Editor—In my zeal to protect editorial freedom at the BMJ, and profoundly troubled over the fates of George Lundberg at JAMA and Jerome Kassirer at the New England Journal of Medicine, I shot from the hip in my original letter to the BMJ.
In doing so I made a dumb mistake. I lack evidence that parent societies and advertisers suppress the publication of articles they don't like at these journals.
I withdraw this assertion and apologise to DeAngelis and Drazen, their respective journals and medical societies, and everybody else for my error.
Competing interests: See http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/324/7336/539/DC1. In addition, DS was the founding editor of Evidence-Based Medicine and sits on the advisory or editorial boards of ACP Journal Club, the BMJ, Clinical Trials, and the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.