Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

STAT (Opinion)

U.S. center-left

Owned byBoston Globe Media, owned by John W. Henry (also principal owner of the Boston Red Sox and The Boston Globe)
FundingMix of digital advertising, paid subscriptions (STAT Plus), enterprise content licensing, and historically some pharmaceutical industry newsletter sponsorships
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

STAT launched on November 4, 2015, as a standalone digital publication under Boston Globe Media, founded by Globe owner John W. Henry to test whether readers would pay for in-depth health and life-sciences journalism. It is headquartered in Boston and operates editorially independent from The Boston Globe, though it shares the same parent company. Under executive editor Rick Berke, a former New York Times and Politico editor, STAT grew from roughly 45 staff members in 2016 to more than 100 by 2025 and has expanded into the United Kingdom. The outlet gained wide recognition as one of the first U.S. news organizations to treat the novel coronavirus as a potential global catastrophe, and it successfully sued Purdue Pharma to obtain internal documents on OxyContin marketing. Its reporters have twice been named Pulitzer Prize finalists. The opinion section has drawn criticism on multiple occasions for publishing op-eds by authors with undisclosed pharmaceutical industry ties, including at least one piece later found to have been solicited and edited by a pharma public relations firm; STAT revised its op-ed submission guidelines in response. Media bias trackers place the outlet at center-left (Media Bias/Fact Check) to center (Ad Fontes Media, AllSides), with generally high marks for factual accuracy in its news reporting. The opinion section specifically reflects the views of outside contributors and tends to attract voices from the public health, academic medicine, and health policy communities, which have been broadly skeptical of the second Trump administration's approach to federal health agencies and science funding.

Sources

  1. Stat (website) — Wikipedia
  2. STAT Marks 10 Years of Reporting — Boston Globe Media
  3. About Us — STAT
  4. Why STAT is the media startup to envy — Columbia Journalism Review
  5. Stat (News) Bias and Credibility — Media Bias/Fact Check
  6. Stat News Bias and Reliability — Ad Fontes Media
  7. STAT Media Bias — AllSides
  8. Another 'breach of trust' at STAT: patient who praised TV drug ads says pharma PR company asked her to write op-ed — HealthNewsReview
  9. We've updated STAT's guidelines for op-ed submissions
  10. STAT News Officially Has a Credibility Problem — ClassAction.com
  11. Stat's 10-Year History Coupling Quality Reportage With Paid Subs — A Media Operator

Profile compiled 2026-07-26; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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