My Home About Me

by Julia A. Seymour
Business & Media Institute



Evening newscasts last night praised a new drug, Tykerb, calling it a possible “lifesaver” for women fighting breast cancer, but none of the reports ever mentioned the company that developed the effective new treatment.

“A new drug that proved to be so effective so quickly, the approval process was sped up,” praised anchor Katie Couric during the March 13 CBS “Evening News.”

ABC reporter John McKenzie interviewed cancer patient Marsha Brekke, who told “World News with Charles Gibson” viewers the drug was her last chance. Brekke is one of about 25 percent of patients fighting HER-2 positive metastasized breast cancer.

According to the reports on the FDA approval, Tykerb can be used in conjunction with chemotherapy and as NBC “Nightly News” anchor Campbell Brown said, it gives patients a second option when the drug Herceptin hasn’t worked.

Despite the positive treatment of Tykerb by all three networks, the media still managed to give the pharmaceutical industry short shrift. None of them even mentioned the company responsible for the breakthrough: GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

According to a press release from GSK, “This approval reflects more than 16 years of research, including more than 60 clinical trials” and other research studies.

The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development has estimated that the cost of developing one new drug is $802 million before FDA approval.

This media exclusion is consistent with Business & Media Institute (BMI) findings from a Special Report released March 14: Prescription for Bias.



Report Summary
by Ken Shepherd and Amy Menefee
Business & Media Institute


BMI has found a recurring network news bias against the pharmaceutical industry, treating drugs as an entitlement rather than an expensive-to create product, refusing to credit and often ignoring entirely the companies that made the medicine. 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. BMI looked at 132 stories on prescription or over-the-counter drugs from the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts between January 1 and Sept. 30, 2006. Among the findings:

Industry Ignored: While covering everything from medical “controversies” to breakthroughs, nearly 80 percent of the stories excluded the viewpoint of the pharmaceutical industry, failing to include either a company statement or a company spokesman.

Media Overemphasize Cost to Consumer: The broadcast networks mentioned costs to consumers or drug company revenues 11 times more often than they mentioned drug development costs.

Networks Leave Companies Unnoticed: Only 22 percent of the stories even named the company that developed the drug or drugs featured in the story.

What Development Costs?: A mere 2 percent of stories dealt with the cost of developing drugs, and even those costs were downplayed by industry skeptics.

Special Treatment for Left-Wing Causes: Nineteen stories focused on drugs that were popular liberal causes such as the morning-after pill or HPV vaccine Gardasil. The networks didn’t apply the same scrutiny to those drugs and their makers as they did to others.

Source: BusinessandMedia.org
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