Michael Arnold Glueck & Robert J. Cihak , The Medicine Men
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

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The Medicine Men have written on previous occasions about how the pharmaceutical companies often find themselves labeled the "pariahs du jour," depending on the political winds and how news stories shape the debate.

So we predict another round of high profile drug-company bashing all made possible courtesy of the media. Why? Because last week the Senate killed a bill that would have imposed price controls on Medicare's Part D drug benefit.

Even the Medicare agency said they didn't need the bill, and that seniors are happy with the savings that have resulted from the program.

Nonetheless, the AARP and other groups will ramp up the rhetoric that drugs are too expensive, companies make too much money, yadda yadda yadda. And expect the media to eat it up.

Remember the stories about seniors eating dog food so they could afford their drugs?

So do news stories always focus on the "high" cost of drugs? And in what context? Do they explain that a $100-a-month drug may be cheap compared to surgical treatment instead?

"It constantly confounds me why Americans think Coca-Cola is entitled to a bigger profit than pharmaceutical companies, notes Kathryn Serkes, policy director for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a professional group that accepts no pharmaceutical funding.

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Now there is proof of slanted coverage provided by a study just released by the Business and Media Institute called, "Prescription for Bias, Networks Downplay Drug Costs, Treat Medicine as Entitlement."

Conducted by Ken Shepherd and Amy Menefee, the study analyzed 132 stories about prescription or over-the-counter drugs from the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2006.

The conclusion: The BMI study found a recurring network news bias against the pharmaceutical industry. Surprise!

The authors write that the networks treat drugs as an "entitlement," rather than an expensive endeavor to create product, refusing to credit and often ignoring entirely the companies that make the medicines.

Medical advances don't just pop out of the woodwork, but the network news rarely admits it. The report shows that that nearly 80 percent of the stories on prescription drugs left out the drug companies entirely.

For example, even when one new drug was hailed as a "major advance in combating breast cancer" and a "major medical breakthrough," its manufacturer was given only a passing mention on one network.

Instead, stories emphasized consumers' costs and company profits, largely ignoring companies' investment to create life-saving medicines.

Drug prices were mentioned 11 times more often than the cost of developing the drug. Only 2-percent even mentioned the R&D costs, usually featuring skeptics who pooh-poohed those costs.

It's interesting to note that all bets were off when it came to stories about pet liberal interests such as the morning-after pill or a mandate for the HPV vaccine Gardasil.

"The networks didn't apply the same scrutiny to those drugs and their makers as they did to others not on their agenda," write the authors.

To improve coverage, the report says reporters need to get back to basics for a start by remembering the first "w" of journalism: "The who, what, where, when, and why are fundamental to journalistic storytelling."

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