While efforts are underway in Australia and elsewhere to disentangle the ties between doctors and drug companies (as reported in Crikey yesterday), the spotlight should also be illuminating another influential profession’s conflicts of interest.

The media is often quick to get on its high horse about the pharmaceutical industry’s wining and dining of doctors, but is much less upfront about the lucre that journalists accept from drug companies and other health organisations.

These take the form of journalism prizes — the booty for the Pfizer Eureka Prize for Health and Medical Research is a hefty $10,000 — and sponsored trips to attend conferences or other such events.

Organisations as august as the National Press Club take sponsorship for health journalism awards from groups with clear vested interests, such as the pharmaceutical industry lobby group, Medicines Australia, and the drug company, Pfizer Australia.

Indeed, so many vested interests are involved in medical journalism awards that it’s verging on the ridiculous. Roche funds an international award for obesity journalism, and is also one of the companies behind an international osteoporosis journalism award. My personal favourite is the Embrace Award, jointly sponsored by Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim, for “accurate, responsible and sensitive reporting on urinary incontinence”.

Other awards are funded by professional or advocacy groups eager to promote themselves or their issues. The Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy has an award “to recognise outstanding medical and health reporting on allergic and immune diseases in Australia and New Zealand”. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists gets up to 30 entries each year for its awards – two of $3,000 each – for journalism promoting “understanding of eye care issues specifically related to the work of Australian and/or New Zealand ophthalmologists”.

Organisations such as the National Press Club stress the independence of their awards and the judging process, and just about everyone involved in such awards emphasises that their aim is to support and encourage good journalism. That may be the case but of course there are also other agendas, whether generating positive corporate PR, building relationships with key journalists and organisations, or promoting particular issues/products. The Embrace Award at least is upfront about this, saying it aims to “empower women to seek help” – presumably from one of the sponsors’ products.

I am not writing this piece from the high moral ground. I’ve previously written in the British Medical Journal about taking sponsored trips and prizes myself. In the past year I’ve spoken at two meetings sponsored by drug companies in order to promote my book, Inside Madness, and my travel expenses were paid.

Juggling conflicts of interest is a particularly vexed issue for freelancers like myself, whose income comes from a variety of sources. I try to minimise conflicts where possible, and declare them where appropriate. But I’m not naive enough to dismiss them as irrelevant. Research shows that doctors are mistaken if they think they are not influenced by taking drug company funding or gifts.

And it’s not only the financial conflicts of interest that matter. The longer you spend covering a particular round, the more likely you are to develop relationships, even friendships, which can exert a pull. Indeed, I have been dithering about writing this article for exactly that reason. Associate Professor Alex Barratt, a colleague in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney – where I have an honorary position – recently won the Pfizer Eureka Award for Health and Medical Research Journalism for the second year in a row.

I have no doubt that her prize-winning broadcast on ABC Radio’s The Health Report was excellent and deserving of recognition.

But that’s not the point.