A prescription for bias

Mar/18/2007 08:51 Filed in: Pharma Business
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From one of my readers comes a report from the Business and Media Institute that confirms what a lot of us in the business already know: the media is bias against the pharmaceutical industry. However what puzzles this author is why the pharma industry seems to have chosen a strategy that involves retreat? Are industry leaders so afraid of the environment that don't want to make waves or are they more focused on pleasing Wall Street than helping patients?


Among the key findings of the report:

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.


Surprised? You shouldn't be. What should surprise you is that the pharmaceutical companies will spend millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to research positioning statements or DTC messaging but when it comes to communicating the challenges the industry faces to the general public the lack of noise if deafening. How many millions of people are leading better quality lives because of prescription medications? How many people are adding years to their lives because of prescription medications? A diagnosis of HIV is no longer a death sentence. People who have cancer are living longer and beating back this horrid disease because of the prescription drug industry. Yet papers like the New York Times continue to report one sided stories which is scary because too many people believe what they read without challenging information.

Again I believe that a leader needs to emerge from the pharmaceutical industry to state the facts and defend the industry. He, or she, needs to remind people within the industry that we are here to benefit patients and to never lose sight of that. But more importantly this leader needs to tell the instant gratification people on Wall Street that the industry will continue to devote resources to new product development and if short term profits could take a hit at the expense of strategic or long term company health. Help Wanted ...now !

For copies of the report send me an email
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