Pharmaceuticals

CMD and Consumer Reports WebWatch Launch Full Frontal Scrutiny

"The American public deserves to know when someone is trying to persuade them." — U.S. Federal Communications Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Thursday, January 17, 2008

Front Groups Beware of Full Frontal Scrutiny

Front Groups - Appearances May Be DeceptiveToday, the Center for Media and Democracy and our partners at Consumer Reports WebWatch launched an exciting new project: Full Frontal Scrutiny. The site seeks to shine a light on front groups -- organizations that state a particular agenda, while hiding or obscuring their identity, membership or sponsorship, or all three. Google the term "front groups" and the number one return is CMD's extensive articles on its SourceWatch site.

Once Again, Drug Companies Caught Data Doping

Submitted by Diane Farsetta on

The pharmaceutical companies Merck and Schering-Plough, which co-market the cholesterol drug Vytorin, "have gone into damage-control mode, taking out newspaper ads." The PR campaign follows the companies' reluctant publication of a study showing that neither of the drugs present in Vytorin "reduced the buildup of fatty plaque in arteries." The study "

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Main Source: 
Advertising Age, January 22, 2008
Topics: 
Advertising
Crisis Management
Corporations
Health
Pharmaceuticals
Science
Secrecy

More Selective Science from Pharmaceutical Front Group

Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is criticizing the Providence Journal for publishing an op-ed article by Robert Goldberg while failing to disclose that Goldberg and his organization, the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest

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Main Source: 
Integrity in Science Watch, January 14, 2008
Topics: 
Front Groups
Journalism
Ethics
Health
Pharmaceuticals

Marketing Drugs for a Disputed Condition

Submitted by Diane Farsetta on

"Fibromyalgia is a real, widespread pain condition," stresses a woman in a television ad for Lyrica, a Pfizer drug that recently became "the first medicine approved to treat the pain condition." But some doctors have their doubts. These skeptics "say vague complaints of chronic pain do not add up to a disease. ... The condition cannot be linked to any environmental or biological causes." Even Dr.

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Main Source: 
New York Times, January 14, 2008
Topics: 
Advertising
Corporations
Health
Pharmaceuticals
Women

Drug Ads Raise Legislators' Blood Pressure

Submitted by Diane Farsetta on

The U.S. Congress is investigating "the pharmaceutical industry's use of celebrity endorsements in direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements." First up are ads for Pfizer's cholesterol drug Lipitor, which feature the inventor of the artificial heart, Dr. Robert Jarvik.

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Main Source: 
PM (Pharmaceutical Marketing) Live, January 9, 2008
Topics: 
Third Party Technique
U.S. Congress
Health
Marketing
Pharmaceuticals
Science

Drug Ties Lead to "Wishful Conclusions"

Submitted by Diane Farsetta on

"Meta-analyses," or reviews of several studies' worth of data on a single drug, influence patient care and healthcare policy. Increasingly, the people carrying out these meta-analyses have financial ties to drug companies. So researchers at Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco set out "to determine whether financial ties to one drug company are associated with favourable results or conclusions in meta-analyses on antihypertensive drugs," which are taken to lower blood pressure.

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Main Source: 
British Medical Journal, December 8, 2007
Topics: 
Corporations
Health
Pharmaceuticals
Science

The Fakest Time of the Year: The 2007 Falsies Awards

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the year that the Falsies Awards have truly arrived!

Groucho maskHere at the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), we've dearly treasured our Falsies since we gave the first awards out in 2004. After 12 months of reporting on the cynical, manipulative and just plain anti-democratic pollution of our information environment, we love adding an extra dash of humor to our work. But this year's Falsies Awards are extra super special.

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