Sanjay Gupta: another nail in the coffin of ‘change’?

Dr Sanjay Gupta fits right into Barack Obama's new-leaf White House. Like the man who will be President next week, the nominee for America's Surgeon General is handsome, brown-skinned, articulate, and has a funny name.

Born to Indian immigrants in Detroit in 1969, Gupta might seem an unlikely candidate for such high office: within the country's complex racial hierarchy, immigrants from the subcontinent are among the latest to reach American shores, and are still thought of as turbaned cab-drivers in New York or striving motel owners in the loneliest corners of the map.

But just as Obama succeeded because of his academic smarts, his bestselling books and his ability to project a sense of being new and outside the old system, so Gupta has got to the top by combining a television persona with the brains to have made the single-generation leap from car factory to neuro-surgeon.

A whiz at school, he was accepted straight into the University of Michigan's medical school without a first degree, and then on to elite neurosurgery. By 1997 he had risen far enough up the ladder to become a White House consultant to Hillary Clinton. Married with two bi-racial daughters, Sage and Skye, he still performs operations at a charity hospital for the poor.
 
But what Gupta is best known for is his position as CNN's medical correspondent. He sees this as good training for the new job because the Surgeon General's role is to preach from the bully-pulpit and has little to do with health service policy or administration.
 
All Gupta has to do is switch sides from behind to before the camera. And it helps that he is fit, lean and long legged, personifying the ideal as the citizens newly in his charge slide ever deeper into sugar addiction and obesity.

Even as a CNN correspondent Gupta has joined the action in a way closed to mere journalists. He made his name during the Iraq invasion of 2003 when he persuaded the cable station to send him to cover "medical aspects" of the war.

With camera crew on hand, he performed operations on both American troops and Iraqi civilians. A Marine named Jesus Vidana even called for his help for a bad head wound, and made it safely home for rehabilitation. Gupta was a hero. The average war correspondent could not hope for a career boost like that. Back home, Gupta wrote his own bestseller, Chasing Life.

All this sounds perfect. Gupta comes across as an Obama twin, the ideal complement to the President in his through-the-barrier White House. But just as Obama is enmeshed in establishment ties and deals with tarnished political lobbies, there is a downside to Gupta.
 
His television colleagues accuse him of broadcasting press releases from the drug companies who own American healthcare, and who sponsor CNN, rather than applying the usual inquiries of journalism.
 
This has been enough to trigger a Congressional campaign to block his nomination. Democrat John Conyers, of Gupta's home state Michigan, is calling for his fellow congressmen to sign a letter to Obama urging him to think again. "It is not," he says, "in the best interests of the nation to have someone like this, who lacks the requisite experience."

But the most serious doubts over whether Gupta can put truth above ambition came with his reporting on agitprop documentary maker Michael Moore's film on American healthcare, Sicko.

After Gupta staged a head-to-head debate with Moore, in which he accused him of "fudging the facts", CNN had to issue a correction over Gupta's ridiculing of Moore's claim that Cuba looked after its citizens for $25 a year. Moore never claimed that: the figure was $250. Gupta was labelled a stooge for the drug and medical insurance companies which fund both neurosurgical practices and CNN broadcasts.

When he heard of Gupta's nomination for Surgeon General, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote that while he "didn't have a problem" with his qualifications, he did have one with his "mugging" of Moore. By accusing Moore of "fudging the facts", he effectively accused him of lying. But it turned out that "Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong".

"And Gupta," wrote Krugman, who last year won a Nobel Prize, "did not apologise." ·