But perhaps even worse for Naimi, his friends at ICCPUD and those who want controls on people’s freedoms to consume alcohol were Dr. Oz Mehmet’s comments at a press conference addressing the new Guidelines:

“Alcohol is a social lubricant that brings people together, In the best-case scenario, I don’t think you should drink alcohol, but it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize, and there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way.”

The fact is, nobody got what they wanted from the new alcohol Guidelines. The alcohol industry’s best-case scenario was that the old 2-drink/1-drink recommendation would stay in place. It didn’t. Tim Naimi, Kevin Shields, and the others on the ICCPUD panel hoped to nudge America toward population-level controls with the Guidelines mimicking their and the World Health Organization’s claims that there is “no safe level” of alcohol consumption. That didn’t happen. But most interesting of all, the mainstream media, which had embraced the WHO’s stance on the evils of alcohol and was near universally appalled that the Trump Administration had revoked the U.S. membership in the WHO, had been hoping that the Biden Administration’s attempt to push the government closer to the WHO and the rejected Canadian recommendations via the discredited ICCPUD process would prevail. It didn’t.

But that’s OK, the media got what they wanted. They just had to wait another six months.

THE RETURN OF NAIMI AND ICCPUD
On Tuesday, June 9, the findings of the ICCPUD cabal were independently published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (JSAD). The authors of this study were the same six people who worked on the discredited ICCPUD efforts to influence the Dietary Guidelines. The study, entitled, Alcohol Intake and Health Study: No Protective Effect at Low Levels, With Mortality Increasing to 1 in 25 at 14 Drinks Per Week, is nearly identical to the draft report of the ICCPUD study released in early 2025.

Despite the information being developed within the federal government, it was released on Tuesday without consent from the feds. But, here’s what’s really remarkable. Alongside the study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (JSAD), an editorial by Robert Vincent, the man who oversaw the ICCPUD work, was published. This is highly unusual. Can you guess what it said?

“This editorial is not about personal grievance. It is about what happens when evidence-based public health work collides with commercial influence—and what it means when that influence reaches inside government itself.”

That’s right. A full-fledged accusation that the demise of ICCPUD’s Dietary Guideline work was orchestrated by the alcohol industry that had captured the Trump administration, which did the bidding of that industry.

But there’s more.

On June 9, the day the ICCPUD work was independently released in the JSAD, two of the authors, Katherine Keyes and Priscilla Martinez, sent out separate press releases touting the study. Each referenced the editorial by Robert Vincent. Between the report, the editorial and the press releases, it was successfully communicated that this was a report tanked by the Trump administration for political reasons.

What followed? The media drank from the ICCPUD well like a thirsty dog in the desert.

THE BECLOWNING OF THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA
The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS, Associated Press, Reuters, The Hill, Fox News, Prevention, NBC News, People, The Dallas News, USA Today, US News & World Report, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Independent, Yahoo News, The LA Times, MSN, and a hundred other affiliated outlets that rerun stories from parent companies or newswires ran with the story, most stressing the political angle, while hailing the report as groundbreaking news.

It was a deluge. But it’s the headlines that really tell the story that the media was reporting on.

Alcohol study discarded by Trump officials is published in scientific journal
—StatNews

Sidelined US research on alcohol’s health effects published in independent journal
—Reuters

What a Study at Odds with Trump Health Officials Health Guidance Found on Alcohol Limits
—Washington Post

The White House blocked a study on alcohol consumption. This is what it said
—The Hill

And while every single article published in the wake of the release of this study touted the groundbreaking nature of its claims (that harm comes to people who drink even at one glass per day, not a single article mentioned the complete discrediting of the ICCPUD study, the clear bias of the authors of the study, or the disreputable science that made up the bulk of the study. Not one.

How bad is the study really?

Let me quote from a recent article by Vinay Prasad, one of the country’s best-known oncology specialists. Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and health researcher. He served as the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. And he was a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco:

Is this paper good science? No, the paper is low quality science. The authors decide which diseases have alcohol attributable risks and which don’t and they ignore all cause mortality. This converts an indisputable endpoint into one that requires investigator preference/ decision making. It’s a poor analytic choice— that adds bias to the analysis.

They then pool a bunch of observational studies and decide what the relative risks are from alcohol on those diseases. But this begs the question. Those studies are non-randomized. People who drink and those who don’t are different in other ways— and those differences, and whether or not they are properly accounted for (or if they even can be) is the crux of the disagreement. The studies measure alcohol use in a number of ways that may be incorrect— such as self reporting.

A model is like a juicer. It only tastes as good as what you put in, and they are shoving in rotten fruit.

This paper proves nothing. It would convince no serious scientist. It preaches to the choir— the dry choir.

Then there is Prasad’s coup de grace — his comment on the Journal they were able to find that would publish the paper:

“The paper is published in a journal with an impact factor of 2. To put that in perspective, my mother’s refrigerator door has an impact factor of 3.”

The foolish and clownish way the media glazed this study can only be explained in a couple of ways. Either they don’t have the reporting chops to actually investigate what the study means, or the uncontrollable desire to bash one presidential administration overrode journalistic integrity.

An article in the NY Times on the publication of the ICCPUD study written by Roni Caryn Rabin is instructive here.

“In an editorial accompanying the new paper, Robert M. Vincent, the former government official who commissioned the study, said he believed he was fired because the report produced evidence “at odds with commercial interests.” Mr. Vincent lost his job as associate administrator for alcohol prevention and treatment policy at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration during a reduction in force last year.

“It was going to cost the alcohol industry money,” Mr. Vincent said. “They didn’t like going from two to one for men, and they didn’t like the mention of cancer.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Vincent’s statement.

In this and in the rest of the article there is no mention of ICCPUD, no mention of the bias of the authors, no mention of the opaque process of the ICCPUD effort, no mention of the Congressional committee that condemned the study, no mention of the more than 100 lawmakers who criticized the ICCPUD study, and no mention of the fact that the design of the study violates the cardinal rule of scientific studies: it can’t be reproduced.

Moreover, neither Ms. Rabin nor any of the others who wrote about this study reached out to anyone in the alcohol industry. And it wasn’t until Ms. Berger from DISCUS began reaching out to writers to ask them to make some mention of the discrediting of this report earlier that some media outlets reluctantly updated the story by noting a congressional committee called it “irretrievably flawed.” The New York Times and Ms. Rabin did not update their story.

The New York Times and Ms. Rabin have beclowned themselves in an effort to take a dig at the Trump administration. What’s absolutely clear is that Ms. Rabin and her editors simply can’t be trusted to report honestly on matters concerning alcohol and health.

It’s worth noting that just last month, a study was published in a top Journal that reported those who drank light amounts of alcohol died from cancer less frequently than those who abstained, and those who had up to two drinks a day showed no increase in cancer mortality from those who did not drink at all. This contradicts the WHO and others on their hysterical claims about cancer and alcohol, and the notion that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.

Neither Ms. Rabin at the NY Times nor any of the other reporters who wrote about the debunked study in the inconsequential journal reported on these findings. It turns out there’s no way for them to push a partisan agenda in their reporting with that study.

I end with another quote from Dr. Prasad:

The media is eager to create a political narrative, but is unable to distinguish when science is independent, falsifiable and useful, and when science is contrived, malleable, and so biased that it verges on propaganda.

This paper is the latter. It was, at the outset, a misuse of taxpayer money, and its’ findings do not advance the alcohol dialog in any way. Publishing the paper was a waste of ink and paper and human capital.

Dr. Prasad is correct about the ICCPUD study and he is correct about the media. Equally important is what we have learned over the past week: the mainstream media will beclown and discredit themselves on the issue of alcohol and health, for no good reason.

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Tom Wark is the publisher of FERMENTATION, a source of commentary on the wine business that he has written since 2004. He is also the publisher of THE SPILL, a free, daily newsletter that curates the best wine content on the web. SUBSCRIBE TO THE SPILL FOR FREE.