What a difference a headline makes. An alert tipster in Minnesota sent the Media Research Center a clip from the August 10 St. Paul Pioneer Press, which included this scary-sounding headline over a story about a Food and Drug Administration report: “Heartburn Drugs Subject of Federal Safety Inquiry.”
The story, distributed by the Los Angeles Times News Service, was about whether two commonly prescribed drugs, Nexium and Prilosec, might cause heart problems. Maybe, suggested writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar: “Federal regulators Thursday said they have opened a safety investigation of two popular heartburn drugs — Nexium, marketed as the ‘purple pill,’ and Prilosec, its older chemical cousin — after receiving clinical data that appeared to link them to serious heart problems.”
The only problem was that the FDA hadn’t said the drugs were dangerous, as a little Web surfing quickly determined. “FDA: Heartburn Drugs Seem OK for Heart,” read the WashingtonPost.com headline over the Associated Press version of the same story. The AP’s lede: “The popular heartburn drugs Prilosec and Nexium don’t appear to spur heart problems, say preliminary U.S. and Canadian probes announced Thursday.” Much more comforting.
Last March, the MRC’s Business and Media Institute published “Prescription for Bias,” an extensive study documenting the generally hostile media attitude towards drug companies that make life-saving medicines. You can find the whole report here.
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I'm not going to argue with your study, but...
August 25, 2007 - 02:48 ET by sarcasmo"Generally hostile" or not, in the wake of the VA Tech shootings we saw the truth, right here. Recall, before the end of the incident, I'd publicly predicted the shooter was either 1. an Islamofascist or 2. on prescription antidepressant drugs.
Turns out, door number 2 was correct. I immediately began a campaign here on NB to get the name of the drug(s?) prescribed, the name of the doctor who prescribed it, and the dosage of said drug or drugs, and even (because I knew they'd go-after the gun shop) which pharmacy. Nothing happened. We all saw me totally fail to convince the news media to do basic journalism on an issue where the media get a LOT of income-streams and have what look to me like many financial conflicts of interest.
The antigun-bigoted media found the time/space to repeatedly tell us the calibers, brand names, and the retail sources of both pistols he used, complete with bonus-pestering of the gun-shop's owner, but despite my CONTINUAL "full court press" questions here on NB about whether it was constant Cialis, Viagra, or Levitra boner-drug commercials financing the silence about which doc/drug/dosage, I never learned the truth. We all saw it, I totally failed to get ANYONE in the news media to do ANY journalism on the subject. Ya can't win 'em all, and I doubt we'll EVER learn the truth about the VA Tech killer's prescription psychotrophic cocktail. I'd call that "protective," not "hostile," to their advertisers, and I still think it's totally-unethical.
Now, does anyone believe that if Glock and Walther ran even half as many commercials as the 4-hour-boner drug makers run, that we'd have known those brand-names & calibers so-soon? If so, wanna buy some cheap land in the Florida Everglades or a bridge in Brooklyn, NYC??
JMR
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