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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."
Healthy Skepticism, an organisation set up to "defend health
care from misleading and harmful marketing" - formerly the Medical
Lobby for Appropriate Marketing (MaLAM)
"The media can easily be hostage to the public relations
machinery that's created around these new drugs." (Clinical
pharmacologist, Professor David Henry)
"It's often not clear that many of the stories we see and read are
actually well-disguised company promotions."
"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 ..." (Louise Sylvan,
Australian Consumers Association)
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Sunday Newsletter
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.
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."
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. 
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. 
"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.
