Please explain how it is not investigative journalism to have researched the university president’s personal financial gain from increasing the number of smokers. When you write that the piece is not based in fact, please specify what assertions within the journalist’s piece you challenge as not being fact? Which facts do you wish to add to the discussion to refute the journalist?

How is it shown to be a fact to assert what “most believe” about VCU setting up to research how to help people break the powerful addiction to nicotine, or how to make tobacco smoking or chewing “healthier”?

Please do go on & on. Especially please clarify how to know whether there is such a thing as good or evil, or how those adjectives might be applied to a corporation. Not saying, mind you, that there are no answers, just that it is hard to tell how you are using the terms from the contribution to the discussion so far.

For example, if VCU were astonishingly found to be funding professorships on, say, heroin smuggling, or slavery, or blackmail, or just snake oil, would that taint the $ from the business relationship? How about funding from marijuana sales, if it is one of the area’s cash crops, creating jobs that contribute to many in the local economy? How about something that was once legal, such as cocaine in Coca Cola; would it still be a good university investment after it is recognized as a dangerous habit? Gambling? Is it ever wrong to take $?

It will help the supporters of VCU work together to see where we believe the same things, & where is the line that divides the two definitions when we are using one word to mean different things, even opposite things, like what is “evil”.

How dare these hillbillies hold Trani and VCU responsible for their own actions.

PM is not an evil company, as the “reporter” makes it out to be. Both it and Universal Tobacco are major local employers that provide jobs and contribute to the local economy.

Trani’s relationship with “Big Tobacco” is a positive for VCU, not a negative. The PM complex at the biotech park is set up to research ways, most believe, to help smokers quit or develop new products that are healthier. It is not a tobacco plant. Building a business is about relationships and we should be thankful Trani has those in place.

Yes, tobacco kills. So do guns, alcohol and a range of other things, oh I could go on and on…..

The statement above really sounds like it was written by one of those conspiracy theorists. It should be noted that Anne Landman writes for PR Watch, project of the activist group “Center for Media and Democracy”. You may or may not agree with their politics, but the information coming from this group is slanted towards their own point of view.