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  Doctoring the Spin August 11, 2002 Reporter :Jane Hansen Producer : Nick Farrow  Pharmaceutical companies in Australia are banned from advertising drugs direct to the public. There again, they hardly need to. As Sunday reports this week, the media seems to do the promotion work for them.Spending as much on marketing as they do on research and development, these corporate giants have developed effective ways of side-stepping laws protecting the public interest. In a debut cover story for Sunday, guest reporter Jane Hansen looked at the spin surrounding media stories about new drugs or medical "breakthroughs". Some had legitimate news value — but hidden agendas often lurked behind the hype. As Professor John Marley, Dean of Health at Newcastle University, told Hansen: "[The public] see it as a news item and take it as face value as a news item and they're not aware that ... it is a marketing item." A clinical pharmacologist, Professor David Henry, agreed: "The media can easily be hostage to the public relations machinery that's created around these new drugs." Hansen, a reporter for the Nine Network's A Current Affair program, looked at how journalists appear to suspend professional scepticism and become part of drug company cheer squads.  She said: "We can all get caught up; I certainly was some four years ago when an 'independent study' I used in a medical story turned out to be just spin. It's worrying to see how easily we as journalists can become party to covert advertisement."Louise Sylvan, from the Australian Consumers Association, told Hansen: "I think ... journalists should re-think in fact how they are producing information and whether they're really serving in terms of their public responsibility appropriately." "Doctoring the Spin" starts with the arrival in Australia of the anti-impotence pill Viagra on September 9, 1998 — which has gone down in marketing history as the textbook drug launch. As Hansen showed, the makers Pfizer achieved positive coverage by adopting a well-used formula. They served up all the right elements — expert, victim and research and let the journalists do the rest. The result was seven prime time TV stories about Viagra, 89 newspaper articles and hundreds of mentions on radio. Hansen reports that it's often not clear that many of the stories we see and read are actually well-disguised company promotions. The coverage is credible, and extremely effective. Louise Sylvan comments: "It is an outstandingly sophisticated machine and I think we don't have enough really critical questioning done about the way they manipulate consumers, the media and so on ..."  Pfizer's follow-up campaigns have been equally effective. Recently, high-profile Viagra TV and press advertisements featuring soccer superstar Pele gave the contact numbers of Impotence Australia. Little known is that Pfizer set up this patient group for men with impotence three years ago and so far has given it $250,000. It's part of an established technique of using drug company-funded patient groups and disease awareness campaigns to start people thinking about specific health issues — and then talking about it with their doctors. Jane Hansen asked Professor Marley what was wrong with a drug company being involved in a disease awareness campaign. He said there were a number of problems: "It may be an area that's not actually recognised as a disease at that particular time. One of the interesting things is that countries that have got the most to spend on health, their populations regard themselves as more sick than countries that have less to spend on health. And part of that is that we actually create that, we make people unwell."  Among medical specialists — some who'd been involved in drug company promotions — Hansen found concerns about commercial messages buried within what appeared to be credible journalism and independent research. Recently all three commercial TV channels ran stories about how influenza affects the workplace and the economy. The "new" research cited was conducted by the Gallup Group acting for Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL), a flu vaccine manufacturer. That link with CSL was never reported. Was that a legitimate part of the story ... and did the public have the right to know that link existed? And the face of credibility for CSL, the expert they commissioned for their press conference, respiratory specialist Dr Christine Jenkins, found her views were being taken out of context in the news reports that followed. "I wasn't at all comfortable with the coverage," Dr Jenkins said. "I wasn't comfortable even before the coverage occurred, in fact, even before the press conference.  "The initial information that was provided in the media releases, the drafts actually suggested that flu was the problem that had been discussed in the Gallup questionnaire, in fact, it was influenza and flu-like illness and that tends then when you simplify that to flu to grossly exaggerate the impact of influenza in the community by including flu-like illness."So by including flu-like illness in talking about influenza you are grouping, bundling, two diseases which have familiar symptoms, different causes, different viruses. And one of them will be significantly helped by influenza vaccination and the other group of them won't." Hansen also looked at the hype surrounding the anti-arthritis drug Celebrex which saw 2.9 million scripts written in the first nine months of its subsidy under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Feted by an uncritical media and apparently endorsed by then Health Minister Michael Wooldridge, the bill for Celebrex for those first nine months was more than $100 million — a sum which came close to breaking the public purse. Hansen asked Professor Henry if the media was too accepting of the Celebrex spin. "Yes," he replied, "I think the media was too accepting of it. I think benefits tend to be exaggerated, side effects tend to be minimised, conflicted sources tend not to be revealed and all of these features were present in that episode." Weblinks: |
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