rug makers often find themselves labeled the “pariahs du jour,” depending on the political winds and how news stories shape the debate.
So let’s predict another round of high profile drug company bashing, all made possible courtesy of the media.
Why? Because the Senate recently killed a bill that would have imposed price controls on Medicare’s Part D drug benefit.
Never mind Medicare said it didn’t need the bill and seniors are happy with the savings that have resulted from the program.
But AARP and other groups will ramp up the rhetoric that drugs are too expensive, companies make too much money, yadda yadda yadda. 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 surgery?
There is proof of slanted coverage from a study by the Business and Media Institute called “Prescription for Bias, Networks Downplay Drug Costs, Treat Medicine as Entitlement.”
The study analyzed 132 stories about prescription or over-the-counter drugs from ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30 last year.
The conclusion: The study found a recurring network news bias against the drug industry.
The authors write that the networks treat drugs as an entitlement, rather than a product that’s expensive to make, refusing to credit and often ignoring entirely the companies that make the medicines.
Medical advances don’t just pop out of the woodwork. But network news rarely admits it. The report shows nearly 80% of stories on prescription drugs left out the drug companies entirely.
Even when a 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 a drug. Only 2% even mentioned 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 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 by remembering the five “W’s” of journalism: “The who, what, where, when and why are fundamental to journalistic storytelling.”
Other recommendations:
– Stop looking at the extremes of drugs:
Too often drugs are portrayed as either a perfect cure or a dangerous killer. Most are neither. All drugs have pros and cons and are right for some patients, wrong for others.
– Report dispassionately on the role of money in medicine:
Journalists should take care not just to report on the price of drugs, but what it costs to research and develop them.
Kathryn Serkes has another recommendation. “Drug companies are required to make full disclosure of adverse effects and other issues in their advertising. Maybe the news media ought to be force-fed a little consumer sunshine as well.”
She suggests that when the media cite the price of drugs, they also should disclose how a big percentage results from jumping through complex and redundant government regulatory hoops.
“Government bureaucracy jacks up the prices and the public should point the finger in the right direction,” Serkes said.
How many stories mention that the price tag just to get a drug to market is more than $800 million? Or that 1 in 10,000 potential drugs even makes it to market?
Drug companies should not always be portrayed as the bad guys. These companies are owned by tens of millions of stockholders,half of whom earn moderate incomes.
If the media doesn’t object to Coca-Cola making profits, why should they object to drug makers doing the same? There is nothing in soft drinks that will save your life.
Glueck comments on medical-legal issues and is a Visiting Fellow in Economics and Citizenship at the International Trade Education Foundation of the Washington International Trade Council.
